Syria suspected in Tripoli bombs

[Originally posted at NOW]

Indictments of five people, including a Syrian intelligence officer, on charges of carrying out last week’s deadly mosque blasts suggest senior Syrian regime involvement, say analysts.

Investigations into last Friday’s deadly twin bomb blasts in the northern city of Tripoli appeared to make significant progress Friday, with Military Prosecutor Saqr Saqr filing charges against five men suspected of planning, preparing, and placing the car bombs outside the crowded mosques. The identities of the suspects, who include a Syrian intelligence officer, point to high-level involvement of the Bashar al-Assad regime, according to analysts NOW spoke with, although a laywer for one of the accused insists the charges are false and politically-motivated.

The two key Lebanese indictees, Sheikhs Hashem Menqara and Ahmad al-Gharib, are respectively the leader and a member of a splinter faction of the Islamic Tawheed Movement, a small Sunni Islamist movement based in Tripoli known for its links to the Syrian regime, although it was once bitterly opposed to Damascus.

Formed in the early 1980s in alliance with Iran and what would become Hezbollah, the militia in fact fought the Syrian occupying forces until the latter’s bloody crackdown in Tripoli in 1985, at which point Menqara was jailed. By the time he was released, 14 years later, Hezbollah and Syria had overcome their onetime enmity, and Menqara “came out as an ally of the Syrian regime and worked alongside them,” according to Sheikh Nabil Rahim, a Tripoli-based member of the Muslim Scholars’ Committee. According to Rahim as well as a senior Tawheed source who asked not to be named, the movement today is divided, with one faction loyal to Menqara and another to Sheikh Bilal Shaaban, son of the founder, Sheikh Saeed Shaaban. The senior Tawheed source, who belonged to the latter faction, firmly denied to NOW that his movement was responsible for Friday’s bombs.

And Menqara’s lawyer, Ibrahim Ayyoubi, also told NOW his client was not guilty. “This case is politicized […] the evidence isn’t there. The sides that are accusing him are known. It’s impossible, completely, entirely, fully, for Sheikh Hashem to do this […] He can’t, as a matter of religion, do anything involving bloodshed.”

Nonetheless, if the accusations should prove true, the case would tally with a history of Syrian-ordered bombings in Lebanon already well-established, said Lebanese American University Professor Imad Salamey.

“Considering the infamous case of Samaha-Mamluk, this sounds like it fits the same pattern,” Salamey told NOW, referring to the 2012 indictment of former Lebanese minister Michel Samaha along with Syrian national security chief General Ali Mamluk on charges of planning a number of terror attacks in Lebanon, particularly in the north.

As for why Syria would order such a bloody attack, Salamey believes the rationale is bound up with the ongoing war in the country.

“The regime is trying to expand its crisis to make it region-wide, linking the fate of regional stability to its survival. This gives it negotiation leverage with the international community, both for itself and its allies in Lebanon.”

Speaking of whom, Salamey argues the attack need not have involved Hezbollah, being the kind of tactic on whose merits Damascus and Hezbollah’s patrons in Tehran would likely disagree at the present moment.

“I personally doubt that Hezbollah approved of this – not because they care much about the people who were in those mosques, but rather because it’s not in Hezbollah’s interests for the security situation in the country to get totally out of hand, and for them to be engulfed in a sectarian struggle without much purpose or benefit for them.”

“So I think there is a relative difference here between the Iranian position and that of Syria. While the Syrian regime is desperate to expand the regional instability […] for Iran, the situation in Lebanon is to its advantage. Hezbollah has the upper hand politically, militarily, and security-wise, and the outbreak of Sunni-Shiite conflict in Lebanon would undermine this,” he told NOW.

Finally, despite Friday’s indictment of another Syrian regime official on charges of plotting attacks on Lebanon, Salamey foresaw no deterioration in Lebanese-Syrian diplomatic relations.

