The Daily Star reports: The assassination of a high-ranking Lebanese security official opposed to Syrian President Bashar Assad in a car bomb in Beirut signals that the Syrian crisis has begun to explode in Lebanon, political analysts said Friday. The powerful blast that killed Brig. Gen. Wissam al-Hasan, the head of the police’s Information Branch, and at least four others Friday in the Beirut neighborhood of Ashrafieh, has also revived memories of the wave of car bombings that engulfed Lebanon during the devastating 1975-90 Civil War.

“The Ashrafieh blast sets the beginning for the Syrian crisis to explode in Lebanon. Lebanon has entered the Syrian melee,” Simon Haddad, professor of political science at the American University of Beirut, told The Daily Star. “The regime in Syria has entered a dangerous stage. Therefore, it will use all means in order to prolong its life.”

Blaming the Assad regime for the explosion, Haddad said: “The Syrian regime is sending messages to the March 14 parties as well as to America and Europe to stop their support for the Syrian opposition.

“The Syrian regime is trying to send a clear message to the international community saying: ‘Supporting the rebels [in Syria] will threaten security and stability in Lebanon,’” he added.

A similar view was echoed by Samir Franjieh, a former Maronite MP, who said that the Ashrafieh explosion and Hasan’s killing were clearly linked to the 19-month-old bloody conflict in Syria.

“The Syrian regime has begun playing with Lebanon’s stability as a card to negotiate with the international community over the future of Syria, including reducing the international sanctions on it,” Franjieh, a member of the opposition March 14 Secretariat General, told The Daily Star.

“The explosion was a clear attempt by Syria to undermine stability in Lebanon in order to exert pressure on the international community. Syria wants to tell the international community: ‘If you want to maintain stability in Lebanon, you must talk to us.’”

Friday’s explosion, the most serious blast the Lebanese capital has seen in more than four years, comes at a time when Lebanon has increasingly felt the repercussions of the crisis in neighboring Syria with the country’s March 8 and March 14 parties sharply split over the conflict next door.

Arab and Western countries have repeatedly voiced concerns over Lebanon’s stability, warning against the reverberations of the turmoil in Syria on the country’s security.

Politicians and analysts have long held the view that Lebanon’s security and stability are intertwined with that of Syria.

Violence in Syria has often spilled over into Lebanon, jolting the country’s already fragile security situation, with cross-border shootings, shelling by the Syrian army, tit-for-tat kidnappings, sectarian clashes and fighting between armed supporters and opponents of Assad in the northern city of Tripoli. Several Lebanese have been killed and wounded by Syrian gunfire in a series of deadly incidents on the Lebanese-Syrian border in recent months.

The split between the Hezbollah-led March 8 alliance and the opposition March 14 coalition over the Syrian crisis has raised fears of the turmoil in Syria spilling over to Lebanon.

Ahmad Moussali, professor of Islamic studies at AUB, also said Hasan’s assassination signaled the beginning of grave repercussions of the Syrian crisis on Lebanon.

“The Ashrafieh explosion and Hasan’s assassination sent political messages both at home and abroad. But the most important message is that the situation in Syria will not remain confined to Syrian territory and will plunge Lebanon into conflicts of high-level tension,” Moussali told The Daily Star.

“No doubt, the crisis in Syria will reflect on the political conflict in Lebanon because the Lebanese have joined the conflict in Syria by financing, arming and training the Syrian opposition,” he said.

Moussali added that Hasan’s assassination deep in the Lebanese capital showed that the repercussions of the Syrian crisis directly struck the heart of Lebanon. “The assassination of Hasan, who is linked to the U.N. investigation [into former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri’s killing], has sent a strong message to all parties in Lebanon.”

“The one who assassinated Hasan wants to turn the conflict in Syria into an inter-Lebanese conflict. Hasan’s assassination is a trap to play the Lebanese against each other,” Moussali said. “The assassination could be the beginning to justify an exchange of assassinations between the feuding parties in Lebanon.” [Continue reading…]

Ahed Al-Hendi writes: They came for me on December 14, 2006. Plainclothes police carrying automatic weapons stormed into an Internet café in Damascus and grabbed me and a friend. They brought us in a car to the headquarters of the Syrian secret police. Around midnight they dragged me from my holding cell to the man I would come to know only as “Captain Wissam.” He was a tall, dark-skinned officer. He looked at me and smiled. “We will release you in just a few minutes,” he said. “You should be a good citizen.” He then called a guard, whom he ordered to “take good care” of me.

Both men spoke with the distinctive accent of the Alawites; in fact, every single person in the prison did. The Alawite minority has effectively ruled Syria since 1963, and especially since President Hafez al-Assad took power in 1970. So when you hear this accent, you pay attention. Ever since I can remember, this has been the way that the people with real power in our country speak.

