On Sunday, 26 May, a Syrian opposition group called the Revolutionary Military Council (RMC) in Aleppo issued a statement in which it threatened to transfer the battlefield into Lebanon in response to Hizbullah fighting in Al-Qusair. The RMC threat was one of series of threats issued by various Syrian opposition groups condemning Hizbullah's involvement in fighting alongside regime forces in Al-Qusair. Shortly after Hizbullah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah made his 25 May speech in which he reiterated support for Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad's regime, the Free Syrian Army (FSA) chief commander, Salim Idriss, set a 24-hour ultimatum for Hizbullah to pull its fighters out of Syrian territories or face the consequences of tracking down its fighters “wherever they are”. Later last week, a statement attributed to Jabhet Al-Nusra (a militant Salafist umbrella group fighting against Al-Assad's regime with a strong military presence on the ground) said that it would plant Dahiya — the Beirut southern suburb commonly known as Hizbullah's hinterland — with explosives. The statement was soon dismissed. As villages of the middle Beqaa Valley came under attack by rockets fired from Syrian territories, Hizbullah elements clashed with an unknown armed Syrian group in Baalbek, and Tripoli was still burning, Lebanon appeared — for the first time since the uprising in Syria two years ago — to be facing a serious threat to its already fragile stability. Signs of a spillover of the fighting in Syria into Lebanon can no longer be ignored. These signs were present long before Hizbullah disclosed its involvement in fighting in Syria. For the past two years since the eruption of the Syrian protest movement-turned-armed rebellion, the country has maintained a policy described by premier Najuib Mikati as keeping Lebanon neutral on the Syrian crisis. On the ground, however, it was a totally different story as the Lebanese state turned a blind eye when hundreds of fighters were trained and then smuggled into Syrian territory from Lebanon and an arsenal of weapons kept flowing to the Syrian opposition. Training camps recruiting and equipping fighters for the FSA were scattered across border villages in Wadi Khaled, and FSA injured fighters had been hospitalised in Tripoli. At one point, what the Lebanese state and officials claimed their policy was on Syria was in total contradiction to what was actually taking place on the ground. Last week's developments only brought things full circle. In his last speech, Nasrallah called on all parties to “settle their differences over Syria in Syria” and to prevent Lebanon from falling into the conflict. According to his party's view, transferring the battlefield into Lebanon should be avoided by all means, else it exhaust the party's energies having to fight on different fronts. But this is precisely what the Syrian opposition wanted to happen. As one analyst argued, the more Hizbullah and the Syrian army tighten the screw on the opposition in Al-Qusair, the more they want to avenge their losses in Lebanon by striking Hizbullah targets. The clashes in Baalbek between Hizbullah elements and some unknown Syrian opposition group was one further indication that Hizbullah's participation in the fighting alongside Syrian regime forces will not be cost-free, and that Lebanon was bound to pay a heavy price in terms of renewed internal volatility.
LEBANON UNDER THREAT: When fighting began in Al-Qusair, Lebanese security sources told local press that their concerns over transferring the battleground from Syria to Lebanon were real and not imagined. One high-ranking officer, quoted by daily As-Safir, expressed fears that there were cases of takfiris — although on individual and not organisational level — viewing Lebanon as “a delayed jihad battlefield”. The Lebanese security sources said a close link existed between developments in Lebanon and the course of the battle in Al-Qusair. “The more the Syrian opposition is likely to lose on the ground, the more our fears increase that they might seek to avenge their loss in Lebanon by striking Hizbullah targets,” the source said. Such a move, however, added the security source, would require a decision from Jabhet Al-Nusra, which may be made if they know they will be defeated in Al-Qusair. Similar incidents such as that of the two missiles targeting the southern suburb of Beirut last month, or the clashes in Baalbek, which is only 50 kilometres away from the open front in Al-Qusair, would be likely. An As-Safir political analyst explained that such incidents were a strong indication that the Syrian opposition had decided to open a new front in order to alleviate the pressure on Al-Qusair. “All signs indicate that once finished with Al-Qusair, the Syrian army will deploy some of its forces to the Qalamoun area, facing the Lebanese towns of Eersal and Baalbek, in order to secure the Lebanese-Syrian Eastern border because of it being a backyard for any attack on the capital and also for being a passageway to smuggle arms and fighters into Syrian territory from Lebanon.” Lebanese security sources, meanwhile, said that Jabhet Al-Nusra was “the mastermind” behind any organised revenge operation, particularly after it succeeded in uniting most extremist organisations under its umbrella in Syria. Syrian opposition continued to fire rockets on Lebanese villages in West Beqaa Valley from Syrian territory. On Sunday, 14 rockets were fired on villages south of Baalbek. Hizbullah opponents in Lebanon hold the party responsible for the deteriorating situation and pushing the country to the brink of civil strife as a result of its military intervention in Syria, with signs of strife particularly evident in Tripoli. One source was quoted by Al-Akhbar as saying, “We have set one foot in the civil war quagmire and if we set the other the whole country is going to the dogs.” Contrary to this view, the head of Hizbullah's parliamentarian bloc, Mohamed Raad, charged in a popular rally Monday that it was “Lebanese hands” that assisted in recruiting armed men and smuggling them to Al-Qusair where “they spread mayhem and oppressed its Lebanese population”. Raad said that locals sought Hizbullah backing to defend their presence in those villages. Meanwhile, the head of Hizbullah's Executive Council, Hashem Safieddin, described the rockets fired at Hermel and Baalbek as a manifestation of “weakness and fitna [sedition]”.
THE LARGER PICTURE: Reading the attacks in Lebanon in their larger regional context, commentator and human rights advocate Fouad Ibrahim, who has also written a number of seminal books on Salafism and Shia political thought, said that, “the Wahhabi Salafist movement was dreaming of a Sunni-Shia confrontation that would eventually strip Hizbullah of the popularity it earned following the July 2006 war.” “What better way to do so than a sectarian war that put the party before an existential threat?” he added. Ibrahim is not surprised by what he described as “sectarian hallucination” in Gulf oil-financed media outlets. This, he explained, is the best way to divert attention from popular demands for democracy in these countries. The outcome of the 127th session of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) ministerial meeting should be interpreted in this context. As-Safir reported that the escalation in the GCC's hostility towards Hizbullah was the most serious move against the group so far. The meeting concluded with the GCC announcing it considers Hizbullah “a terrorist organisation” and threatening to take steps against its interests. It fell short of placing the group on a list of terrorist organisations, however, at least before studying the issue. “There is a consensus to brand Hizbullah's intervention in Syria as terrorism,” said the Bahraini state minister for foreign affairs. Hizbullah responded indirectly via the words of Lebanese Agriculture Minister Hussein Al-Haj Hassan, who said: “The resistance is facing today a Zionist-American scheme that targets the region. It is fighting [this scheme] on behalf of the whole Islamic nation and no one will be able to drag it into a sectarian conflict because its first and foremost goal is to abort the fitna.”
