When the head of Lebanon's Free Patriotic Movement, Christian leader Michael Aoun, a political ally of Hizbullah, was asked whether the second car bombing that hit Beirut's southern suburbs last Thursday, killing 27 people and leaving scores injured, was in response to Hizbullah's fighting in Syria, his answer was categorical. “No, because the crisis existed long before Hizbullah got involved in the fighting in Syria. Hizbullah went there to prevent further disasters,” Aoun said. As Lebanese security forces and army intelligence units continued their investigation of the second bombing, a breakthrough appeared to have been reached when the defence minister disclosed the names of the culprits and their alleged plans to prepare further cars full of explosives for detonation in Hizbullah areas. On Saturday, the Lebanese security forces said they had put their hands on what was described as a car-bombing ring composed of Lebanese, Palestinian and Syrian nationals. Sources said that at least three people had been detained by the General Security Directorate and that these had confessed to planning to detonate a car filled with 250kg of explosives along with a device to remotely detonate it found in the Naameh neighbourhood in south Lebanon in another location. Reports by the Lebanese national news agency said that the ring had confessed to belonging to a network planning to detonate other car bombs across Lebanon. The town of Ersal on the Syrian-Lebanese border was said to be the hub of fighters going back and forth from Syria, many of them involved in planning the car bombings. Last month, town leaders issued a statement disassociating themselves from illegal actions carried out by residents in what was seen as a move to strip those involved of popular backing. The bombings triggered a barrage of criticisms from Hizbullah opponents, who said that the explosions had shown that attempts to neutralise extremist forces by fighting them in Syria before they could come to Lebanon had been a “delusion”. Members of the 14 March Movement blamed the party for plunging Lebanon further into the Syrian conflict, while Hizbullah and its allies said that the targets had not been Hizbullah military or even political headquarters, but instead had been women and children in one of the busiest shopping districts in Dahiya. The message had been to try to hit Hizbullah where it hurt the most among its social base in a bid to put pressure on the movement to halt its military involvement in the Syrian conflict. However, just as importantly, the attacks have fuelled the flames of yet another round of sectarian-inspired violence by invoking an angry reaction from Hizbullah supporters among the Shia community in Lebanon against the perpetrators, supposedly Sunni extremists. In an interview with the daily Annahar newspaper, the Lebanese interior minister said that the name of the group that had claimed responsibility for the bombings in a YouTube video had been used in an attempt to create sectarian divisions. “Terrorism has no identity or pattern,” the minister said, a point already made by Hizbullah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah in a speech following the bombings. Nasrallah had insisted that the sectarian identity of the culprits was irrelevant. “Someone will come who will say that Sunnis were the ones who shelled you in the suburbs, and that Sunnis were the ones who planted bombs on the road, and that Sunnis were the ones who sent car bombs to the southern suburbs, and that they were the ones who perpetrated the massacre. But anyone who uses this logic is an Israeli agent and a partner to the killers in achieving the goal of killing and massacres.” “On my own responsibility I state that the [killers] were not Sunnis. They are people who have no religion and no homeland and no kinsfolk,” Nasrallah said. According to Lebanese security sources, a decision has been taken to transform Lebanon into a war zone by proxy. The Lebanese press has been filled with unconfirmed reports about an “operations room” led by the Saudi intelligence chief to target Lebanon and particularly Hizbullah areas of influence in response to its military involvement in Syria. Such bombings aim to pressure the party to cease its operations in Syria, the press says. Druze leader Walid Jumblatt was the first to point the finger at Israel for last week's bombing. Jumblatt, soon joined by several other commentators, said that he held Israel responsible for the bombings. One commentator, Jean Aziz, a member of the Christian Free Patriotic Movement, also denied that the bombings were in retaliation for Hizbullah's military involvement in the Syrian crisis. “Innocent people were killed in Dahiya because there is a party that reflects their will and is fighting Israel,” Aziz said. Aoun said that it did not matter who the perpetrators were, since “those who did the planning are the real criminals.”