They did not keep me for a few minutes. They threw me into a cell they called “the Suite.” Measuring five feet by one and a half feet, it had no windows. There was a hole in the floor for a toilet and a hose attached to a faucet in the wall. The hose had two purposes: to keep the toilet clean and to provide me with drinking water. They told me I’d be staying for two years.

As it turned out, they let me go in 40 days. But that was more than enough. During that period, which I spent entirely in solitary confinement, I was interrogated constantly. I was tortured repeatedly, both psychologically and physically. (Forgive me, but I would prefer not to go into the details.) Every single day I feared death. When they released me, I staggered out onto the street, bearded and unkempt, wearing the same clothing I had on at the time of my arrest (though now everything was in tatters). Outside, everything seemed to be normal. People in the streets were walking around and enjoying their lives, smiling and laughing.

This was Syria under the Assads. I had drawn the attention of the secret police because of my membership in a student group that set out to publicize the human rights abuses of the regime. To engage in opposition meant questioning not only the government, but the entire version of reality that it had imposed upon us for decades. [Continue reading…]

The Guardian reports: Wissam al-Hassan knew he was a marked man. Last week, as he briefed Lebanon’s opposition leaders on the case on which he had staked his career, the spy chief told them that assassins were again stalking the country.

Virtually besieged in their homes since the early summer, his hosts hardly needed the warning.

Hassan brought with him evidence that he said strengthened the case against his highest profile target, Lebanon’s former information minister, Michel Samaha, who he alleged had collaborated with Syrian officials to plot bombings – like the very one that killed the veteran major general on Friday.

He died when a bomb in east Beirut blew up the car he was in during the rush hour, killing at least seven others and injuring scores more.

A feared spillover of the violence in Syria into deeply fragile and sectarian Lebanon had been edging ever closer to inevitable. The melting pot of the region has barely been holding together as Syria boiled, its fragmented sects increasingly drawn into a conflict that the Lebanese had dreaded but could do little to stop.

The case Hassan had built against Samaha was highly unusual in Lebanon, where bigwigs are rarely taken on. Those such as Samaha with powerful connections are virtually untouchable.

This case was different, Hassan said. Not just because of the weight of evidence against the accused, who had allegedly been taped by an aide acknowledging that he had been given explosives by the Syrian national intelligence chief, Ali Mamlouk.

Added to that were the former minister’s allegedly incriminating phone calls: he had apparently recorded his key conversations, then downloaded them to his computer. Prosecution briefs rarely come stronger.

Syrian officials made no secret of their demand for Samaha to be freed and the case against him dropped. But Hassan defied them, a move deemed crazy by his detractors and seen as an act of nation-building by his supporters, who saw the crumbling of power in Syria as an overdue chance for Lebanon to assert its sovereignty against its interfering neighbour. [Continue reading…]

The Guardian reports: Turkey has called on the US, Britain and other leading countries to take immediate action to intervene in Syria to prevent a looming humanitarian “disaster” that it says threatens the lives of millions of internally displaced people and refugees as winter approaches and could soon ignite a region-wide conflagration.

Appealing to the major powers to set aside their differences over how to end the 20-month-old civil war in which an estimated 32,000 people have died, Ahmet Davutoglu, Turkey’s foreign minister, said the crisis had gone on for long enough. The Syrian people were crying out for help and their pleas could no longer be ignored.

“How long can this situation continue? I mean in Bosnia, now we have Ban Ki-moon [the UN secretary general] apologising 20 years after. Who will apologise for Syria in 20 years’ time? How can we stay idle?” Davutoglu told the Guardian in an exclusive interview in Istanbul.

“We [Turkey] are doing all we can to help these people, using all diplomatic capacity to stop this bloodshed. But there should be a much more concerted effort by the international community. The best way we can see now is direct humanitarian intervention.” [Continue reading…]

Elias Muhanna writes: The news is still trickling out about the bombing today in Beirut, but all media outlets are now confirming that the target was Brigadier-General Wissam al-Hassan, the head of the Information Branch of the Internal Security Forces.

I’ve written a great deal about Wissam al-Hassan over the past few years and will have more to say about him this evening, but for the time being, here’s a quick backgrounder, followed by several links to my blog posts about the most important events in which al-Hassan played a major role.

Wissam al-Hassan was one of the most important security figures in Lebanon. He headed up the Information Branch of the Lebanese Internal Security Forces (fir` al-ma`lumat), and was recently responsible for arresting Michel Samaha, a former minister with close ties to Syria, for allegedly conspiring to have explosives blown up all around Lebanon in a bid to create havoc. The move was seen as very destabilizing in Lebanon because Wissam al-Hassan is very close to the March 14th coalition while Samaha had long been regarded as “untouchable” because of his connections to Damascus. And yet, none of Samaha’s Lebanese allies demanded his release. Many people were shocked at the ISF’s boldness and concluded that the evidence against Samaha (which allegedly included video and audio footage) was so compelling that he became politically radioactive to his allies.

