Lebanon Risks Becoming More Like Iraq Than Syria

Lebanon’s slide into the Syrian quagmire has become fact and reality. Hezbollah’s intervention in the war there, and its Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah’s announcement that its participation there would continue, and in fact even intensify, has made it clear — on a political and security level — that Lebanon is now part of the Syrian crisis and not merely affected by its repercussions. This characterization is most likely enhanced by actions from the other side, whereby Sunni Salafist factions seem to have retaliated for Hezbollah’s involvement in Syria by carrying out car bomb attacks against the party in Lebanon. The last of these was the Ruwais explosion that targeted a predominantly Shiite neighborhood in Beirut’s southern suburb, one of Hezbollah’s most important strongholds in the country.

The prevailing warnings of the past few weeks about Lebanon sliding toward a gradual sectarian Sunni-Shiite war have become more consequential. The last two weeks witnessed an intensification of reciprocal retaliatory kidnappings in the northern Bekaa region between adjacent Shiite and Sunni neighborhoods, as Salafist groups planted explosive devices targeting Hezbollah convoys along the Beirut-Masnaa road leading to Syria.

Expectations currently are that this security war will greatly escalate in the form of recurrent bomb attacks and rocket launches targeting Hezbollah, as the latter intensifies its security efforts to dismantle Salafist cells operating against it. This security conflict is not taking place in a vacuum, but is occurring amid extreme sectarian polarization — particularly among Shiites and Sunnis — throughout Lebanon. This was evidenced by Sunni Salafists handing out sweets in Tripoli to celebrate and gloat over the Ruwais explosion. Similar incidents occur in Shiite neighborhoods when the Syrian army achieves victories over Sunni Islamist factions inside Syria.

It has become clear today that Hezbollah’s participation in the fighting in Syria was, in the party’s view, a strategic necessity that is not open to compromise. In contrast, the Salafist factions probably will not back down from their efforts to shift their war from Syria to Lebanon, if the party fails to withdraw from Syria. The two sides are now at the point of no return, and both claim that their fight is a defensive one. The Salafists crossing the Lebanese-Syrian border say that Hezbollah initiated the battle against them when it ventured outside its borders to fight in a war that it has no business being involved in. Hezbollah, meanwhile, asserts that it went to fight them in Syria because it was leery of Islamist rebels coming to fight it in Lebanon once they succeeded in vanquishing the Syrian regime.