Reuters

Efforts to secure the release of Lebanese soldiers and policemen held captive by the Nusra Front have been obstructed by last minute demands from the Syrian al Qaeda-linked group, the head of a Lebanese security agency was quoted as saying on Monday.

Major General Abbas Ibrahim, head of General Security, told al Joumhouria newspaper the government had fulfilled all its commitments to secure their release. The men were expected to be released over the weekend in a deal that would include the release of a number of Islamist prisoners jailed in Lebanon.

The security personnel were taken captive in August 2014 during an incursion from by fighters from the Nusra Front and Islamic State into the border town of Arsal. The authorities have been trying to negotiate the release with Qatari mediation.

Press TV.

The Lebanese Military has reportedly freed a number of militants with the al-Qaeda-affiliated al-Nusra Front in exchange for the Syria-based group to release over a dozen of the Lebanese soldiers it held captive in 2014.

According to media reports on Sunday, the Lebanese military swapped 16 al-Nusra militants with 16 of its soldiers, who had been in the militant group’s captivity since August 2014. The exchange took place in a district between the town of Baalbek and the village of Labweh, both located in Lebanon’s eastern Bekaa Province.

Lebanese forces had tightened security in the area before the exchange took place, the reports added.

Pamela Engel

Billboards, newsletters, radio stations, murals, big-screens, and pamphlets.

ISIS inundates the residents of its territory with propaganda that has become nearly impossible to escape.

It’s well-known that ISIS has been very successful in disseminating its propaganda online to recruit westerners to its self-proclaimed Islamic "caliphate," the swath of territory it controls in Iraq and Syria.

But ISIS also runs a very sophisticated operation within the caliphate itself to brainwash the population it rules. The group has set up "media points" in the cities it controls to maximize the exposure of its propaganda to the public.

The media points are surprisingly high-tech. People can can submit their own material or download media from machines that have built-in slots for SIM cards and flash drives. Large flat-screen TVs set up in public places show gruesome beheading videos alongside scenes of utopia. One activist from Raqqa, Syria compared the screens ISIS has placed in central areas of the city to Times Square in New York — highly visible and well-known to those who live there.

catholicherald.co.uk

The Church in Syria faces a “suicidal choice” of either exile or “living under the shadow of Islam”, one of Syria’s leading clerics has said.

In his pre-Christmas letter Maronite Archbishop Samir Nassar of Damascus spoke of the exodus of Christians from the country, much of which is under the control of Islamist groups like ISIS and the al-Qaeda-linked al-Nusra Front. He also spoke about the sense of hopelessness that pervades the country as it approaches its fifth Christmas at war.

In a letter the archbishop wrote that: “Since 2003 (the Iraq war) and especially since 2011 (Arab spring) the exodus of Christians from the east increases. Some reports give only ten years for the page to turn concerning Christianity in the Middle East. This seems to be a pessimistic view, but observed experience shows an alarming and growing emigration.

There is a consensus that Lebanon is a great location to pilot an idea, test it and then transition to an international market for growth.

fairobserver.com –

For a country that has defined and redefined itself through politics, religion, immigrations, emigrations and decades of war, you may wonder what it’s like starting a company in Lebanon.

“Surprisingly peaceful, given all that you hear in the media,” says David El Achkar, co-founder of Beirut-based Yellow, a tech startup aiming to make bitcoin payments more accessible across the Middle East.

If you set aside the sociopolitical factors beyond your control, you’re left with daily inconveniences of fragmented infrastructure like electricity cuts of up to six hours, regular water shortages in the summer and fall, and an average Internet speed of 3.11 Mbps; to put things slightly in perspective, estimates abound that doubling Lebanon’s Internet bandwidth could improve GDP by 0.6%.

The Lebanese army commander says camps that are home to refugees from neighboring Syria represent a growing security risk as potential hideouts for militants who have been prevented from using other areas to launch attacks and rig car bombs.

Natasha Bertrand

Russia is preparing to sanction Turkey in response to its downing of a Russian warplane earlier this week, Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev announced in a televised cabinet meeting on Thursday, according to the BBC.

"The government has been ordered to work out a system of response measures to this act of aggression in the economic and humanitarian spheres," which may include "limits or bans" on "foodstuffs, labor, and services from Turkish companies," Medvedev said.

The sanctions "could bite into more than $30 billion in trade ties between the two countries, as police here began seizing Turkish products and deporting Turkish businessmen," the Washington Post’s Moscow Correspondent, Andrew Roth, wrote on Thursday.

Separately, a group of 39 Turkish businessmen visiting Russia on tourist visas were detained by Russian authorities who accused them of making "false statements about their trip to the country," the Telegraph reported on Thursday.

This piece was originally published by Foreign Policy in Focus, November 20, 2015, http://fpif.org/after-paris-and-beirut-its-time-to-rein-in-saudi-arabia/

After the carnage in Paris, Western governments turned immediately to debating the usual tactics for "bringing the terrorists to justice." Should we employ drone strikes, they wonder? Boots on the ground? Police?

The much more important matter, however, is identifying and stopping the source of the nihilism, misogyny, and sectarian animus that’s found fertile breeding grounds in the civil wars of the Middle East. Unless the source is addressed, there will be an endless supply of terrorists wreaking havoc. And we in the West will continue wringing our hands and responding impulsively rather than strategically.

While virtually all Islamic scholars dispute the theological soundness of the ISIS ideology, the group’s roots lie in fundamentalist Sunni Islam, specifically the Wahhabi strain officially espoused by Saudi Arabia — our "ally" — which views Shiites as apostates and seeks to turn Islamic societies back to an intolerant (and imagined) medieval past where women are stoned for adultery and reporters are lashed. Since the 1970s, the Saudi government and its allied religious establishment have exported their extremist version of Sunni Islam around the world — all financed by their oil money.

iloubnan.com

Property consultants Cushman & Wakefield’s 2015 survey of the world’s most expensive streets in terms of rents for retail space ranked Beirut as the 48th most expensive retail location among 65 cities worldwide, the fourth most expensive city among seven cities in the Middle East & Africa region, and the third most expensive among five Arab cities, Byblos Bank ‘Lebanon This Week’ reported.

Each city is represented by its most expensive retail street. Beirut’s global rank rose by two spots from 50th place in the 2014 survey, while its regional rank was unchanged year-on-year. The study evaluated retail rental prices between June 2014 and June 2015 in over 500 locations in 65 countries around the world.