Wissam al-Hassan has long been the target of March 8th ire. His branch of the police has been described as an independent fiefdom that is not under any real civilian control. Al-Hassan was a key security chief for former Prime Minister Rafiq al-Hariri, and was accused by some of having played a suspicious role in the build-up to the assassination in 2005. From March 14th’s perspective, the loss of al-Hassan is a major blow.

C.J. Chivers writes: As the war in Syria escalated this year, fighters opposed to President Bashar al-Assad reached for arms from many sources, including weapons manufactured by their own hands: Molotov cocktails, roadside bombs and locally made mortars and rockets. These are the familiar tools of modern insurgencies — weapons of choice or necessity for fighters who begin conflicts with limited means.

But a more surprising phenomenon is also present on Syria’s battlefields: pro-government forces are using makeshift weapons, too.

The development of improvised ordnance for both the Syrian military and loyalist militias, or shabiha, is at this point beyond dispute. Since this summer, evidence has surfaced showing the remains of so-called “barrel bombs,” which have been dropped from government aircraft, and the presence of a particular type of improvised rocket that has a history of use against American forces in Iraq. Both have been dropped or fired repeatedly into rebel-controlled territory. And both summon intriguing questions, for which answers remain elusive.

According to conventional wisdom, pro-government forces should be well equipped by weapons from Russia and China and, to a lesser extent, Iran. But for some reason they have resorted to crafting weapons to complement, or perhaps even replace, their standard arms. We are not sure why, though theories abound. [Continue reading…]

The Associated Press reports: Most of the rebels fighting government forces in the city of Aleppo fit a specific mold: They’re poor, religiously conservative and usually come from the underdeveloped countryside nearby.

They bring to the battle their fury over years of economic marginalization, fired by a pious fervor, and they say their fight in the civil war is not only against President Bashar Assad but also the elite merchants and industrialists who dominate the city and have stuck by the regime. The rebels regard this support for the government to be an act of betrayal.

The blend of poverty, religious piety and anger could define the future of Aleppo, and perhaps the rest of Syria, if the rebels take over the country’s largest city, which is also its economic engine. They may be tempted to push their own version of Islam, which is more fundamentalist than what is found in the city. Their bitterness at the business class may prompt them to seek ways of redistributing the wealth.

“Those who have money in Aleppo only worry about their wealth and interests when we have long lived in poverty,” said Osama Abu Mohammed, a rebel commander who was a car mechanic in the nearby town of Beyanon before he joined the fight.

“They have been breast-fed cowardice and their hearts are filled with fear. With their money, we could buy weapons that enable us to liberate the entire city in a week,” he said. [Continue reading…]

William Dalrymple writes: Few forms of conflict are so damaging to a country or its people as a prolonged civil war. By 1939, when Franco’s forces had finished mopping up the last Republican resistance in Spain, more than half a million lay dead and some of the most beautiful city centres in Europe had been destroyed.

A similar pattern played out in 1970s Lebanon, which saw 150,000 casualties and the almost complete destruction of the elegant villas of Ottoman Beirut. In Afghanistan it was not Soviet invasion or occupation that killed most people or wrecked Kabul, but the internecine street fighting that followed in the early 1990s. In a few years, as Masood‘s rockets fell on Pashtun neighbourhoods of Kabul, and Hekmatyar’s forces emptied the Tajik suburbs, palaces and museums were looted; while in the Shomali plain, Gandharan Buddhist sites were serially plundered of their treasure.

Today, as Syria faces the desperate prospect of an open-ended civil conflict, traumatised by its 20,000 dead and 250,000 refugees – the human cost of the war – it may seem trivial to mourn the speed with which its astonishing archaeological and architectural heritage is disappearing. But while the human pain inflicted by torture and killing is immeasurable, the destruction of a people’s heritage is irretrievable: once a monument is destroyed, it can never be replaced. With modern weaponry it only takes a few months of concerted shelling for the history of an entire people to be reduced to rubble. [Continue reading…]

AFP reports: The BBC said Thursday its services in the Middle East and Europe were being deliberately jammed, along with those of other broadcasters — with the interference coming from Syria.

The jamming of Eutelsat satellites affected BBC television and radio services in English and Arabic, the British Broadcasting Corporation said.

The French-based satellite provider Eutelsat said the interference was coming from Syria.

A BBC spokeswoman said: “The BBC, together with a number of other broadcasters, is experiencing deliberate, intermittent interference to its transmissions to audiences in Europe and the Middle East.

“Impacted services include the BBC World News and BBC Arabic television channels and BBC World Service radio services in English and Arabic.

“Deliberate interference such as the jamming of transmissions is a blatant violation of international regulations concerning the use of satellites and we strongly condemn any practice designed to disrupt audiences’ free access to news and information.”