Will The Terrorists Please Reveal Themselves?

"It was a double martyrdom operation by two of the Sunni heroes of Lebanon. God bless them."
Twitter feed, Sheikh Sirajeddine Zuraiqat, Abdullah Azzam brigades

"Shards of glass fell around me. I saw residents falling from their balconies, which crumbled beneath them. I saw at least seven bodies, some of them completely burnt."
Rabia Istanbuli, Beirut

"This is related to the Syrian war. There is chaos there and the extremist jihadists want to bring the chaos here."
Wasfi Berri, relative of Nabih Berri, leader Shiite Amal party, Lebanon

Soldiers, policemen and medical personnel gather at the site of explosions near the Iranian embassy in Beirut November 19, 2013. (Reuters / Hasan Shaaban)

And if any country knows all about chaos, atrocities, mass murder and tribal, sectarian antipathies of vicious brutishness, Lebanon is that country. Once a role model for the entire Middle East, the country became transformed forever with the influx of Palestinian refugees who settled there after Black September when Jordan's King Hussein had enough of their presence and the cross-border raids into Israel by Yasser Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organization.

Jordan's liberation of the Sword of Damocles hanging over its future with the State of Israel, was Lebanon's undoing. The Lebanese were generous in their welcome of the Palestinians and the Palestinians were voracious in their need for security and stability while harbouring an ongoing aspiration to return to the Palestine that they had left at the assurance of invading Arab armies prepared to destroy Israel and reunite the Arab Palestinians to the land.

The ensuring invasions by Israel's military, by Syria's military, by Iran's military and United Nations peacekeepers all led to a horribly fractious war with Israel intent on having Yasser Arafat and the PLO removed once again from their perch enabling cross-border attacks into Israel, and the internal fractious factional infighting of the Lebanese themselves, discovering that the Shia, Sunni, Kurd and Christians had their clear agendas excluding their opponents.

The civil war that ensued left Lebanon a wan spectre of its once-glorious nationhood. Bitter at the presence of Palestinians. The Iranian Revolution spawned the rise of Hezbollah, created by, trained by and armed by Iran, which continues to use its proxy militia as a tool to advance its aspiration for Middle East conquest. Together with Syria, the triumvirate opposed the authority of superior numbers of the Sunni Middle East countries, with Saudi Arabia and Iran in particular clear belligerents.

Conflict is a constant in the Middle East; it ebbs and it flows. Since Islamism has grown in influence spurred both by Saudi Arabia's fundamentalist Wahhabist movement, breeding Salafist Islamist jihad, and the Islamic Republic of Iran's own very particular Shi'ite primacy of undiluted Shari'a Iran-style, it was inevitable that the two main branches of Islam would cross paths time and again and contest one another in atrocities taking countless lives.

Iraq's liberation from its tyrant turned the Sunni-led Baathist regime over to the majority Shia revolt, seeing common cause with Iran, and now facing a renaissance of sectarian violence that rocks the country with bloodshed and anarchic destruction of state infrastructure. Syria's spiral into civil war with Hezbollah joining the regime's military and Iraq bleeding al-Qaeda jihadis into Syria to confront them has edged closer into Lebanon.

The latest bombings that took place in the Hezbolloh stronghold in part of Beirut had a purpose, and that purpose, according to Sheikh Sirajeddine Zuraiqat is to "drag Hezbollah and Iran out of Syria". Iran's foreign minister is clear in his mind who is to blame for the attack outside the Beirut Iranian embassy; it is of course, Israel. While Hezbollah and Syrian officials blame Saudi Arabia and Qatar.

"Each of the terrorist attacks that strike in Lebanon, Syria and Iraq reek of petrodollars", said a Syrian government statement. Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah's chief, who has pledged the destruction of Israel, stated his men would remain in Syria as long as it becomes necessary to "defend Lebanon, Palestine, the Palestinian question and Syria, the protector of the resistance".