Lebanon and Israel may be facing the prospect of massively increased terror attack threats. New reports claim that al-Qaida has set up an organizing center in Lebanon and that Iran has boosted its ties to West Bank Palestinian militants, especially Islamic Jihad, who have launched a new suicide bomber campaign against Israel.
The Lebanese Shiite weekly Shiraa, which opposes the Iranian-backed Hezbollah, or Party of God, is claiming this week that al-Qaida has already set up an operational command base in the country. It also claims that Imad Mughniyeh, the prominent Hezbollah leader, is representing al-Qaida in talks with potential sympathetic Palestinian leaders in the south of the country. Al-Shiraa said Mughniyeh also met with Jemal Suleiman, head of the Palestinian Ansar Allah, and with Abu Mahujayn, Shehada Jawahr and Khaled Safayn, who lead Palestinian militias in the Bureij camp. The report follows other indications of growing al-Qaida influence in Lebanon. There have been reports, as yet unsubstantiated, that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, commander of al-Qaida operations in Iraq, has been receiving an increasing number of Lebanese Sunni Muslim supporters.Also this week the Israeli debka.com web site, which maintains a wide circle of sources within Israeli intelligence, said an FBI-CIA team was currently in Lebanon, trying to discover whether al-Qaida was planning to participate in a major terror offensive against Israel from bases in Southern Lebanon. 'The Americans are concerned lest Mughniyeh has been tasked to orchestrate simultaneous strikes against Israel from its northern and southern borders,' debka.com said. The development of a close alliance between al-Qaida and Iran-backed organizations like Hezbollah would mark a dramatic strengthening of anti-American and anti-Israeli guerrilla capabilities in the Middle East. Given Iran`s great and still growing influence among the 60 percent Shiite majority in Iraq, it could also open the way for future operational cooperation between al-Qaida and other insurgent forces in Iraq, and Iran-backed Shiite paramilitary groups there such as Moqtada al-Sadr`s Mahdi Army.
In a parallel development, The Australian newspaper reported Wednesday that Israeli security chiefs fear Hezbollah militants may have already joined forces with Islamic Jihad and other Sunni Muslim Palestinian guerrilla groups on the West Bank The report emerged after Islamic Jihad claimed responsibility for the suicide bomb attack on a shopping mall in the prosperous, middle class Israeli resort city of Netanya, north of Tel Aviv, Monday. Five people were killed and 40 wounded in the attack. Israeli Intelligence officials say Hezbollah has been using donations and other sponsorship to infiltrate the restive West Bank areas of Nablus, Jenin and Tulkarm, The Australian said. Two members of a second militant group, the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, told the newspaper that that a man claiming to represent Hezbollah had recently asked them to join the organization.
Israeli suspicions of Hezbollah infiltration were given fresh impetus by the fact that the claim of responsibility for Monday`s attack, which killed five people and wounded 55 others at the entrance to the Netanya mall, was first aired on Hezbollah television in Syria, the paper said. 'We are looking at a proxy relationship between Hezbollah and Palestinian Islamic Jihad and their major terror masters, who are directly linked to the Iranian Islamic revolution,' former Israeli military intelligence chief Erin Lerman told The Australian.
The Israeli reports and claims of growing ties between Hezbollah and al-Qaida, or between Hezbollah, backed by Iran, and Islamic Jihad, may also strengthen the hands of Bush administration hawks around Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld who remain eager to confront Iran. But they also may reflect the growing militancy of Iran`s hard-line President Ahmed Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who in October publicly called for Israel to be 'wiped off the map.' Some U.S. security analysts believe the growing public militancy and confidence of Ahmadinejad and other Iranian leaders reflects the fact that they may for the first time have full access to nuclear weapons bought or stolen clandestinely from former Soviet republics. It may also reflect the Iranians observing the continuing U.S. inability to make significant progress in scaling down the level of operational violence of the still-spreading insurgency in Iraq.