Region

BAGHDAD — Seven bombs ripped through Baghdad killing seven people Thursday, hours after American lawmakers criticised the slow pace of political reconciliation in Iraq which they said was stoking the worsening violence.

The blasts, which mostly targeted Shiite-majority neighbourhoods of the capital, come amid the country’s deadliest protracted period of unrest since 2008 as security forces grapple with near-daily attacks and battle militants in Anbar province.

Diplomats have called for the Shiite-led government to do more to reach out to the disaffected Sunni Arab minority, but with a general election looming in April, Prime Minister Nouri Al Maliki has taken a hard line.

There has been no let-up in the bloodshed, with seven bombs going off across Baghdad from around noon (0900 GMT), while militants also mounted a massive, though ultimately abortive, assault on a jail in northern Iraq.

The blasts in the capital killed at least seven people and wounded more than 40, security and medical officials said.

Four of the neighbourhoods hit are populated mostly by Iraq’s Shiite majority. The other three bombs went off in commercial districts in the centre of Baghdad.

The blasts came a day after 33 people were killed in the capital, 25 of them in a series of bombings near the heavily fortified Green Zone, which is home to parliament, the prime minister’s office and the US and British embassies.

No one immediately claimed responsibility for the latest attacks, but Sunni militant groups, including the jihadist Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), have claimed previous bombing campaigns targeting Shiites in the capital.

Elsewhere in Iraq on Thursday, a car bomb near a Kurdish political party’s offices killed one person in Tuz Khurmatu, while a police general and his bodyguard were wounded by a bombing in Baqouba.

In Nineveh province in the north, militants mounted a massive assault on Badush Prison late on Wednesday, reminiscent of twin attacks on jails near Baghdad last July that succeeded in freeing dozens of inmates.

The attempted prison break left one guard dead and 14 wounded, and involved mortar fire as a riot broke out inside the jail, but was ultimately repulsed, the justice ministry said.

Meanwhile, US House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Ed Royce said on Wednesday that Maliki’s failure to do more to address Sunni grievances had allowed ISIL to exploit the minority community’s “alienation” to sharply step up its attacks.

“As head of state, while he may not be up to it, Maliki must take steps to lead Iraq to a post-sectarian era,” Royce said.

“Al Qaeda has become very skilled at exploiting this sectarian rift, and Maliki’s power grab has given them much ammunition.”

US Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Iraq and Iran Brett McGurk insisted Maliki had made changes since he visited Washington in November and “got a very direct message” from President Barack Obama on “enlisting the Sunnis into the fight”.

ISIL has also been fighting security forces in Anbar, a mostly Sunni desert region bordering Syria where militants have held parts of Ramadi and all of Fallujah for weeks.

Security forces and tribal auxiliaries have made slow progress in Ramadi but recaptured several neighbourhoods late Tuesday, an AFP journalist reported.

In Fallujah, however, security forces have largely stayed out of the city for fear that major incursions could spark high civilian casualties and heavy damage to property.

The city was a bastion of the Sunni insurgency following the 2003 US-led invasion, and American troops there fought some of the costliest battles since the Vietnam War.

Ahmad Abu Risha, a prominent tribal leader in the Sunni Awakening movement, which allied with US troops against Al Qaeda and now supports the government, said an attack on the city was imminent and has urged anti-government fighters to lay down their arms.

The standoff in Anbar has prompted more than 140,000 people to flee their homes, the UN refugee agency said, describing it as the worst displacement in Iraq since the peak of sectarian fighting between 2006 and 2008.

BEIRUT/UNITED NATIONS — The United Nations on Thursday welcomed reports that an agreement had been reached to allow the evacuation of civilians from the besieged Syrian city of Homs and for aid to be delivered, a UN spokesperson said.

The United Nations made clear that it was not a party to the deal and while it was ready to send in aid, it did not yet have the go-ahead from the government and opposition sides in Syria’s war to move on the reported agreement.

