By Yara Bayoumy

The case of Salah Ezz el-Din, a Shi’ite Lebanese financier who has been accused of embezzlement and alleged to have defrauded Shi’ite investors, including Hezbollah officials, of hundreds of millions of dollars, has Lebanon in a stir.

The overall amount pales in comparison to Bernard Madoff’s Ponzi scheme, but in a community of little more than a million Shi’ites, it has meant that many have had their life-savings wiped out.

But what’s more shocking than the amount is the overwhelming trust that his investors still have in him. That is, no doubt, due to Hezbollah’s approval of him.

There are even some Hezbollah officials who invested with him, although the group’s leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah has denied any direct links with Ezz el-Din.

Political sources say the investors, most of whom are from the Hezbollah bastions of southern Lebanon and Beirut’s southern suburbs, were so willing to part with their money because Hezbollah said Ezz el-Din was a man to be trusted.

Fouad Ajami, one of the investors, told Reuters: “To tell you the truth, people put their money with him because he was wearing the Hezbollah cloak, because he was close to Hezbollah and he duped people into thinking he was someone important in Hezbollah,” he said.

“They (investors) asked if he was trustworthy and they (Hezbollah) said he was, and they asked if they should put their money with him and (Hezbollah) said of course. Even those people in Hezbollah did not know anything about him,” Ajami said.

Certainly the saga has embarrassed Hezbollah, and Nasrallah has set up a crisis centre to deal with those who lost their money. He has not yet promised to provide compensation.

Now that the alleged pyramid scheme has come tumbling down, it begs the question: how could Hezbollah have been duped so easily?

The Ezz el-Din saga has also exposed Hezbollah in a new light. A “resistance” movement that emphasises the rewards of the after-life gained from “martyrdom”, it is disconcerting to some Lebanese to see several members of the movement so deeply involved in a get-rich-quickly scheme.

Certainly, this raises the question: To what extent will Hezbollah’s image be shaken by the Ezz el-Din saga?

This is one of a series of post cards by Reuters reporters looking at how the financial crisis is playing out for ordinary people across Europe, Middle East and Africa.

On an Easter break in south Lebanon with visitors from Britain, we see scores of election posters lining the highway ahead of the June 7 parliamentary poll — the first big test of stability here since a Qatari-brokered deal last year calmed an internal crisis that had dragged Lebanon towards renewed civil war. Vague slogans on the slickly produced adverts promise change, democracy, resistance (to Israel) and much else beside. But the election will change little. Power might shift a bit
between Lebanon’s dominant alliances — one backed by the West and Saudi Arabia, the other by Syria and Iran. But voters have scant choice as the sectarian power-sharing system allows party leaders to do deals that stitch up most seats in advance.

Election tension might spark low-level clashes, but external factors — a Syrian-Saudi rapprochement, Obama’s overtures to Damascus and Tehran — have helped cool the atmosphere. And the Lebanese, who have so far survived the global downturn thanks to the liquidity and conservative policies of their banks, know any major violence could wreck the lucrative summer tourist season.

On the Beirut-Tyre highway, billboards for beach resorts alternate with Hezbollah banners. The Iranian-backed Shi’ite group does not seem keen to provoke a repeat of its 2006 war
with Israel, but no one doubts its military capacity, however well concealed. South of the Litani river, we see only UNIFIL peacekeepers and Lebanese army checkpoints. The calm we enjoyed on our break would of course unravel swiftly if Israel’s confrontation with Iran were to ignite in outright conflict.

Not that all is quiet in Lebanon — four soldiers were ambushed and killed in the Bekaa Valley this week by brothers of a drug baron slain earlier at an army checkpoint, illustrating the fragility of the rule of law, especially in neglected rural hinterlands. We decide to skip the Roman ruins of Baalbek.

Back in Beirut, cranes swing over building sites where Syrian workers toil away as if Lebanon were immune from the world’s economic woes. In fact property prices have lost some froth, but the crisis has been strangely slow to bite. Money sent home by Lebanese working in the Gulf and elsewhere makes up more than a quarter of GDP, but the finance minister says his compatriots are not the first to be fired.

Perhaps the impact will be felt later, but for now Lebanese can still afford to employ many foreigners themselves. Not just Syrian labourers. Our visitors were also struck by the Ethiopian maids twittering from balconies, not to mention the Bangladeshis in green overalls dusting the traffic lights downtown.

(Tourists walk in the forest of cedars, located north of Mount Lebanon July 24, 2008. Sturdy cedars perched high in the mountains stand for many Lebanese as symbols of their fractured lands survival. But some environmentalists worry that the trees face a new threat from global warming. Picture taken July 24, 2008. To match feature LEBANON-CEDARS/ REUTERS/ Jamal Saidi (LEBANON))

When Lebanese Interior Minister Ziad Baroud issued a memorandum giving Lebanese citizens the option to remove their sect from civil registry records, it seemed like a step towards removing deeply embedded sectarianism from Lebanon’s social fabric.

