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Can Canada help a besieged town in Lebanon resist Daesh?

adminJanuary 29, 2017UncategorisedComments are off for this post

By Corbett Hancey from thestar.com

ARSAL, LEBANON—A
frigid wind rips across the mountaintop as Col. Ahmed Assir, a commander
in the Lebanese Army’s Ninth Infantry Brigade, peers into the valley
below. The restive town of Arsal lies at the bottom, inside an army
cordon set up two years ago after a brief Daesh takeover. I
ask him where the Daesh fighters are now. He points to the snow-capped
mountains on the other side of the town that form Lebanon’s border with Syria. It’s a few kilometres away. “It’s empty,” he replies. “They can have it. Like dogs.” He’s talking tough, but he’s also begrudgingly acknowledging the jihadists control Lebanese territory. I’m
travelling with the Ninth Brigade around Arsal, on Lebanon’s
mountainous northeastern border with Syria. In August 2014, fighters
from Daesh — also known as ISIS and ISIL —
and the formerly al Qaeda-linked Jabhat Fateh al-Sham stormed out of
the mountains and overran the town, winning a stunning victory.

But
it was short-lived. During five days of fierce fighting, the army
wrested back control. In the end, 17 soldiers, dozens of militants and
at least 42 civilians were dead. The
defeated fighters were pushed out, but they didn’t go far. Thousands of
them dug into the outskirts of town, taking refuge in the caves and
natural defences of the mountains between here and the Syrian border. The
battle came with another cost: the jihadists kidnapped 29 Lebanese
police officers and soldiers on their way out. Four have since been
executed; several are still being held. Last February, then-foreign affairs minister
Stéphane Dion announced a Canadian mission to stabilize Lebanon. He
warned it was at a “tipping point” and needed Canadian help to avoid
collapse as it struggles with the pressures of the Syrian civil war next
door. It is part of Canada’s revamped mission to counter Daesh, put in
motion after Canada pulled out of airstrikes against the group when
Justin Trudeau came to power.

So far
Lebanon has weathered the storm, but containing Syria’s chaos is an
ongoing struggle. There have been bombings, arrests of jihadist leaders
and foiled terror plots, all linked to Daesh. As state infrastructure
buckles under the enormous strain of the refugee influx, Lebanon’s warm
welcome is cooling. One in four people in Lebanon are now Syrian
refugees. Foreign aid has poured in to ease
the burden. But against the towering needs of Syria’s displaced, the
response falls short. In an interview, UNICEF’s chief of field
operations for Lebanon said that as of November — almost year’s end —
just 50 to 60 per cent of the group’s annual appeal had been funded.

Canada’s
contribution is a $1.6-billion development and security package (spread
over three years) for Lebanon and Jordan — another Mideast ally deemed
at risk of collapse. Signs of the crisis
are on full display in Arsal. Originally home to some 30,000 people, it
now hosts an additional 60,000 to 90,000 Syrian refugees. Looking down
from the army position in the mountains, clusters of white refugee tents
dominate the town. One of Canada’s
principal aims in Lebanon is to promote “social cohesion” between Syrian
refugees and their Lebanese hosts. But with refugees vastly
outnumbering locals in Arsal, and a widely held belief that refugees are
sheltering jihadi fighters, the relationship has coarsened. Last summer
the municipality imposed a curfew requiring refugees to stay inside
between 10 p.m. and 7 a.m.

By Harry Enten

Donald Trump signed a wide-ranging executive order on Friday that resets the United States’ immigration and refugee programs. The policy bars immigrants from seven heavily Muslim countries from entering the U.S. for 90 days, including people with green cards. It bans all
refugees from entering the U.S. for 120 days, and indefinitely bans
Syrian refugees. And it cuts the number of refugees the U.S. will accept
overall in 2017. (For a more detailed rundown, read here.)

The scope of Trump’s executive order is such that we’re largely in
uncharted waters. Past polls are only so useful, as most of them did not
ask about actions as broad as the ones Trump undertook. This isn’t like
same-sex marriage, or other more straightforward yes-no issues that
have been polled for years. I’d be suspect of anyone claiming it’s clear
which way public support will go on Trump’s actions — at least until we
get more polling.

Slight differences in framing and question wording can also have big
effects on how well immigration, refugee and terrorism policies poll.
Whether Trump’s executive order is viewed in humanitarian terms or (as
the Trump administration has tried to frame it) in the context of
counterterrorism could go a long way towards determining how much the
public supports it.

In the meantime, here’s what we do know:

1. In the context of terrorism, at least a plurality of Americans are OK with immigration bans.

The Trump administration has argued that this is not a ban on Muslims. Rather, they’ll likely argue, as the order itself does,
that the policies are meant “to protect the American people from
terrorist attacks by foreign nationals admitted to the United States.”
It’s not at all clear these policies will actually improve national security, but the American people have been more supportive of immigration restrictions in the name of counterterrorism. In a Quinnipiac University poll
conducted in January, 48 percent of voters supported “suspending
immigration from ‘terror prone’ regions, even if it means turning away
refugees from those regions.” Forty-two percent were opposed. And a
December Politico/Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health poll
found 50 percent of Americans were in favor of “banning future
immigration from regions where there are active terrorist groups.”

2. But a majority of Americans oppose a religion-based immigration ban.

Just 41 percent of Americans supported a temporary ban on Muslims
entering the country who are not U.S. citizens, according to an August
2016 ABC News/Washington Post poll. A slight majority (52 percent) were opposed. A July CBS News/New York Times survey, which asked a similar question, found only 35 percent of voters thought the U.S. should temporarily ban Muslim immigration.