“The United Nations and humanitarian partners had pre-positioned food, medical and other basic supplies on the outskirts of Homs ready for immediate delivery as soon as the green light was given by the parties for safe passage,” UN spokesperson Farhan Haq said in a statement.

Syria earlier said it reached a deal to allow “innocent” civilians to leave the rebel-held old city of Homs, potentially the first positive result after deadlocked peace talks in Switzerland last week.

The government’s announcement came hours after rebels declared a new offensive in the northern province of Aleppo, in response to an escalated air assault by government forces trying to recapture territory and drive residents out of opposition-held areas.

President Bashar Assad’s forces have used siege tactics to surround and try to starve out rebels holding strategic areas, a technique increasingly copied by rebels as well.

The siege of the old city of Homs has gone on for over a year, and activists say 2,500 people are trapped inside the area struggling with hunger and malnourishment. They represent only a small fraction of besieged Syrians across the country in desperate need of aid.

“The agreement will allow innocent civilians surrounded in the neighbourhoods of Old Homs — among them women and children, the wounded and the elderly — an opportunity to leave as soon as the necessary arrangements [made], in addition to offering them humanitarian aid,” said a Syrian foreign ministry statement, cited on Syria TV.

“It will also allow in aid to civilians who choose to stay inside the old city.”

Delegates from Syria’s warring sides met face to face for the first time at the Geneva II peace conference last week and were unable to agree on anything, even a humanitarian deal for Homs that diplomats had hoped could be a relatively easy first step.

A second round of talks is scheduled for next week.

The government statement did not elaborate on who would be considered “innocent”.

Rebels have rejected similar offers to evacuate women and children in the past because of fear for the fate of any men left behind. Dozens of men disappeared after a similar deal reached in Mouadamiya, west of Damascus.

RIA news agency from Assad’s ally Russia quoted an unnamed official at Syria’s defence ministry saying rebel fighters were keeping civilians in the area as human shields.

“As for civilians, we are not holding them up or refusing them humanitarian aid but the terrorists are the problem,” it quoted the source as saying. 

“Terrorists are claiming that there are only civilians in the Old City who need humanitarian aid. In fact, it’s terrorists who are mainly there, including foreign militants, using small groups of civilians held as hostages.”

RIA said the evacuation of civilians and entrance of humanitarian aid were due to start on Friday morning, but that was not immediately confirmed by the United Nations.

Syria’s nearly three-year conflict began as peaceful protests against four decades of Assad family rule and devolved into an armed insurgency after a fierce security crackdown.

Now the major Arab state is in a full-scale civil war that has killed more than 130,000 people and forced over six million  — nearly a third of the population — to flee their homes.

In Aleppo, the Islamic Front, Syria’s largest Sunni Islamist rebel alliance, joined forces with the Jabhat Al Nusra, an Al Qaeda offshoot in Syria, to launch an assault dubbed “The just promise approaches”, a reference to a Koranic verse about Judgement Day.

Assad’s forces recently mounted a series of attacks on Aleppo city, once Syria’s business hub, using barrel bombs — oil drums or cylinders packed with explosives and metal fragments, dropped out of helicopters.

They are an indiscriminate weapon activists say is being used to push out civilians as the army tries to seize the initiative on the long-stalemated Aleppo battlefront.

“All military forces in their bases should head to the front lines, otherwise they will be questioned and held accountable,” a joint rebel statement said.

It warned residents near checkpoints and bases held by Syrian government forces to leave in the next 24 hours, saying the areas would be the insurgents’ main targets.

Forces loyal to Assad have been making small gains on rebel-held parts of Syria’s second city, advances which many opposition sources blame on weeks of rebel infighting that has killed more than 2,300 combatants.

The Islamic Front and some of its secular rebel allies are trying to oust an Al Qaeda splinter group, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, with whom they have ideological and territorial disputes.

Since government forces unleashed the barrel-bombing campaign on rebel-held Aleppo last week, residents have been leaving in droves to seek refuge in government-held parts of the divided city.

