Michael Karam

First Syria, then Lebanon

Syria’s civil war is tearing Lebanon apart

 

Beirut

On New Year’s Eve 2011, I asked a senior Swedish diplomat, who had just crossed over from Damascus and was ready to see in the New Year Beirut-style, how long he gave Bashar al-Assad as Syrian president. ‘Longer than we think, but not as long as he thinks,’ he said with a wink. That was still in the days of what we naively called the Arab Awakening; we Lebanese assumed we could sit back and wait for Syria’s hated system to fall. But the weeks have turned to years, and not only is Assad still in place, he might just be prevailing. Lebanon, meanwhile, is falling apart. Fighting alongside Assad’s troops, arguably tipping the conflict in his favour, are up to 7,000 mercenaries from the Lebanese Shia party Hezbollah, which is once again driving a wedge through Lebanese society. The Party of God was the darling of the Arab world after it fought Israel to a draw in 2006, but it has drifted from its admittedly dubious core business of defending Lebanon from ‘Zionist aggression’ and taken sides in Syria, presumably on the orders of its paymasters and spiritual bosses in Iran. Hezbollah used to be cagey about its role in Syria. Not any more. Its secretary general, Hassan Nasrallah, recently admitted in public that his fighters were indeed helping retake the strategic border town of Qusayr — and they will in all likelihood be first on the team sheet when the regime masses to regain -Aleppo. That risks plunging Lebanon, which has an almost even Sunni-Shia split among its Muslim population, into another full-blown conflict. Sectarian tensions defined by the ebb and flow of the Syrian civil war are escalating by the day. From the start of the Syrian uprising in the spring of 2011, Lebanese prime minister Najib Miqati declared a policy of neutrality.

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