By Brooke Anderson The Daily Star

KAWEISHRA, Lebanon: The Turkish-language signs and red flags bearing white crescents and stars in this small mountainous village might make you think you’ve made a wrong turn. In fact, you’ve just entered the town of Kaweishra – Kavashra in Turkish – one of Lebanon’s few Turkmen villages.

“We’re the last Turkmen village where everyone still speaks Turkish,” Kaweishra mayor Mustafa Khodar says, sitting at the local Turkish restaurant Yildizlar, one of several local businesses inspired by his ancestral homeland.

BEIRUT: The Beirut Municipal Council’s first public hearing to discuss urban planning Wednesday ended in a heated debate over a controversial plan to build an underground parking lot in Ashrafieh’s Jesuit Park. Signs written in English welcomed members of the public to the “town hall meeting,” where council members presented a series of projects aimed […]

The State Department says all non-emergency workers who were ordered out of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut last month are being allowed to return to their jobs. The department told all non-essential U.S. personnel to leave Lebanon on Sept. 6 because of fears that an American-led strike on neighboring Syria would unleash more bloodshed in […]

BEIRUT: The administration of the Beirut International Film Festival announced in a Thursday press release that Lebanon’s censor has denied permission to screen the Lebanese short “Wahibatouka al-Moutaa” (“I Offered You Pleasure”) and the French feature “L’Inconnu du Lac” (Stranger by the Lake). The 13th edition of the festival commenced Wednesday evening and will close […]

Big on promises but light on details, the Beirut Municipality unveiled numerous plans to improve the city Wednesday evening at a town hall meeting open to professionals by invitation only. Despite the hand-picked crowd of around 70 people, disputes still arose, but city council members showed little will to back down on two particularly controversial […]

The United States Capitol was placed on lockdown Thursday afternoon after a woman tried to ram a car into the White House gate, was chased by Secret Service and exchanged shots with police, sources said. The suspect — who sources said had a child in the car — was shot and killed, and a shelter-in-place […]

An obligation to the fallen, the survivors and the families involved in the 1983 bombing in Beirut, Lebanon. Tuesday, at the Veterans of Foreign Wars post in Swansboro, Doolittle began a daily 12.5-mile walk in and around Jacksonville — and he will continue over the next 22 days, ending at Lejeune Memorial Gardens on Oct. […]

BEIRUT — Um Ali is one of more than a million Syrians who have fled the country since 2011, when the uprising against President Bashar al-Assad began. She left Aleppo with her husband and son four months ago to join her sister, mother and other family in Lebanon. Her son had just turned 18 — […]

By BEN HUBBARD

BEIRUT, Lebanon — Fighters from the fastest-growing Qaeda franchise in Syria have repeatedly clashed with other rebel brigades, seizing towns, replacing crosses on churches with black flags and holding classes to teach Syrian children about the importance of battling “infidels,” meaning anyone who is not a Sunni Muslim. Since the group, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, announced its presence in Syria this year, it has emerged as the leading force for the foreign fighters streaming into the country, exploiting the chaos of the civil war as it tries to lay the groundwork for an Islamic state.

“They want to carve out a jihadi state or a jihadi territory and obviously anything above that is gravy, like overthrowing the Assad regime,” said Bruce Hoffman, director of the Center for Security Studies at Georgetown University. “I don’t think they have ambitions of taking over the entire country, although they’d be happy to.”

While the Syrian rebels initially welcomed the group as a powerful ally in the civil war against President Bashar al-Assad, many now resent it for putting its international jihadi agenda ahead of the fight to topple the government. Antigovernment activists say they detest the group’s brutality and imposition of strict social codes, and even other Islamist rebels say the struggle’s focus should remain on leadership change.

The tensions have set off frequent fighting between rebel groups that has undermined the effort to combat the government and could complicate efforts to dispose of Syria’s chemical weapons. An advance team from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons arrived in Damascus on Tuesday to discuss with Syrian officials the logistics of destroying the country’s chemical arsenal. Officials from the group said keeping its personnel safe during a raging civil war would be extremely difficult.

The rise of extremist groups has exacerbated Syria’s instability. ISIS has attacked rebel bases to capture supplies, and routed rebel groups last month to seize control of Azaz, a strategic city near the Turkish border, leading to a tense cease-fire. Last week, Qaeda fighters tried to storm a village in Idlib Province to kidnap some rebels, leaving 20 dead from both sides, including the jihadis’ Libyan commander.

Security services on Tuesday arrested four Lebanese citizens on suspicion of involvement in the case of people smuggling to Australia via Indonesia and Malaysia, state-run National News Agency reported. “Four Lebanese, some of whom hail from Akkar, have been arrested for interrogation over possible involvement in the activities of people smuggling between Lebanon, Malaysia, Indonesia […]