Others have fled to Turkey, where many have been held up at the border crossing as camps near Aleppo faced overcrowding.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said Jabhat Al Nusra fighters and the Islamist group Ahrar Al Sham had taken over a large part of Aleppo prison, freeing hundreds of prisoners and killing or wounding dozens of members of the security forces.

CAIRO — The Egyptian military on Thursday denied a report by a Kuwaiti daily claiming that its chief had made up his mind to run for president.

The military’s spokesperson said the nation’s top soldier will, if he decides to run for president, announce his intention in an address to the “glorious people of Egypt” — and not through a third party.

The spokesperson, Col. Ahmed Mohammed Ali, was responding to comments attributed by the Kuwaiti daily to Field Marshal Abdel-Fattah El Sisi, saying that he has decided to run for president.

Sisi is widely expected to run for president, but he has yet to announce his candidacy. Speculations are rife in Egypt that he will do so in a televised address to the nation later this month.

The spokesperson insisted that what Kuwait’s Al Seyassah newspaper attributed to Sisi was the daily’s own “interpretation” and not “direct comments” by the military chief. Ali’s statement was posted on his official Facebook page.

Sisi, 59, led the popularly backed “military coup” in July that ousted Egypt’s Islamist president Mohamed Morsi. 

Sisi’s popularity has since soared, with many Egyptians now viewing him as a saviour and demanding that he run for president. 

Presidential elections are expected in the spring, followed by parliamentary elections. Thousands of posters bearing Sisi’s image already have sprung up across Egypt and much of the media treats his victory as a foregone conclusion.

If Sisi runs, the career infantry officer is likely to win a landslide victory, but he will then face the unenviable task of finding remedies to a multitude of pressing problems, from a terrorist campaign by Islamic militants in the strategic Sinai Peninsula and tenuous security to a deepening economic crisis and persistent street protests by Morsi’s supporters.

The interim government’s finance minister, in comments to reporters on Thursday, underlined some of the more pressing economic problems facing Egypt and explained that raising taxes was essential to fund state services like education and healthcare.

Ahmed Galal, the minister, said the government spends a staggering 130 billion Egyptian pounds, or nearly $1.9 billion, every year on fuel subsidies so that oil products are sold at well below world prices. He said a comprehensive plan to gradually reduce fuel subsides has been put together but gave no details.

Sisi himself has offered a glimpse on his possible economic plans, saying in leaked videos that mobile phone users should pay for incoming calls as well as the ones they make and that no state service should be offered to the public at below cost, suggesting that he disapproves of a decades-old system under which successive governments were burdened by a heavy subsidies bill to provide Egyptians with cheap basic items like bread, fuel and sugar.

In a separate development, authorities on Thursday set February 19 as the starting date for the trial of ousted president Hosni Mubarak and his two sons on charges that they had illegally seized 125 million pounds of state funds earmarked for the maintenance of presidential palaces.

Mubarak was ousted by a popular uprising in 2011. 

He was detained along with his sons — wealthy businessman Alaa and one-time heir apparent Gamal — in April that year. 

Mubarak and his security chief were convicted and sentenced to life in prison in June 2012 for the killing of protesters in the 2011 uprising that led to his ouster. Their conviction was overturned and they are now being tried again.

Alaa and Gamal were acquitted of corruption charges in the same trial, but the prosecution successfully appealed the verdict and they are being retried in the same case as their father’s.

The Mubarak sons have been in detention since April 2011. Their father was ordered released last year, but he has since been placed under “house arrest” in a Nile-side military hospital in a southern Cairo suburb.

GAZA CITY — Hemmed in by Israeli and Egyptian blockades, Gaza is plagued by long and frequent power blackouts, prompting some residents to try to lighten the mood with dark humour.

Gaza ensemble Tashweesh — Arabic for “interference” — has posted on YouTube a parody of a truck ad in which Belgian action film star Jean-Claude Van Damme does the splits between two moving lorries.

In the Gaza spoof, actor Mahmud Zouaiter, 28, repeats the feat, this time astride two family cars being pushed down a road in the coastal Palestinian territory, where empty fuel tanks are commonplace because of chronic fuel shortages.

