Abdel Salam al-Ordoni is a Prince, the first Emir to rule over Lebanon in over a century. He keeps his seat of power, well, somewhere, maybe in Syria or the Bekaa Valley, or maybe even Tripoli. He is the first Prince named by the first Caliph of the new Islamic State, formerly the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS/ISIL). No one knows as of yet why he was chosen by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the aforementioned Caliph. Did his piety set him apart? Was his service in Syria so meritorious as to warrant his promotion? Not much is known about the Prince, except that he appears to be a Palestinian hailing from one of the refugee camps that has dotted Lebanon since the 1948 war with Israel, and that he has declared war on Lebanon as it exists today, and its Shi’a population in particular.
Al-Ordoni has declared war on a state hardly suited to a protracted struggle with a hardened and motivated group like ISIS.
Business As Usual in Lebanese Politics
In the almost 25 years since the end of its civil war, Lebanon at its most stable was still a place with tensions like embers, waiting to be blown back into the full fire of war. At this moment, though, Lebanon is not stable by any stretch of the imagination.
Parliamentary elections are overdue by more than a year, held up by a running battle over possible changes to the electoral law. The assembly has granted itself an extension under the assumption that some sort of agreement would forged, but that hasn’t happened. Now it looks like they’ll have to grant themselves yet another extension, because they have yet to figure out the answer to a very important question: who is going to be the next President of Lebanon?
President Michel Sleiman’s six-year term ended in May, and no replacement has been found for him. It was thought that Sleiman, brought in after a stint as head of Lebanon’s military to be a compromise president, may be invited to stay on for either an extended term or a full second one. He was not, though, and so the search for his replacement began.
Under the terms of the National Pact, made when Lebanon was just emerging from French rule, the President must be a Maronite Christian, the Prime Minister a Sunni, the Speaker of the Parliament a Shi’ite, and the Chief of the General Staff a Druze. The President is elected by the Parliament, and the Prime Minister holds the post if and when it becomes vacant and a new candidate has yet to be selected. Prime Minister Tammam Salam currently is the placeholder President, and the executive-to-be is…Nobody.
Though other candidates have come and gone (including former President Amine Gemayal), the contest has essentially turned into a battle of wits and wills between Samir Geagea of the Lebanese Forces (and of the anti-Syrian March 14 parliamentary alliance) and Michel Aoun of the Free Patriotic Movement (and of the pro-Syrian, Hezbollah-led March 8 Alliance). Looking even more closely, though, it’s a battle between the Saudi-backed, Sunni led March 14-bloc of Saad Hariri and the Iranian-backed, Shi’a led March 8-bloc led by Hezbollah. As one can imagine, it’s going about as well as similar situations in Iraq and Syria. It’s now the season of compromise candidates, the latest being George Khoury, Lebanon’s ambassador to the Vatican.
The Rotting Cedar Foundations of Lebanon
Lebanon’s political conflict only serves as a cover for the bigger, and much more serious, societal conflicts. The various Christian and Muslim sects in Lebanon have vied for supremacy for the entirety of the existence of the state. The Christians and Sunnis, who long held a duopoly on power (economic, political, and social), have seen their influence wane as their populations have dropped. The Shi’a have been the opposite, growing in power as their population boomed, something that started in the 1950s and hasn’t stopped. At first, the Shi’a were co-opted by Communist and Socialist-Nationalist parties, before shedding the new collars that had been made for them in the years leading up the Civil War. The Iranian Revolution only brought a new energy to their search for a new identity in Lebanon.
The Civil War upended the order. The Christians retained the presidency, but were broken as a true power. The Druze remained closed off in their mountain stronghold in the central part of the country, the Sunnis for the most part chased out of Beirut and into the northern city of Tripoli. The Shi’a were ascendant, led by the Iranian and Syrian-backed Hezbollah.
Trouble brewed, though, both during and after the Syrian occupation. Extremist Sunni groups took hold in the mountains northeast of Tripoli, while sectarian conflict between Sunnis and Alawites in Tripoli continued relatively unabated. Al-Qaeda spinoffs went public in the Palestinian refugee camps. The Lebanese Army was called in to tackle each problem, but in classic (but very costly) whack-a-mole style, a new problem popped up with each one “solved.” The Army was always more than happy to fight Fatah al-Islam, a Palestinian Al-Qaeda affiliate that had to be rooted out of the Nahr al-Bared refugee camp in, guess where, Tripoli, or other Sunni extremists in remote mountains, but it found itself impotent when it came to infighting between Hezbollah and its allies and Hariri and his allies in Beirut and elsewhere in 2008. The Lebanese Army, simply put, has proven quite adept at combatting armed groups not represented in the Parliament.
Syria and Lebanon have always been tied together. Since it became independent, Syria has tried and tried again to absorb Lebanon, seeing it as a sort of lost province. They came close to succeeding, but were forced out by intense international pressure following the 2005 Cedar Revolution (the year of the great color revolutions in Georgia and Ukraine). It’s been a reliable truth, though, that Lebanon’s problems tend to become Syria’s, and Syria’s problems tend to become Lebanon’s. The Civil War in Syria is no different.
As Syria’s main ally in the area, Hezbollah quickly entered the conflict on the side of the Assad government, along with Alawites from Lebanon coming to fight with their coreligionists. Just as quickly came Sunnis of all stripes coming to topple Assad. The fighting did not stay confined to Syria long. The aforementioned fighting between Alawites and Sunnis in Tripoli flared up again with a vengeance, along with attacks by Sunni extremists on Army units brought in to try to keep some sort of calm.
