Entries Tagged 'Lebanon' ↓

Ekhlaas member al-Sarim al-Shami (”the Stern Shami”) asks: Why aren’t the armed Salafi groups entering the fight in Lebanon? He is particularly critical of their religious leaders, who are sitting on their hands. Sarim acknowledges, as I wrote a few days ago, that some Ekhlaas members endorse this tactical neutrality in order to prepare for a larger battle against the state. But he retorts that there is no better time than now to begin “the holy war” (al-harb al-muqadassa) against the infidel foreign powers that are trying to shape the destiny of Lebanon. These powers know that conflict in Lebanon will only benefit “the sons of al-Qaeda,” so they are pushing their proxies to negotiate. They realize that if there is not a peaceful settlement, Lebanon “will become a second Iraq and (turn into) the Islamic State of Lebanon.”

Another Ekhlaas member, abu_3ubayda, disagrees. Armed Salafi groups should not enter the fray because it is merely a political dispute between al-Mustaqbal, Hezbollah, and Amal. It is not a battle to raise the banner of Islam. Moreover, the war is not caused by Sunnism or Shi’ism; if that were the case, then the situation would be different and there would be no way for the warring factions to reconcile because pious people on both sides would not agree to it.

Another member, Abu Suhayb al-Shami, agrees with Sarim for the most part, but does not think it is appropriate to criticize the Salafi religious scholars for not acting. No matter the near-term resolution to the crisis, he argues, Sunnis are now more receptive to al-Qaeda in Lebanon because of what happened (i.e. they will want AQ to defend them against Hezbollah).

Document (Arabic): 5-15-08-jihadis-debate-should-sunnis-fight-in-lebanon

Mitchell Prothero of U.S. News and World Report gives a shout-out.  This paragraph is right on target:

But while such groups have received little support from Lebanon’s Sunnis in the past, their humiliating defeat last week by Hezbollah and the tensions that led to the clashes already had Beirut’s urbane and unarmed Sunni population looking to religious conservatives and rougher men from outlying regions like Tripoli, Akkar, and the Bekaa Valley, which all have significant militant communities.

I’ll try to post something this weekend on the different militant Sunni groups operating in Lebanon.

The May issue of the Jannat (”Paradise”) Journal has been released.  The monthly journal is a collection of short news stories on the global jihad and excerpts from online Jihadi discussion forums.  If you haven’t been following the latest goings on in the jihadosphere, this is a good place to look to get caught up.

Although Jannat covers most of the open conflict zones in each issue, it focuses heavily on the Palestinian territories, which means that’s where its producers likely live (Gaza would be a good bet).  Since it is critical of Hamas and hateful toward Hezbollah, it’s also safe to assume that its producers are Jihadi-Salafis of some sort.  Jihadis are trying to gain greater visibility in Gaza, but it has been tough given Hamas’s monopoly on Sunni Islamist violence there.

The headline story in this issue is the Shia march from Iran to Iraq to Syria to Lebanon to the Gulf and finally to Yemen (which seems pretty circuitous).  The headline screams that Hezbollah is appropriating Sunni Beirut and that the extermination of Fatah al-Islam (a Lebanese Jihadi group which rebelled against the government last summer) has paved the way for Hezbollah’s control of Lebanon.

The Jihadi forums are buzzing today about the impending civil war in Lebanon, which they ominously refer to as being “in the mouth of the dragon.” There were two items of particular interest. One was advice from a Jihadi name al-Jawahir to militants in Lebanon:

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He counsels his brothers to operate in secret, shun reporters, gather armor-piercing weaponry, and refuse to help either the Lebanese Army or Hezbollah. The bit about shunning reporters does not seem consistent with Zawahiri’s type of revolutionary vanguardism, which is very dependent on the media.

The second item is a short post recommending that the mujahids in Lebanon read Abu Bakr Naji’s Management of Savagery (you can find my translation of it here). Naji is probably dead (I’ll save that for another post), but this is the second time his ideas have been trotted out before a Muslim civil war; Iraq was the first. His main idea is that Jihadis should move into security vacuums and establish rudimentary governments that provide basic services to the people, which will win them the support of the locals. They can then network and coordinate with one another for common objectives, even if the areas they control (which he calls “regions of savagery”) are not contiguous.  These areas need not be large; they can be as small as city blocks. Combined with the advice above, this seems a plausible scenario for some Jihadi groups in Lebanon if the country descends into a full civil war.

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