BEIRUT: Khalid Hmayyed, the man whose arrest sparked recent clashes between the Lebanese military and gunmen in the eastern town of Arsal, was a member of Jabhat al-Nusra (Nusra Front), a militant Islamist group with ties to Al-Qaeda, the head of Army Intelligence said late Monday.   “The wanted man was very dangerous: a […]

  The Bulgarian government said Tuesday that Hizbullah was behind a bomb attack in July that killed five Israeli tourists and one Bulgarian. "We have information on financing and membership of Hizbullah for two people including the bomber," Interior Minister Tsvetan Tsvetanov told reporters. "We have well-grounded reasons to suggest that the two were members of the […]

  Again and again, the nettle of civil marriage has poked through to Lebanon’s public sphere, and again and again, politicians have failed to grasp it. The past few weeks have been no exception. Calls for a large rally in Beirut yesterday afternoon in favour of civil marriage were merely the culmination of weeks of […]

  BEIRUT: Lebanon issued Monday an arrest warrant in absentia for Syrian general Ali Mamlouk for his alleged involvement in a plot to carry out terrorist attacks in Lebanon. Investigative Judge Riad Abu Ghayda referred the file to Military Prosecutor Saqr Saqr after completion of the investigation, judicial sources told The Daily Star.   They said […]

  Maronite Patriarch Beshara al-Rahi condemned on Sunday the recent clash in the Bekaa town of Arsal that left two army officers dead.   He said during his Sunday sermon: “We hold political powers responsible for their deaths due to their covering up of such assaults against the army and security forces.” Furthermore, he added: “They […]

  President Michel Suleiman on Sunday said that “no one should harbor armed men,” stressing that the killers of Major Pierre Bashaalani and First Sergeant Ibrahim Zahraman “will be punished.” “The state and the army must come first and we hope that justice will be served and the criminals will be arrested,” Suleiman said from the […]

Much like the air campaign against Hamas targets inside the Gaza strip, Israel’s airstrike in Syria looks like a well-timed tactical move—and the confusing media reports regarding the attack may be part of the plan.The Jerusalem Post reports that a Western diplomatic source told Iraqi daily Azzaman that the attack took place more than 48 hours before it was leaked by Israel Furthermore, the source said the reports about a strike on a convoy carrying weapons into Lebanon were probably meant to divert attention away from the operation’s main objective: To use F-16 aircraft to fire at least eight guided missiles at a military research center near Damascus.

On Wednesday U.S. officials — who said they were given forewarning of the strike — told The Wall Street Journal and other outlets that the Israelis were targeting a convoy of trucks allegedly carrying Russian-made SA-17 missiles to Hezbollah. Syria insisted that the reports about the convoy attack were "baseless," and that the real target was a military research center in Jamraya, which lies about three miles from Damascus and eight miles from the Lebanese border.

Maj. Gen. Adnan Salo, a former head of the chemical weapons unit in the Syrian Army who defected and is now in Turkey, told The New York Times that the complex produces both conventional and chemical weapons. The Azzaman source said that the complex is heavily fortified and houses experts from Russia and has been guarded for years by at least three thousand Iranian Revolutionary Guards, adding that the Guards suffered heavy casualties in the strike. The Syrian rebel commander in the Damascus area told Reuters that rebels attacked the facility with "six 120 millimeter mortars" at about the same time that Israeli planes bombed the convoy. But there has been no confirmation of the convoy attack besides unnamed diplomatic and rebel sources saying it occurred three miles south of where the main Damascus-Beirut highway crosses the border into Lebanon.