Hezbollah found itself under attack on its home turf as a number of bomb attacks targeted Shi’a neighborhoods in Beirut. Attacks such as those troubled the group so much that they actually turned to the Lebanese government for help, calling on them to protect their neighborhoods. The Army and united of the Interior Ministry entered areas in which they hadn’t stepped foot in decades, all to protect Hezbollah as it got itself ever more tangled in Syria.
The Bekaa Valley became a supply dump for both pro-and-anti Assad groups, and the Syrian government did not hesitate to bomb camps on the Lebanese side of the border that they thought harbored their enemies. Battles in the Qalamoun area bounced over the border and back, bringing Lebanese villages and towns into the combat zone.
Then came the refugees. As of July 1st, there are over 1.1 million Syrian refugees in Lebanon, and the UN is warning that the number could rise to over 1.5 million by the end of the year. If that holds true, Syrian refugees would constitute a full third of the population of Lebanon. Not surprisingly, Lebanon is hardly able to care for all of these people, and the UN and aid agencies are cracking under the strain. The Lebanese government has agreed with the UN that refugee camps may have to be set up (as of now the refugees are put wherever room can be spared), a thought that terrifies much of the country, still living with the problems the 250,000-or so-strong Palestinian refugee population poses.
With the Palestinian refugees in mind, Al-Qaeda spinoff groups such as Fatah al-Islam have risen again in the Ain al-Hilweh camp in southern Lebanon, posing yet another security risk. The Palestine Liberation Organization, which is nominally in charge of the camps, has created an “elite” security force to contain the threat, but its creation has been met with a dare from Fatah al-Islam for the security force to just try and enter their neighborhoods.
While the eyes of the world are focused on the dramatic spectacle that is the ISIS advance in Iraq, the group has quietly (for the Middle East) begun planting roots in Lebanon.
ISIS’ arrival in Lebanon was announced with the detonation of a suicide bomber’s explosive at the Duroy Hotel in Beirut during a raid by Lebanese security forces. The government was quick to hail the averted terrorist plot as a great success, with Prime Minister Salam insisting that it was proof that Lebanon could contain the terrorists.
“There is no safe haven for terrorism in Lebanon, said Salam to Al-Jazeera, “and the internal situation is under control. It will not allow for such an environment to rise.”
Though Iran has offered its full support to Lebanese counter-terror efforts, sources inside Lebanon were quick to note that it was Western intelligence cooperation that was behind the recent success of the crackdown on terrorist groups.
That was only one success, though, and the indication is that those killed and captured at the Duroy were only part of one wave of suicide bombers and militants the Islamic State is trying to infiltrate into Lebanon. A serious escalation by al-Ordoni and his wing of the Islamic State would be a major test of the capacity of the Lebanese security establishment, even though propping up Lebanon is one thing that the West, the Saudis, and Iran can all agree to pitch in on.
Lebanon’s societal and political problems help to inhibit the country’s ability to launch an effective nation-wide counter-terror campaign, but a very real problem comes from the practical limitations of what they are working with. Lebanon’s Army is a beggar army. Though it has a few elite units, including its own version of the U.S. Navy SEALs, the Lebanese Armed Forces are poorly led and even more poorly equipped. It has what is perhaps the most eclectic assortment of arms and equipment of any military on the planet, due to the fact that it takes what it can get in terms of military aid. Tanks from Ukraine, armored cars from France, land rovers from the British, small arms from Russia and the United States, etc, etc. Lebanon is the younger child when it comes to military equipment, getting the cast-off toys of those done playing with them. The country’s Navy is little more than a harbor patrol, and it has no air force to speak of.
The deficiencies of the Lebanese Armed Forces were on display in their full glory during the fighting against Fatah al-Islam and other Salafist groups in the Palestinian refugee camps in 2007. There were no quick gains to be had as the army quickly got bogged down in bloody urban combat. The narrow streets and allies of Ain al-Hilweh and Nahr al-Bared swallowed units whole, and the Army had to level portions of the camps to make any progress. Air support would have helped, but the best that could be mustered were helicopters dropping unguided bombs.
There are few indications to make one believe that the capabilities of the Lebanese Armed Forces have improved dramatically in the seven years since those events. It is stretched due to deployments on the border with Israel, in Tripoli on peacekeeping duty, on the Syrian border trying to exert some sort of influence in the area, and in Beirut. Likewise, Internal Security Forces are tied down by deployments to hotspots around the country. This is a situation similar to that in Iraq, where the few quality units were constantly being run around the country and broke under the strain of a concerted attack by the Islamic State. That being said, it’s not nearly as dire as what the Iraqi army has faced.
Lebanon’s situation bears some resemblance to Iraq but, despite some serious problems, it is most certainly in a better position than Iraq. For one, it doesn’t have its own version of Nuri al-Maliki, which helps. Lebanon also doesn’t have its own version of the Kurdish Autonomous Region, which would protect its own area and then sit tight, leaving the rest of the country to its own fate. Most importantly, perhaps, is the fact that the Islamic State is so committed in Iraq and Syria that it might just not have the resources available to prosecute a significant military action against Lebanon. Lebanon’s security forces are stretched, but so are the forces of the new Caliphate.
Is Lebanon in a great position? No, but is it as vulnerable as Iraq? Again, no. As in Iraq, though, the answer to this latest problem for Lebanon lies as much in Syria as it does at home.
Garrett Khoury, a graduate of the George Washington University’s Elliot School of International Affairs and an MA Candidate at Tel Aviv University, is the Director of Research and Content for The Eastern Project. Garrett has previously worked with The Israel Project in Jerusalem and The American Task Force on the Western Sahara in Washington, DC.
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