DAESH assassin held
BEIRUT, Aug 26, (Agencies): Lebanon’s army said on Saturday it had detained an Islamic State suspect accused of planning attacks against its troops.
The man was sent by Islamic State operatives in Syria to assassinate a senior Lebanese army officer. He had been surveilling the soldier’s home, the military statement said.
“He also worked on securing the necessary weapons and explosives to execute this operation,” as well as bomb attacks against the army and villages in north Lebanon, it said.
Authorities arrested the suspect, a Lebanese national, in the northern village of Wadi Khaled at the border with Syria, a security source said.
In recent years, some attacks in Lebanon
have been linked to Islamic State, which controls territory in neighbouring Syria and a shrinking enclave on the common border.
Still, the country has mostly escaped the violence unleashed by the six-year Syrian war, where Lebanon’s Shi’ite Hezbollah fights alongside President Bashar al-Assad’s government.
The Lebanese army said the man it detained took orders from Islamic State in the Syrian city of Raqqa, which the militants had used as a base before losing ground there to USemirate
backed militias.
The suspect has also been in touch with militants in the Islamic State enclave among the barren mountains straddling the Syrian-Lebanese frontier.
Since last week, Lebanon’s army has been waging an offensive on its side of the border against the Islamic State pocket near the town of Ras Baalbeck in the northeast.
The United States blasted the commander of the UN peacekeeping force in Lebanon on Friday, accusing him of turning a blind eye to Hezbollah weapons smuggling.
US ambassador Nikki Haley said the 10,500-strong UNIFIL force was “not doing its job effectively” and singled out its Irish leader, Major General Michael Beary.
“What I find totally baffling is the view of the UNIFIL commander General Beary,” Haley told reporters, accusing him of ignoring Hezbollah’s arms dumps.
“He seems to be the only person in south Lebanon who is blind. That’s an embarrassing lack of understanding on what’s going on around him,” she said.
Asked about Haley’s sharp criticism, United Nations spokesman Stephane Dujarric said of Beary “we have full confidence in his work.”
Haley was speaking at UN headquarters as member states debate the future of UNIFIL, which is deployed to keep the peace on Lebanon’s southern border with Israel.
The existing mandate, last modified in 2006, expires at the end of the month, and the United States would like to see its language toughened.
Washington wants the UN force to take a tougher line on Hezbollah, an Iranian-backed Shiite armed movement that is represented in Lebanon’s government.
Israel alleges that Hezbollah is restocking its arms dumps and missile batteries in southern Lebanon, under
the eyes of Blue Helmet peacekeepers.
But Russia, which is allied with Iran and thus with Hezbollah in support of regime forces in the conflict in neighboring Syria, wields a UN Security Council veto.
And US allies France and Italy, which have hundreds of soldiers in the UN force that would be in danger if it clashed with the militia, are also concerned.