BEIRUT
— Lebanese security forces arrested 17 men in two Beirut hotels on
Friday on suspicion that they were plotting to assassinate a prominent
Lebanese Shiite leader, a government official said, describing an attack
that could inflame sectarian conflict across the Middle East.
Investigators
are exploring whether the men intended to kill Nabih Berri, the speaker
of Parliament, who has been a leading Shiite political figure in
Lebanon for decades, the official said, speaking on the condition of
anonymity under government rules. Intelligence reports identified the
men as members of a newly established militant cell in Beirut that was
believed to include foreigners, the official said, adding that there
were suspicions that they belonged to the Islamic State in Iraq and
Syria, the Sunni militant group known as ISIS.
Such
a plot would be a bold and dangerous escalation by ISIS, which wields
extremist and sectarian ideology and brutal tactics in its drive to
erase the existing nations in the region and create a fundamentalist
Islamic caliphate in their place. The group’s insurgent fighters, who
already control large parts of northeastern Syria, swept across northern
Iraq last week, slaughtering captured Shiite soldiers and proudly
broadcasting the killings on the Internet.
Spreading
their attacks to Lebanon, the region’s most religiously diverse
country, could intensify the destabilizing sectarian conflict. The most
powerful force in the country is Hezbollah, the Shiite militant group
and political party, which is allied both with Mr. Berri’s Amal movement
and with President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, where the chaos of a
three-year insurgency has provided fertile ground for ISIS to grow.
Hezbollah
has provided Mr. Assad with crucial military help against his armed
opponents, fighting mainly in parts of Syria near the Lebanese border
and around Damascus, the Syrian capital; the presence of ISIS in those
areas is far smaller than in the north and eastern regions bordering
Iraq.
ISIS
has threatened for months to expand its campaign into Lebanon, and many
Lebanese are worried that the group, flush with its swift gains in
Iraq, will turn next to disrupting the relative calm in the country, or
that imitators could multiply in pockets of Sunni militancy in the
northern city of Tripoli and elsewhere.
Graphic
In Iraq Crisis, a Tangle of Alliances and Enmities
The major players in the Iraq and Syria crisis are often
both allies and antagonists, working together on one front on one day
and at cross-purposes the next.
Lebanon
is bursting with more than one million refugees from Syria, and is
deeply divided over the civil war there, especially over Hezbollah’s
involvement. The group says it sent its fighters to intervene on Mr.
Assad’s side to defend against the extremism that threatens the region.
Its main Sunni rivals in Lebanon, the Future Movement, say that
Hezbollah has made the sectarian conflict in the region worse by helping
to crush an uprising by Syria’s Sunni majority. While Lebanese
militants have joined either side in Syria, political leaders and
security officials of all stripes here have tried to keep the fighting
from spreading back into Lebanon.
On
Friday, a suicide attacker detonated a car bomb at a checkpoint in
Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley, killing a security officer and wounding more
than 20 people. The attack was the first car bombing in the country in
nearly three months. Coupled with the arrests in Beirut, the attack in
the Bekaa sent ripples of anxiety through a country that had been
cautiously enjoying a respite.
Sunni
militant groups detonated a number of car bombs in Hezbollah-dominated
areas over the past year, killing scores of civilians, but there had
been no attacks since March, when Hezbollah and the Syrian Army drove
insurgents out of much of the area along the Syrian-Lebanese border.
Graphic
The Iraq-ISIS Conflict in Maps, Photos and Video
A visual guide to the crisis in northern Iraq, updated daily.
In
the raid on Friday, security forces blocked off numerous streets in
Hamra, the main commercial district of West Beirut, and surrounded the
Napoleon Hotel. In the narrow streets outside the hotel, lined with
shops, bars and apartments, dozens of officers cleared pedestrians off
the sidewalks and then led 14 men out with their heads covered. Three
more men were arrested at the Casa D’Or hotel a short distance away.
Lebanese
news channels reported that most of the suspects were foreigners from
Syria, Iraq, Pakistan or elsewhere. The government official said that
the men’s identities were still being checked, and declined to say
whether any of them were Lebanese.
Earlier
in the day, Mr. Berri’s political party, the Amal movement, canceled a
conference that was to be held at a United Nations building in downtown
Beirut, and cited security concerns as the reason.
The
government official denied local reports that the car bomb in the Bekaa
Valley on Friday was aimed at Maj. Gen. Abbas Ibrahim, the head of
Lebanon’s general security service, which is seen as closer to Hezbollah
than the country’s other security agencies are. He said the police saw
and followed a suspicious vehicle headed toward Beirut, causing the
driver to change course; when the vehicle was stopped at a checkpoint,
the bomb went off, he said.
The
official said the arrests in Beirut were made by a joint task force
from the general security service and from the intelligence arm of the
national police, which is seen as closer to the Future Movement. He said
the agencies acted preemptively to prevent worse violence, and that
given the degree of regional chaos surrounding Lebanon, they are
performing well.
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