“Van Damme is not necessarily better than me, but unfortunately there is no petrol in town,” Zouaiter says in the clip’s narration.

“Electricity is cut off for 12 hours a day and the water stops flowing when there is no current [to pump it],” he adds. “I’d really like to have a shower.”

His video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a5LuoVzNCXM&list=PLDwn0qXLqH683tm8joIRjc0u5eVrckOkn) has so far attracted more than half a million hits.

Zouaiter, from Gaza’s Deir El Balah refugee camp, told AFP he chose to model his spoof on Van Damme, “who is known throughout the world, to send a message, because the world is responsible for the crisis in Gaza”.

Gaza has been under an Israeli blockade since 2006, when Palestinian fighters kidnapped a soldier in a cross-border raid. 

The closures were tightened after Hamas took over a year later, with crippling restrictions imposed on movement as well as the import and export of goods.

Supplies smuggled in from neighbouring Egypt initially eased the situation, but much of the smuggling tunnels were destroyed following the military’s July 2013 overthrow of Islamist president Mohamed Morsi, seen as a Hamas ally.

Formed last May, Tashweesh’s six volunteer members have been creating scripts, sketches and video clips for official Palestine TV with a camera imported from Egypt for 6,000 shekels ($1,700), Zouaiter said.

Blending satire, social commentary and agitprop, the group has so far been tolerated by the territory’s Islamist Hamas rulers, and through social media it is creating a buzz beyond the strip’s narrow confines.

“We weep and we joke at the same time,” said Zouaiter, a trained nurse and graduate of Arabic and communications.

“The Gaza crisis pushes us to be creative. We don’t have material things but we have our brains and we don’t need money to come up with good ideas,” he said.

“We speak for all Palestinians, especially the young. Comedy is a way of expressing their frustration, to make peace,” he added.

‘A new colour’ 

Zouaiter is not the only one in Gaza using black humour, which he likens to a “new colour” in the tragic Palestinian canvas, to rally his people and attract outside attention.

There is no shortage of subject matter.

Besides the blockades and the conflict with Israel, there are issues such as corruption, child labour, the plight of the handicapped, child marriages and exorbitant wedding costs.

“Here it’s best to be single to live well, and if you want to be rich, buy yourself a municipality!” quips Islam Ayub, a jovial Gaza comic, wedding singer and father of six.

In one of his songs, he makes fun of the shortage of cement in the territory, asking “What are we going to build our tombs with?”

“But there’s hope, we’re still here,” he says.

“For the first time in Gaza we can overcome all obstacles, all the checkpoints, and break the blockade thanks to new technology,” said Nabil Al Khatib, a scriptwriter and director of a TV production company who is close to Hamas.

“We don’t want to talk politics, even if we can’t completely ignore the politicians,” he said in an interview by candlelight during one of the strip’s regular power cuts.

“Everything is politics, even [earning] our bread, but in the end our message is humanitarian and art is a good vehicle.”

OCCUPIED JERUSALEM — Three Israeli settlers have been charged with carrying out so-called “price tag” attacks against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, the justice ministry said on Thursday.

It was the first time that charges have been pressed over acts of vandalism by Jewish extremists which were not directly related to government demolition of rogue settler outposts, local media said.

The three, from the Havat Gilad settler outpost in the northern West Bank, were reportedly the first to be interrogated by the Shin Bet internal security service under the provisions of a 2013 defence ministry directive defining perpetrators of price tag attacks as “members of an illegal organisation”.

They were charged on Wednesday for torching Palestinian-owned vehicles in the village of Farata, close to Havat Gilad, a justice ministry statement said.

“Price tag” is the euphemism for hate crimes that generally target Arabs.

Initially carried out against Palestinians in retaliation for state moves to dismantle unauthorised settler outposts, the attacks have become a much broader phenomenon targeting anyone seen as hostile to the settlers.

Perpetrators of the attacks have also targeted Muslim and Christian sites, as well as Arab property in Israel.

