Conflict to oust Assad ripples across Middle East
Growing fear of blowback from militants returning home from fighting with rebel forces in Syria
BISARIYEH, LEBANON — The oncetranquil, religiously mixed village of Bisariyeh is seething: Two of its young men who fought alongside the rebels in Syria recently returned home radicalized and staged suicide bombings in Lebanon.
The phenomenon is being watched anxiously across the Mideast, particularly in Saudi Arabia, where authorities are moving decisively to prevent citizens from going off to fight in Syria.
The developments illustrate how the Syrian war is sending dangerous ripples across a combustible region and sparking fears that jihadists will come home with dangerous ideas and turn their weapons against their own countries.
In Lebanon, where long-standing tensions between Sunnis and Shiites have been heightened by the conflict next door, the fear of blowback has very much turned into reality.
The social fabric of towns and villages across the country is being torn by conflicting loyalties and a wave of bombings carried out by Sunni extremists in retaliation for the Iranian-backed Shiite group Hezbollah’s military support of Syrian President Bashar Assad.
In the past few months, at least five Sunni men have disappeared from Bisariyeh, an impoverished, predominantly Shiite village in south Lebanon, and are believed to have gone to fight in Syria.
Two of them — Nidal al-Mughayar and Adan al-Mohammad — returned and blew themselves up outside Iranian targets in Beirut on Feb. 19, killing eight people and wounding more than 100.
“He was a good man with a good heart, but it seems that people who have no conscience brainwashed him,” Hisham al-Mughayar said of his 20-year-old son.
As news spread in the village that Nidal was one of the bombers, angry Shiite residents marched to his parents’ home and set it on fire along with the family’s grocery and four vehicles.
“He destroyed himself and destroyed us with him,” said the father, as he took an Associated Press reporter on a tour of his torched, twostorey house, much of its furniture reduced to ashes.
Concern about such radicalization has sent Mideast governments scrambling into action.
After years of often turning a blind eye to jihadists taking up arms abroad, Saudi Arabia is enacting new laws and backing a campaign to stop its citizens from joining Syria’s civil war. The intention is to send a clear message that those who defy the law are to fight to the death and are not welcome back.
The move, in part, reflects pressure from Saudi ally the U.S., which wants to see the overthrow of Assad but is alarmed by the rising influence of hardline foreign jihadists — many of them linked to al-Qaida — among the rebels.
Many Saudis have been easy recruitment targets for jihadist organizations. Osama bin Laden and 15 of the 19 hijackers on 9-11 were Saudi. The oil-rich kingdom was among several nations that backed the anti-communist mujahedeen forces fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s, and Saudi fighters have travelled to other Muslim hot spots around the world since then.
More recently, at the urging of Saudi preachers and even judges, thousands of fighters from Saudi Arabia — home to a strict, puritanical strain of Sunni Islam — have joined the three-year-old uprising against Assad, whose government is dominated by members of his Alawite sect, an offshoot of Shiite Islam.
“The Saudis are very much concerned about a repeat of the 2004 jihadist insurgency inside the kingdom, led at the time by Osama bin Laden,” said analyst Bilal Saab.
The shift to criminalize fighting abroad is gaining traction in the Middle East and North Africa. Egypt’s military leadership has taken a stricter stand, and Bahrain is drawing up legislation. Tunisia said it has prevented 8,000 from going to Syria and is putting together a database to monitor hundreds of fighters who have returned.