If Lebanon was already staring into the abyss, this week’s
co-ordinated suicide bombings in southern Beirut that killed 23 people
and wounded 140 have pushed it to the brink.
It is now a question of when, not if, the next bombing will occur, as
the fallout from the attack on the Iranian embassy in the Shiite
militant group Hezbollah’s stronghold of Bir Hassan continues.
The al-Qaeda-linked Abdullah Azzam Brigades claimed responsibility for the bombings via Twitter and threatened more to come.
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The 2½-year Syrian conflict has transformed from ”a sectarian civil war
to a humanitarian and security nightmare with broad regional spill
over”, a senior Middle East adviser at the Washington-based Stimson
Centre, Mona Yacoubian, says.
”Forty per cent of Syria’s population requires humanitarian assistance,
and millions are now displaced,” she wrote on Thursday in the journal
Foreign Policy. ”Meanwhile, Syria has become a magnet for
foreign fighters, surpassing Iraq and soon Afghanistan as a destination
for jihadist and other militants.”
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