If you haven't been reading W. Thomas Smith Jr. reports from Lebanon for the past week, you need to be doing so. He's doing some in-depth interviews with top folks, going on recons to scout out Hezbollah and is a former Marine who has a pretty good knowledge of what he is seeing Go here and scroll down to Sept 25th and read back up. He says Hezbollah is planning something, and soon.JUBAL LUBNAN (east of Beirut) – I write this with some acceptance of risk (everything is a risk here). But it's something that must be published.
I know for a fact that Hezbollah is building defenses and fortifications from which they can launch attacks in the south (where I was two days ago), in the Bekaa Valley, and in Al Dahiyeh (the Hezbollah security square in Beirut, which we covertly entered and moved through twice during our photo-reconnaissance a few days ago). This is not hearsay: This is reality.
The construction (some of which I have seen with my own eyes) is being contracted through the Lebanese government with Wa'ad, a Hezbollah-owned company created – as both a front and a company based in Lebanon — from Jihad Al-Bina, an Iranian-based company on the U.S. terrorist-watchlist.
Wa'ad ("the promise") is 100-percent owned and operated by Hezbollah. And the company is reconstructing houses and commercial buildings, which were destroyed during the war in 2006. But the houses are being rebuilt – as they were — with secret interconnecting corridors linking the houses together in a link-by-link network of fighting positions. There are tunnels running beneath the houses linking them with other buildings and adjacent neighborhoods, as well as to huge underground command posts. And there are walls being constructed with concealed weapons-storage spaces.
Families living and working in those buildings are renting apartments away from the ongoing construction, and they are doing so on Hezbollah's dime.
Other tunnels (basically arms smuggling corridors), which were constructed before the war, run between Palestinian and Hezbollah-controlled areas in Lebanon to Syria.
Why is the Lebanese government permitting this? It's far too complicated to address here.
More to come.