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A Beirut horror story

by artappraiser 10/19/2012 - 3:28 pm

By David Kenner, Passport @ ForeignPolicy.com, October 19, 2012

[....]  This afternoon, a car bomb ripped through Beirut's Sassine Square, a main commercial center in Ashrafieh, a predominantly Christian neighborhood. Brig. Gen. Wissam al-Hassan, the head of the Internal Security Forces' Information Branch, has been reportedly killed in the blast.

In Lebanon, each security branch is a fiefdom of a different political party. Hassan wasn't just a non-partisan official, but widely recognized as the central ally of former Prime Minister Saad Hariri's Future Movement, the country's most important Sunni party. As FP contributor Elias Muhanna writes, Hassan had "long been the target of...ire" from Lebanon's pro-Assad political alliance. Hassan had been riding high: His branch had just arrested Michel Samaha, one of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's staunchest allies in Beirut, on charges of plotting attacks against Christian areas on orders of the Syrian regime.

For Hariri and his anti-Assad allies, then, this looks like payback: They struck a blow against one of Assad's men, so the Syrian regime took revenge by killing the man who orchestrated the arrest. The backlash is already brewing: [....]

Read the full article at http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2012/10/19/a_Beirut_horror_story

Tweeted by Marc Lynch @abuaardvark:

Who is Wissam al-Hassan?
Posted by Qifa Nabki News & Commentary from The Levant ⋅ October 19, 2012

by artappraiser 10/19/2012 - 3:49 pm

Unrest Shakes Lebanon’s Government

By HWAIDA SAAD and TIM ARANGO, New York Times, 3:09 PM ET

Lebanon’s main opposition group called for widespread protests on Sunday in the wake of a powerful bomb attack for which it blamed Syria. Above Below, protests on Saturday.

Wael Hamzeh/European Pressphoto Agency
by artappraiser 10/20/2012 - 5:10 pm

29 Years Ago Today
By Claude Salhani, Now Lebanon, October 23, 2012

Twenty-nine years ago today the US Marines and French paratroopers serving with the Multinational force in Lebanon awoke to two powerful explosions, the first targeted what was known as the BLT Building, or the Battalion Landing Team building, near Beirut Airport. A truck laden with explosives circled the parking lot early that Sunday morning, revved up his speed, rammed the gates and drove straight into the lobby of the building that housed a large number of the Marines in Beirut. The force of the explosion literally lifted the building off its foundation and brought it down upon itself killing 241 US servicemen, mostly Marines. It was the single biggest loss for the Marine Corps since the battle of Iwo Jima in the Pacific during World War II.
 
The FBI investigators who arrived the next day to investigate the bombing called it the largest  non-nuclear explosion in history.

It was early Sunday morning, in October 1983 the only day when we, and the Marines, took the luxury of sleeping an extra hour. A few minutes later I was driving my car at top speed towards Beirut Airport [....]

Why today’s circumstances remind the Lebanese of the civil war
By Naziha Baassiri, Now Lebanon, October 23. 2012

[....] Many say that the events following the assassination are a crude reminder of the Lebanese civil war, which lasted for 15 years. It seems history is repeating itself. Similar to the Palestinian factions in 1975, some believe the Free Syrian Army (FSA) will drag Lebanon into its conflict with the Syrian regime. Recurrent clashes in Tripoli as well as shelling of Lebanese villages by the Syrian regime only underscore how easy it is for the situation to spiral out of control.

Also, there have been talks of armed groups stopping cars and checking passangers’ IDs, which is reminiscent of civil war practices when people were killed simply for belonging to a certain sect or a certain part of town.

Certainly, the political vacuum in the Sunni community as well as the festering anger with the faux pas of the March 14 coalition have led to the inability to contain youth taking up arms, one of whom told NOW Lebanon that “[Saad] Hariri did not even show up to the funeral of [Wissam al-Hassan]. Nobody represents the Shebab (youth), they represent themselves.”

Things, as you can see, are bleak. But it gets worse [....]

by artappraiser 10/23/2012 - 8:26 pm

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