Tuesday, August 27, 2013
Who's Behind Attempts to Spread Chaos in Lebanon?
http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2013/08/lebanon-attacks-chaos-sectarian-war.html#ixzz2dB8BAx00
Who is behind this series of attacks? The former official, who contributed in the past two weeks to efforts to restore communication between the Syrian authorities and UN Envoy Lakhdar Brahimi, said that answer is virtually obvious to the Lebanese security services. For these crimes all emerge from a single human and ideological environment. This environment is represented by fundamentalist (fake)Sunni jihadist movements, which extend between Lebanon and its surroundings, despite some diversity in group names and the banners they raise.
According to the former official, those who fired rockets from inside Lebanon targeting Lebanese sites — as well as those who fired rockets from Lebanon at Israel, as happened on Thursday, Aug. 22 — are members of the Palestinian Hamas Movement. Did they carry out these acts following official orders from the Hamas leadership, or were they carried out on behalf of another fundamentalist party? This is what the Lebanese security services are currently trying to determine. The former official revealed that official contacts were made in the past few days between Hamas leaders and some officials in Beirut. The head of Hamas' Political Bureau, Khaled Meshaal, even invited some Lebanese officials to meet with him to discuss developments regarding accusations that members of his movement were responsible for firing these rockets. [[[[However, the Lebanese officials declined to meet with Meshaal, given that he had requested that the meeting be held in the Qatari capital, Doha.]]]] The Lebanese had suggested that the meeting be held in Damascus, as had been the case during the years preceding Hamas' exit from Syria.
Regarding the recent explosions, the same former official noted that their source is also almost known. He added that the investigations regarding the Ruwais bombing on Aug. 15 revealed that the car that was used in the bombing had been stolen from a nearby neighborhood only 24 hours before the explosion. This means that the car was outfitted with explosives in a nearby area, to ensure that it could be quickly moved to the location of the explosion in a Shiite neighborhood in south Beirut. In contrast, the car that was loaded with huge quantities of explosives and was seized in the town of Naimeh, just south of Beirut, two days following the Ruwais explosion, allowing us to link the pieces of this puzzle together. According to the former official, Lebanese authorities have determined the identities of those suspected of loading this car with explosives. Some of them come from the area of Arsal, a town located along the Lebanese-Syrian border in the middle of the Bekaa valley in northeast Lebanon. This town became the focus of Syrian opposition militants backed by (fake)Sunni Lebanese and Syrian jihadists. Meanwhile, the town of Naimeh, where the explosives laden car was seized, is only 5 kilometers (3 miles) from the southern suburbs of Beirut. This means we can conclude that these same suspects had likely transported explosives from Arsal to the area surrounding the southern suburbs. They then stole a car on the night of Aug. 14, rigged it with explosives in Naimeh, and carried out the explosion in Bir al-Abed, only a few minutes’ drive from Naimeh.
The day following the Ruwais explosion, on Aug. 16, Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah accused those he called takfiris of carrying out the attacks. This provided the opportunity to transfer the bombings from the Shiite neighborhood to the Sunni city of Tripoli, suggesting that the operation was a form of Shiite revenge, and perhaps launching sectarian strife resembling that of Iraq.
Who plotted such a hellish operation? According to the former official, the answer is combatants in Syria. The latter do not like the recent changes in the balance of power in Syria — neither on the ground, following the results of recent military confrontations, nor politically, following American-Russian progress toward convening the Geneva II conference. Those affected by this situation in Syria are ready to do anything to impede it and blow it up. And Beirut is the easiest channel for affecting any change in Damascus.
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