According to the charge sheet, the three men — aged 22, 23 and 35 — set fire to two vehicles and spray-painted stars of David on village walls in their November rampage.

SANAA — Shiite rebels battled pro-government tribes and Sunni Islamists close to the Yemeni capital through the night before a fragile truce was restored on Thursday, tribal sources said.

The rebels have been pushing out from their stronghold in the mountains of the far north to other Zaidi Shiite majority areas nearer the capital in a bid to expand their hoped-for autonomous unit in a promised federal Yemen.

But they have met resistance from Zaidi tribes loyal to the historic leading family of the huge Hashid confederation and their Sunni Islamist allies in the Islah party.

The fighting erupted late Wednesday in the Arhab district — just 35 kilometres north of the capital and close to Sanaa international airport — shattering a fledgling truce, a tribal chief said.

The tribal chief accused the rebels of starting the fighting, breaking the truce agreed after they made major advances, overrunning the home base of Al Ahmar clan, the Hashid’s increasingly contested leading family, at the weekend.

But the rebels, known as Houthis from the name of their leading family, or Ansarullah (Partisans of God), accused Islah party militia of breaking the agreement.

“The truce that was agreed on Saturday between the Houthis and the tribes of Arhab has collapsed due to a broad offensive by the Houthis,” the tribal chief said, asking not to be identified.

But in a statement on their website, the rebels accused Islah Party militia of “breaching the agreement and rejecting all forms of mediation” by launching an attack on the Zu Sulaiman area north of Sanaa “with all kinds of weapons”.

The rebels also accused Islah gunmen of attacking a convoy of mediators sent to the area by President Abdrabuh Mansur Hadi last week and of killing a number of their guards.

The mediators managed to broker a halt to the fighting early on Thursday and were working on cementing the truce, tribal sources said.

TRIPOLI — A new dispute is brewing in unrest-riddled Libya over a decision by its highest, but transitional, political authority to extend its mandate beyond February 7, with demonstrations called for this week.

Leading a transition that has proved chaotic since the 2011 toppling of the country’s longtime leader Muammar Qadhafi, the General National Congress (GNC) was elected in July 2012 for a term of 18 months.

Its mission was to prepare for polling to form a commission tasked with drawing up a new constitution and to organise a general election.

But the GNC on Monday ratified a decision to extend its mandate to December 2014, despite the opposition of a large segment of the population critical of its inability to halt Libya’s slide into lawlessness and chaos.

The congress has adopted a new roadmap and timetable, which allow for two scenarios.

A general election is to be held at the end of the year if the constitutional body adopts a new charter within four months of its own election set for February 20.

But if the commission deems itself with 60 days incapable of completing the job, a Plan B allows for it to call for immediate presidential and legislative polls for a fresh period of 18 months.

The extension of the GNC mandate has raised the hackles of civil society organisations and political groups, and protests have already been held in several towns to demand the congress be dissolved.

A “No Extension” campaign has been launched in the troubled eastern city of Benghazi, and more demonstrations are called for Friday, on the date the GNC’s mandate was to have expired.

Fears have risen of clashes between rival armed groups.

The Operations Cell of Revolutionaries, an Islamist militia of ex-rebels said to be close to the army, has lined up behind the GNC, and the powerful armed groups of Misrata have warned that the “Congress is a red line”.

But rival former rebel fighters in Zintan, an influential force in post-Qadhafi Libya, have vowed to protect any popular movement against the GNC.

The political class is also divided, between Islamist supporters of the congress and the liberal National Forces Alliance, which has slammed the extension as undemocratic even though its deputies voted in favour.

GNC spokesman Omar Hmeidan said the population had the right to express its opposition but stressed that the country would have been left in a “security vacuum” if the congress were scrapped without an alternative body taking its place.

The political bickering comes at a time of uncertainty over the fate of Prime Minister Ali Zeidan, although he defeated a confidence vote against his government.

“The GNC’s decision is a farce intended to indirectly prolong its mandate,” said political activist Abu Bakar al-Badri. “About 40 initiatives were presented to the congress these past few days to find a way out of the crisis, and it paid no attention.”

