“How Iraq spawned wider terrorist chaos”

Salon.com 14 April 2008

As experts long warned, Islamic militants steeped in urban warfare against U.S. troops in Iraq have expanded their violent campaign beyond Iraq’s borders.

[credit: James Martin]

On the outskirts of Tripoli in northern Lebanon, the jagged ruins of Nahr el-Bared rise over the Mediterranean Sea. Once one of Lebanon’s largest Palestinian refugee camps and an urban center of more than 30,000 people, Nahr el-Bared today recalls images of Berlin or Dresden from 1945 — its buildings blasted to rubble from endless mortar and machine-gun fire and its main thoroughfare reduced to a graveyard of hollowed-out foundations and burnt wreckage. Since its founding 60 years ago in the aftermath of the first Arab-Israeli war, when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled the nascent state of Israel to neighboring countries, Nahr el-Bared had grown into a modest-size city that boasted one of northern Lebanon’s most popular markets. Today, its muddy roads are choked with the skeletons of automobiles, its few scattered residents living in ramshackle garages and shanties, or in the crumbling debris of what were once apartment buildings lining its streets.

Nahr el-Bared’s destruction owes much to the spread of militant jihad to and from U.S.-occupied Iraq.

Back in early 2005, Porter Goss, then head of the CIA, warned Congress that the war would spawn a new breed of Islamic militants who would “leave Iraq experienced in and focused on acts of urban terrorism.” Middle East experts have long warned that U.S. actions in Iraq would stir up a deadly hornets’ nest, with consequences potentially spreading throughout the region. On a trip into ravaged Nahr el-Bared this January, what I saw and heard there confirmed those dark predictions.

Nahr el-Bared, whose name in Arabic means “cold river,” was destroyed in the summer of 2007 in heavy fighting between the Lebanese army and the previously little-known Fatah al-Islam — an al-Qaida-linked group of international Sunni extremists that emerged in Lebanon’s Palestinian camps in the aftermath of Lebanon’s 2006 war with Israel. The fighting began in May 2007, when Fatah al-Islam militants slaughtered Lebanese soldiers on the outskirts of Nahr el-Bared, prompting a massive military retaliation. In the battle that ensued, the heavily armed and well-funded extremists — many of whom had come from fighting U.S. forces in Iraq — managed to hold back the Lebanese military for three months, using tactics they had learned in the urban war zones of Iraq.

“Fatah al-Islam was part of a group that was with Zarqawi in Iraq,” says Ahmad Moussalli, an expert in Islamist movements and a professor at the American University in Beirut, referring to the erstwhile head of al-Qaida in Iraq killed by U.S. forces in June 2006. “By virtue of fighting in Iraq, they learned many techniques for fighting a regular army. They were very well trained in urban warfare.”

What’s worse, adds Hilal Khashan, a colleague of Moussalli’s at the American University in Beirut, Fatah al-Islam’s fighters may be the first of a new generation of extremists to expand their fight beyond Iraq. Their suicidal stand at Nahr el-Bared could signify the beginning of a new era of international Islamist violence, Khashan says, brought about by an exodus of battle-hardened militants from places like Baghdad, Fallujah and Mosul.

“Lebanon hangs in the balance”

Baltimore Sun 18 January 2008

After a week of whirlwind travel throughout the Middle East, President Bush returns to the U.S. today hoping that his trip has secured the support of Persian Gulf states in America’s drive to counter Iran’s regional ambitions. But while Mr. Bush worked to draft Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates into a reinvigorated containment strategy for Iran, and while U.S. and Iranian warships played chicken in the Strait of Hormuz, another conflict between Washington and Tehran was quietly unfolding in Lebanon.

There, a stalemate between the pro-Western government of Fouad Siniora and the Hezbollah-led, Iran- and Syria-backed opposition threatens to throw the country into turmoil. Yesterday’s deadly explosion targeting a U.S. Embassy vehicle in Beirut was just the latest reminder of how volatile the situation there is.

The implications for the U.S. of the political power play in Lebanon are huge. Hezbollah’s push to undermine Lebanon’s U.S.-supported government has the group’s Iranian and Syrian backers poised to expand their influence westward and to turn Lebanon into another major regional battlefield in the cold war between Washington and the Tehran/Damascus axis. Unfortunately, there may be little that Mr. Bush can do to stabilize Lebanon. He is determined not to negotiate, and dialogue with the likes of Syrian President Bashar Assad is not without risks. Sustained diplomatic isolation coordinated by the U.S. and France may stand the best chance of preventing Syria from meddling further in Lebanese affairs.