“The foreign policy position of Lebanon is officially tied to [that of] Syria. So Lebanon officially will just turn a blind eye to the situation, as they did with the Samaha-Mamluk issue.”

Maya Gebeily contributed reporting.

Securing Lebanon: an impossible task?

[Originally posted at NOW]

As bombs kill scores across the country, Lebanon's internal divisions add immense difficulties to security forces' work.

Lebanon plunged further into a state of unusually severe violence Friday afternoon, as twin blasts tore through two densely-packed mosques following prayers in the northern city of Tripoli. The explosions, which have killed at least 42 at the time of going to press, come just eight days after a car bomb took 30 civilian lives on a residential street in Beirut’s southern suburbs – the deadliest such attack since the 1975-90 civil war, until Friday's.

The eight intervening days have seen Lebanon’s various security forces scramble to bolster citizens’ safety, implementing an array of precautionary measures including checkpoints, army and police patrols, the detention and indictment of terror suspects, and increased bomb-scanning of vehicles in public car parks. While these efforts appear to have yielded some successes – most notably the discovery of a car laden with 250kg of explosives in Naameh on Saturday, as well as that of a bomb rigged to explode in Tyre on Thursday – Friday’s blasts in Tripoli tragically demonstrated the limitations of what Caretaker Interior Minister Marwan Charbel has called the security “road map.”

Practically speaking, security experts told NOW that beyond basic measures such as checkpoints and searches, what security forces need above all to thwart attacks like these is effective intelligence.

“Whether it’s eavesdropping, communication data, or cooperation with local and regional players, it is all about information,” said retired Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) General Elias Hanna. “Because it’s not a well-known enemy, it’s a shadowy one. You have to have inside information, which is highly difficult with this kind of threat.”

“Nothing is as good as human intelligence,” agreed Riad Kahwaji, founder and CEO of the Institute for Near East & Gulf Military Analysis (INEGMA). “Especially communication intelligence, this is what’s required. But still, the complications in Lebanon pose the greatest challenge for the work of security services.”

Indeed, all experts NOW spoke with stressed the considerable obstacles to successful attack prevention posed by Lebanon’s perennial political segregation.

“There is no cooperation between the security apparatuses,” said Hanna. “One is considered Sunni, one is considered Shiite, one is considered Maronite, one is considered Catholic, so there is no consensus even on security issues. When you have [a bomb] in Dahiyeh, the other side is laughing, and vice versa.”

“When you have a country that has so much political division, with so much sectarian conflict in the region, and the presence of armed militias, all this makes the task of security services very complicated,” said Kahwaji.

Moreover, argues Kahwaji, possible affiliations between powerful Lebanese factions and the perpetrators of attacks themselves add self-evident difficulties.

“There are obviously some foreign intelligence agencies involved in [these attacks.] [Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan] Nasrallah is blaming everything happening on the so-called ‘takfiris,’ but we haven’t seen any suicide bombings. All of these have been car bombs, which is usually the act of intelligence agencies, whether it’s in Dahiyeh or today in Tripoli.”

“Let’s not forget – people keep forgetting this – the biggest preemption of bomb attacks ever carried out in Lebanon was with the apprehension of [former minister] Michel Samaha. That was the biggest operation that preempted and prevented massive car bombs a year ago. And that [implicated] Syrian intelligence. So how are we going to deal with intelligence agencies such as the Syrian ones when you have militias like Hezbollah allied with them and working together with them?”

With politics being so central an impediment to security, retired LAF General Nizar Abdel-Kader told NOW the only truly viable solution was conciliation between feuding parties.

“Putting a stop to all these security threats starts with some type of consensus among the various political factions to form a government. And to really give this government the opportunity to work and make decisions [and] encourage the judiciary, especially the prosecutor’s office, to call on all security agencies to give them the names of all terror suspects […] This is the only way we can preserve stability.”

Hanna agrees: “It’s about cooperation, about having political consensus. Because in Lebanon especially, security is about the ambience, the political environment.”