In July 2012, after more than 40 years under the rule of dictator Qadhafi, Libya chose the GNC in its first-ever elections.

TUNIS — Tunisians on Thursday marked 12 turbulent months since the assassination of opposition politician Chokri Belaid, with his family still demanding to know what happened despite the alleged assassin being shot dead this week.

The charismatic leftist and virulent critic of the Islamist party Ennahda, then in power, was gunned down outside his Tunis home on February 6, 2013.

The political assassination, the first of two by suspected jihadists last year, came amid Islamist violence rocking the country — and the region — since the 2011 revolution that toppled a decades-old dictatorship and touched off the Arab Spring.

Belaid’s death triggered massive anti-government protests and a political crisis from which Tunisia has only now started to emerge, with the adoption of a consensus constitution in January.

Some 200 people gathered Thursday at the site where he was slain to commemorate the anniversary.

A large poster asked the question that troubles many Tunisians despite an announcement this week that Kamel qadhgadhi, his alleged assassin, had died in a police shootout.

“Who killed Chokri Belaid?”

The authorities has put the blame on Salafist group Ansar Al Sharia, suspected of links to Al Qaeda that has since been designated a terrorist organisation but which says it rejects violence.

On Tuesday, Interior Minister Lotfi Ben Jeddou said Gadhgadhi was among seven suspects killed during the 20-hour seige of a house in the Raoued district of the capital.

“[It’s] the best present that we could give Tunisians” on the anniversary of Belaid’s murder, said Ben Jeddou.

But the family of the murdered politician, who at the time blamed his death on the Ennahda Party, spurned the Islamist minister’s comments.

“The truth has not been revealed,” Belaid’s widow Basma Khalfaoui told AFP at Thursday’s commemoration.

While Gadhgadhi may have pulled the trigger, “there are other suspects. I hope they won’t be killed too,” she said.

Belaid’s brother, Abdelmajid, had earlier made similar comments.

“We didn’t want Gadhgadhi to be killed and we are certainly not celebrating his death... We wanted him to be fairly tried,” he said.

“We want to know the whole truth. Gadhgadhi was not alone. There are other parties implicated and we hope they will be captured so that the truth is revealed.” 

‘Unfinished business’

Some newspapers called the militant’s death a turning point in the fight against armed jihadists but others, including popular French daily La Presse, were less confident.

“The glass is half empty and there is... unfinished business,” it said.

A group of lawyers were to hold a press conference Thursday on the state of the investigation into Belaid’s murder, with a candlelit vigil to take place later on Habib Bourguiba Avenue in central Tunis.

And a demonstration is planned at Belaid’s grave Saturday before a march into the city centre, to mark the anniversary of the politician’s funeral procession, which had been attended by tens of thousands and morphed into a mass anti-Ennahda rally.

Belaid’s murder was followed by an intensification of violence between security forces and jihadist groups.

Some 20 soldiers and police were killed last year, mainly in the Chaambi mountain region along the border with Algeria, and two suicide bombers targeted tourist resorts on the coast.

The political crisis, which deepened following the July 25 murder of another opposition politician, MP Mohamed Brahmi, threatened to derail Tunisia’s transition, amid rising social unrest, economic malaise and administrative deadlock.

But last month, following a hard-fought agreement between Ennahda and the opposition, the national assembly approved a new constitution, Ennahda stepped down and a technocratic government was sworn in tasked with leading the country to fresh elections.

“We’ve managed to partly resolve the political crisis. Let’s hope we will do better, but [this time] without blood,” said Basma Khalfaoui.

On Friday, a ceremony is planned in Tunis to celebrate the adoption of the new constitution, with French President Francois Hollande and European Council President Herman Van Rompuy among those due to attend.

BEIRUT — A string of recent bombings in Lebanon, many of them suicide attacks, has raised fears of a homegrown jihadist threat driven by the Syrian civil war across the border.

