Lebanon May Attract Sunnis Seeking to Wage Jihad

BEIRUT—Hezbollah's recent moves to settle by force Lebanon's 18-month-old political crisis might have done more than just subvert the American-backed government of Prime Minister Fouad Siniora. It also seems to have made Lebanon the next "can't miss" destination for Sunni Muslim radicals seeking a violent summer.

Lebanese children run past a Shiite gunman from the Amal movement as he takes position in Beirut's Corniche al-Mazraa district.

Hezbollah and its mostly Shiite allies faced little resistance earlier this month as they moved to capture and neutralize offices and media outlets supporting the mostly Sunni "Future Movement" in west Beirut. It was a violent step in the progressive deterioration of civil society that began after Syrian troops were forced out of Lebanon in the wake of former Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri's 2005 assassination.

But their efforts to preserve Hezbollahs military autonomy from Lebanon's pro-western government—as well as to push for what they consider a more fair allocation of political power—might have backfired because the move has been widely seen by the Arab world's Sunni majority as tantamount to a coup by Iranian-backed Shiite militias.

Lebanon's sectarian strife is starting to resemble Iraq's religious conflicts in the eyes of Sunni proponents of Salafist Islam, a conservative ideology espoused by al Qaeda that considers Shiites to be part of a heretical cult. Lebanon offers a budding jihadist almost everything: sectarian tensions, a weak central government and security services, and what many al Qaeda followers would consider the best neighborhood imaginable, right on Israel's northern border.

And while Lebanon's Sunnis tend to be fairly moderate outside of a few communities of radicals in the north and east, the estimated 400,000 Palestinian refugees, many of whom live in a series of heavily armed and poorly policed camps, have shown significant support for al Qaeda thinkers, most notably Abu Musab Zarqawi, the slain leader of the group Al Qaeda in Iraq, who drew followers from Lebanese refugee camps.

Lebanese security officials have long been warning that militants trained and radicalized in Iraq pose a serious threat, a warning proved true last summer when the Lebanese Army battled Fatah al-Islam—an assortment of militants led by Iraq veterans—in the Nahr al-Bared refugee camp for over three months.

By this week, websites and chat rooms serving virtual al Qaeda buzzed with information on the Lebanon situation, and, according to Jihadica.com, which tracks such sites, postings detailing how to operate in Lebanon were up in hours. One such post referred to Abu Bakr Naji's work "The Management of Savagery," a tome that postulates that aspiring militants should seek out religiously tense places with a security vacuum. There was also ample chatter about the need to fight off Iran and the Shiite influence, leaving Lebanese officials concerned that Sunni governments in the region, namely Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Jordan, might turn a blind eye to militants headed to Lebanon in an effort to see Hezbollah and Iran's control of the country usurped.

Hezbollah, for its part, is nervously watching. The group has long prohibited Sunni militants from operating in south Lebanon or from conducting operations against Israel from Lebanon, in no small part to keep them from establishing a foothold from which to later attack Lebanon's Shiite community. Even as they celebrated their victory against poorly trained and equipped Sunnis in Beirut, Hezbollah fighters were on the lookout for better-motivated and experienced fighters headed for what many are calling Lebanon's new civil war.