The country has been convulsed by bouts of sectarian violence, most notably the 1975-90 civil war, in which 150,000 people were killed, and more recently last May when a power struggle spilled into armed conflict and supporters of Shi’ite Hezbollah briefly took over parts of Sunni western Beirut.

Study the measure a little more closely and some questions emerge. What happens to those wanting to run for seats in parliament, which are distributed according to sect to satisfy Lebanon’s delicate power-sharing balance? What about citizens who have to go to court over personal status issues, which in Lebanon are presided over by courts run by religious sects? Ultimately, they have no choice but to reveal their religious affiliation.
   

So it is doubtful that this measure will really remove sectarianism from Lebanon’s moral and social consciousness, especially when you have a political and legal structure in which sectarianism is required to achieve a power-sharing balance to accommodate 17 different religious communities.
   

The Lebanese media has covered this issue extensively: ”The change is a step in the right direction but it is not sufficient. The government needs to take the next step and ensure that all Lebanese have access to personal status laws that aren’t religiously based,” said Human Rights Watch’s Nadim
Houry. “The Lebanese confessional system is discriminatory and has proven to be a failure,” he told Reuters.
   

After all it is still common to come across taxi drivers who refuse to foray into Sunni Muslim western Beirut from Christian eastern Beirut. And some are reluctant to venture into southern Beirut, a Shi’ite Hezbollah stronghold.
   

Some Lebanese will even admit to feeling uncomfortable in districts which they are not religiously affiliated to. And while most will poo-poo sectarianism, they will almost always support the political party that is based on their religious affiliation. It is a testament to how ingrained sectarianism is in Lebanon’s culture that it is the subject of office politics, jokes and the main soccer teams are divided on Sunni-Sh’ite lines.
  

A group of Lebanese friends recently held a symbolic civil marriage ceremony in one of Beirut’s bars in the hip Gemmayze strip to highlight the fact that Lebanon does not allow civil marriages to be conducted in the country. Generally, a couple either has to go to a Muslim sheikh or a Christian priest to wed, which creates a problem when inter-religious couples want to wed — another sectarian aggravation. Ultimately, if neither one of them converts they are forced to travel abroad, usually to Cyprus, to get married in a civil ceremony.  My colleague Alistair Lyon blogged about that issue here.
    
The Taif Peace Accords which ended the 1975-90 civil war said “abolishing political sectarianism is a fundamental national objective” but gave no timeframe. Political alliances since then have been based on religious and sectarian affiliations, although the Christians are now fractious. The constitution also calls for a committee to be set up to abolish “political confessionalism”.
   

So while Baroud’s measure and the mock civil marriage are attempts at nullifying sectarianism, will they really do much to change Lebanese prejudices? Or are these just cosmetic changes? Does the political system need to be overhauled along with secularising the legal system to bring about real change?

Who remembers the Google Wars website that was doing the viral rounds a few years back – a mildly amusing, non-scientific snapshot of the search-driven, internet world we live in?

It lives on at www.googlebattle.com where you can enter two search terms, say ‘Lennon vs. McCartney’ or ‘Left vs. Right’, and let the internet pick a winner by the number of search hits each word gets.

As we reported here – the virtual world has become a real battleground in the ongoing Gaza conflict – with all sides deploying significant resources.

For Israel – where hasbara or PR has often been frowned upon as unnecessary pandering to international opinion that never turns in Israel’s favour anyway – the second Lebanon war underlined the need for a coherent media and PR strategy coordinated at the centre of government.

The post-mortem of the month-long war with Hezbollah in 2006 - known as the Winograd Commission - recommended a centralised approach to hasbara to avoid spokesmen from different ministries, the army or the police telling different or conflicting stories to a voracious local and international media.

Notwithstanding the fact that the head of the new National Information Directorate did not make it to a scheduled interview with our reporter on the story above  – as my colleague Dan Williams reported here the strategy certainly seems to be working for domestic consumption.

Sources inside the Israeli government have said they are generally happy with the way the strategy has worked internationally as well despite growing international calls for a ceasefire and increasingly angry protests around the world.

The media strategy has been backed up by zero tolerance within the military and security establishment for anyone going “off message” - field commanders or political insiders who seemed to relish leaking tid-bits to their favoured reporters in 2006 are now keeping mum.

And while the virtual media war has raged – with pro-Palestinian websites like electronicintifada.net or Hamas’ own website http://www.palestine-info.co.uk/en/ ratcheting up the rhetoric alongside their Israeli foes – many in the traditional media (or dare I say MSM) complain that they have been totally defeated by Israel’s media strategy which has prevented them from entering Gaza or a ‘closed military zone’ neighbouring Gaza.

The world’s press has been herded on to a hill-top 2 kilometres from the Gaza Strip - where Israeli political and military spokespeople wander among the satellite trucks and live positions ‘briefing’ journalists with the official view of what’s going on inside Gaza.

As much as the protagonists have been duking it out in the virtual world - online media now has the clout to shape the way war stories are told and delivered.