Since July, a series of 10 bomb blasts have hit Lebanon, six of them involving suicide bombers.

The attacks have been claimed by various jihadist groups, some of them linked to organisations fighting across the border in Syria, including Al Nusra Front in Lebanon, the Abdullah Azzam Brigades and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL).

The groups say they are targeting Lebanon’s Shiite Hizbollah movement for fighting in Syria alongside the regime.

A Lebanese military source, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the growth of jihadist groups was an inevitable result of the Syrian conflict.

“We were expecting it would spread here. If your neighbour’s house is on fire, it’s no surprise if your house catches on fire too,” he told AFP.

“Terrorism has begun, regardless of the reasons and causes,” he said.

The source said the different names of the groups meant little on the ground.

“Their ideology is the ideology of Al Qaeda, and Al Qaeda’s ideology is known for not accepting the other. All of these groups... feed on this ideology,” he said.

Lebanon is no stranger to violence, with a 1975-1990 civil war that included a spate of bomb attacks against Western embassies and military targets, some carried out by suicide bombers from the Shiite Hizbollah movement.

Now the tactic has returned to haunt the group, as it has been adopted by Sunni militants bitterly opposed to Hizbollah’s decision to fight alongside Syrian President Bashar Assad against a Sunni-led rebellion.

“For the Al Qaeda jihadists, Lebanon provided their logistical needs for Syria. Once they became more powerful and had a supportive environment, they turned the country into a land of jihad,” the military source said.

Neighbourhoods considered Hizbollah strongholds have been bombed multiple times, with scores of civilians killed, and in August 2013 a double attack hit the Sunni town of Tripoli.

In an echo of the 2005 assassination of former prime minister Rafiq Hariri, an anti-Syrian political figure was killed in a bombing in downtown Beirut in December.

“Lebanon has witnessed an alarming increase in jihadi activities in recent months,” said Rafael Lefevre, a visiting fellow at the Carnegie Middle East Centre.

“The turning point came last April when Hizbollah recognised [publicly] that it was sending fighters to help the Syrian regime crush the rebels.”

He said Lebanon was not yet a major jihadist base, in part because its unique religious diversity “makes the overwhelming majority of its population wary of extremism”.

But the country is attractive to jihadists “because the state security apparatus is relatively weak, which enables groups to carry out a range of underground activities.”

And he said there was potential recruiting ground in Lebanon because of the “growing number of people disaffected with the Lebanese state, especially in the poverty belts of major urban areas.”

The assessment is born out by reports that jihadist groups are particularly active in the impoverished parts of northern Tripoli as well as the Ain Al Helweh Palestinian refugee camp.

On January 25, a previously unknown figure by the name of Abu Sayyaf Al Ansari announced the formation of the Lebanese branch of ISIL, which is fighting in Syria.

He said the announcement was made from Tripoli, which is already the scene of regular clashes between Sunni residents of the Bab Al Tebbaneh district and Alawite residents of neighbouring Jabal Mohsen, who share the same Shiite offshoot faith of Assad.

Local sources say Abu Sayyaf is unknown to security services, religious figures or Salafist groups in Tripoli, but the military source acknowledged a growing jihadist presence there.

“There are reports of Al Qaeda supporters and recently of the formation of ISIL in the city involving Lebanese, Syrians and some Palestinians from the camps, but so far these groups have no bases or organisational structures,” he said.

Ties between Lebanese citizens and groups fighting the Syrian regime already exist, with a unknown number of Sunni Lebanese crossing the border to fight alongside rebel groups.

The military source said Al Nusra Front, Al Qaeda’s official branch in Syria, had been present in Lebanon since the beginning of the conflict.

And he confirmed that the so-called Al Nusra Front in Lebanon was linked to its Syrian counterpart.

Lefevre warned that “sporadic jihadi attacks in Lebanon will continue until a settlement between regime and opposition is found in Syria which will facilitate Hizbollah’s withdrawal”.

But the military source warned that even an end to the conflict in Syria would be unlikely to halt jihadism in Lebanon, calling it “an issue that will take years”.