As things stand, it does not appear that any resolution to the crisis is on the horizon. After the departure from power in late November of Lebanese President Emile Lahoud, the Hezbollah-led opposition, known as the March 8 Alliance, has consistently blocked the election of his successor, demanding a veto-yielding vote in parliament before it agrees to allow a president to be selected. Realizing that granting the opposition this veto power would give Syria and Iran a greater voice in the decisions of the Lebanese government, the pro-Western majority in power has refused to relent. Thus, Lebanon remains without a president and is left in an unstable and dangerous vacuum.

“Inside the spider’s web”

The Guardian 15 August 2007

Last night Hizbullah was celebrating its ‘divine victory’ over Israel and thousands have been flocking to its war museum.

[credit: James Martin]

In Dahia, a predominantly Shia suburb of Beirut, an estimated 50,000 Lebanese turned out last night to celebrate the one year anniversary of the end of last summer’s 34-day war with Israel. Hizbullah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah delivered a televised speech to the throngs of Lebanese Shia in attendance, glorifying his group’s “divine victory” against Israel and warning Jewish leaders that another attack on Lebanon would prove even more costly next time around.

His words were received with raucous approbation by the crowd, who kept the Shia neighborhood up until late at night: bare-chested men drove motorcycles through the streets, waving Hizbullah flags and cheering; fireworks and celebratory gunshots erupted from rooftop to rooftop; and jeeps barrelled through the street overflowing with ecstatic revellers, who chanted and held high into the air enormous Iranian flags.

Not all in Beirut were celebrating last night. A year after the war, which caused over 1,000 deaths and an estimated $5 billion of damage in Lebanon, the country’s political and economic woes have reached crisis level: Fouad Siniora’s western-backed government, stuck in a crippling deadlock with the Hizbullah-led opposition and reeling from a recent string of targeted assassinations, is teetering on the brink of collapse. The economy lies in tatters and the Lebanese army has been bogged down summer-long in a fierce battle with the al-Qaida-linked Fatah al-Islam group in the northern Nahr al-Bared refugee camp.

But in Dahia last night there were no signs of woe to be found: children, draped in Hizbullah flags, played with balloons adorned with the visage of the wildly popular Nasrallah, while men and women together cheered their support for the leader. Green posters clogged the streets proclaiming the August 14 date as a day of triumph for Lebanon.

Nasrallah’s speech last night was only the culminating moment in a summer marked by Hizbullah’s celebration of its “divine victory” last year. The group even opened a museum last month in Dahia that commemorates its war efforts against the Israelis. Thousands of Lebanese have visited in recent weeks.

The museum’s main exhibit – which is entitled “The Spider’s Web” – is a macabre testament to Hizbullah’s ongoing fascination with battling the Jewish state. At the entrance, children pose with badly-damaged Israeli armoured vehicles, adorned with placards giving the name of their model and the date of their destruction by the “resistance”.

“Beirut power play”

The Guardian 7 August 2007

A hotly contested byelection in Lebanon foreshadows a much bigger struggle over the presidency this autumn.

Lebanon’s political stalemate reached a boiling point last weekend, as opposition candidate Camille Khoury won a hotly contested parliamentary seat in Metn, a predominantly Christian area north of Beirut.

Sunday’s byelection, which was to fill a seat left vacant by the assassination of Christian MP Pierre Gemayel last November, pitted Pierre’s father – former president Amin Gemayel - against the relatively unknown Mr Khoury, a member of the Free Patriotic Movement (FPM) which is led by another prominent Christian, Michel Aoun. Since forming an alliance with Hizbullah last year, Aoun’s party has played a key role in the opposition to Fouad Siniora’s ruling coalition, taking part in massive anti-government protests last December that shut down Beirut and left the government teetering.

The results of Sunday’s election in Metn could be a prelude to more chaos: with Syrian-backed President Emile Lahoud scheduled to step down by November 23, the presidency – a post that has to be filled by a Maronite Christian – will be left open for contest between Siniora’s forces and the opposition. With many predicting that the victorious party of Metn’s elections will hold the key to winning the presidency in the autumn, Khoury’s success seems to bode well for the ambitions of Aoun. With Aoun as president, the opposition would be firmly ensconced in the state and could thus be emboldened to force a complete takeover of the government.

But not everyone in Beirut is convinced that Khoury’s victory will translate into success for Aoun in the autumn. Given that Gemayel’s defeat came by less than 500 votes, it is far from clear that Lebanon’s Christians have given the FPM a clear mandate to rule; in fact, the elections saw a huge drop in popularity for Aoun’s party, which won 70% of the Christian vote in parliamentary elections in 2005. Furthermore, given low support for the FPM in Sunday’s vote among Maronite Christians, Lebanon’s largest Christian minority, Aoun’s claim to being the indispensable Christian candidate no longer seems credible to many. Gemayel himself took this line in a Beirut news conference yesterday, saying that a “majority of Maronites voted for us, 75%, and only 34% for Aoun … So now let us talk about the true Christian representative.”