some guy in lebanon

Lebanon's Premier English Newspaper

Nick Kimbrell published an excellent article today on the ongoing Salafi-Syrian crisis brewing in Northern Lebanon – an excerpt:

BEIRUT: Lebanon’s leading Salafi cleric, Dai al-Islam al-Shahhal, has warned Syria to stay out of North Lebanon or risk opening “the gates of hell.” In an interview to be published in the Kuwaiti daily Al-Anbaa, Shahhal made clear that Syrian intervention in Lebanon would be met with stiff opposition.

A military incursion would open “the gates of hell and lead to what is similar to Iraq and its misery,” he said, according to excerpts received by the Lebanese news outlet Naharnet.

“The Syrian command and its allies in Lebanon,” Shahhal added, “are keen on driving a wedge between the Salafi movement and the Lebanese military establishment in order to drag the whole Sunni community into conflict.”

Following the tenuous intra-Lebanese peace forged in Doha, Qatar, in May, residual tensions simmered between Salafist groups aligned with the Future Movement and opposition-aligned Alawites in Tripoli – where, last year, the militant Islamist group Fatah al-Islam and the Lebanese Armed Forces fought a brutal 15-week battle in the Nahr al-Bared refugee camp.

Relations between certain hard-line Sunni factions and the army have remained tense.

But Shahhal said that in the event of Syrian intervention, Salafi leaders would coordinate with the army.

“The Salafi movement is not like other factions and would not take decisions to go to war or peace without coordinating its moves with all other factions because they have the right to set the national path,” he said.

The recent violence in Tripoli, a large deployment of Syrian troops to the border and statements by Syrian President Bashar Assad have fueled concerns in Lebanon of a potential Syrian incursion into the North.

On Monday, a car bomb killed four Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) soldiers and at least one civilian in Tripoli, echoing a similar attack in August which left 15 dead. Monday’s blast came only two days after an explosion in Damascus killed 17 people. The official Syrian Arab News Agency blamed the blast on an Islamist suicide bomber from a neighboring Arab country.

Last week, the Lebanese Army reported that 10,000 Syrian special forces had deployed to the Lebanese-Syrian border in what was called an anti-smuggling campaign.

And in early September, Assad told visiting heads of state from France, Turkey and Qatar that the growing threat of extremism in Tripoli must be addressed by the Lebanese Army, drawing sharp criticism from members of the March 14 alliance who labeled the remarks a “flagrant” violation of Lebanon’s sovereignty.

View whole article here: Senior Salafi cleric issues stark warning to Damascus