The most surreal example of this is probably Joe the Plumber - yes, that Joe the Plumber of US election campaign fame - who has been engaged by pro-Israeli US website Pajamas Media to file reports from Israeli towns under Hamas rocket fire.

Joe’s basic premise seems to be that the media is inherently biased against Israel and journalists have no business being in the war zone anyway.

While you might not agree with his point-of-view - Joe is an example of the sort of do-it-yourself journalism with a strong voice that has been empowered by the Internet.

Read these two accounts - one from my colleague Nidal al-Mughrabi in Gaza and this one from another Gaza journalist - and I think you’ll agree that reporting from inside a warzone is important, journalists should be there and the combatants should facilitate rather than threaten this effort.

And by the way - in case you were wondering - a GoogleBattle between Israel and Palestine gives Israel a decisive victory. IDF vs. Hamas, though, has Hamas edging it.

PHOTO CREDITS

Photgraphers take pictures of Israeli tanks. REUTERS/Ronen Zvulun

Massive explosion in southern Gaza town of Rafah. REUTERS/Ibrahim abu-Mustafa

Lebanon’s beaches, ski slopes and nightclubs exude glitzy modernity. Its educated elite appears cosmopolitan and sophisticated. But beneath the gloss lie deeply traditional aspects of a society reluctant to shake off a sectarian power-sharing system in which loyalty to one of Lebanon’s 17 religious communities takes precedence over citizenship.

    Nothing illustrates this better than star-crossed lovers.

    Take Laure and Ali, who began dating six years ago after a chance encounter at university in Beirut when they were both 21. She studied political science and now works for an international aid organization. He is a computer and communications engineer.

    Long ago they decided to wed, but there was a snag. Laure is Christian, Ali a Shi’ite Muslim, though they say these identities are just “on paper”. Their families opposed the match across the religious divide, just as they were against the romance from the start.

    “My parents had different arguments, none of them convincing,” recalls Laure. “They said the two families would never get along. They worried what people would say. They said: ‘He’s going to force you to wear a veil, maybe now he’s tolerant, but later he will get more and more into religion’. And then it was the kids, what would the kids be?”

    The objections of Ali’s parents also revolved on social fears, not religious convictions. “If they were very religious, I would understand their point of view. But they are not, so I couldn’t understand their opposition,” he says.

    Laure and Ali could have eloped, as many Lebanese couples in their plight do. Instead they chose a long, uncertain but ultimately successful quest to win over their families.

    “There was such a struggle in my mind,” says Laure, smiling at her fiancé. “I didn’t want to have to choose between someone I love and my parents, whom I love too. After six years of struggle, I’m one of the lucky ones who convinced the parents to agree to the marriage. They like Ali now and they are even asking when we are getting married.”

    Ali admits that the long years of rejection by Laure’s parents, who refused to meet him, had hurt. He thought: “How can they judge me if they don’t know me?”

    The couple’s problems don’t end there. Unless one of them converts, they cannot wed in Lebanon. Civil marriage is not recognized here – unless it is performed abroad. Personal status laws are governed by each religious community, which jealously guard this prerogative as a source of power. So inequalities and anomalies abound.

    “For example, Lebanese law says no one can inherit from someone of a different religion,” Laure explains. “So if Ali dies, I wouldn’t inherit. And if my children are registered as Muslims, they wouldn’t inherit from me.”

    Former Lebanese President Elias Hrawi tried to introduce the option of civil marriage in 1998 over the hostility of Christian and Muslim religious leaders. The bill won cabinet approval but not that of former Prime Minister Rafik al-Hariri, who held Saudi and Lebanese passports. Saudi clerics ruled that the proposal contravened Islamic Sharia law.

    So next summer Laure and Ali will fly to nearby Cyprus for a civil marriage, probably without friends or family due to the costs. The procedure is so common that travel agents offer wedding packages ($1,680 for a one-day trip to Nicosia to sign the papers plus day use of a Larnaca hotel afterwards and a free bottle of local champagne thrown in).

    “Personally it kind of insults me that I cannot marry the way I want to in my country,” says Ali. “But then again, so many things in this country work in a way they are not supposed to. If we didn’t accept that, we’d all be in depression.”      

Lebanon, once a byword for violent anarchy, remains a country where the rule of law is patchy, to put it kindly. But Interior Minister Ziad Baroud, a youthful reform-minded lawyer who was appointed in July as part of a national unity government, is determined to change that, or at least to make a start. He has told the traffic police to do something about the cheerful but sometimes lethal chaos that pervades the roads. 

    Few Lebanese normally bother with seat belts or crash helmets. Speeding with a mobile phone glued to your ear or an infant in your lap comes naturally. Double or triple parking is the norm, lane discipline an alien concept and right of way determined by who gets there first or who drives a bigger vehicle. Scooters fizz everywhere, a law unto themselves. 

    Now Baroud is trying to impose order on all this wild individualism. As I discovered the hard way.

    Leaving home by car the other day, I found my normal route blocked by a truck delivering steel rods to a building site. I had a choice. Turn left, legally, and face a lengthy detour through jammed streets, or turn right for 20 metres the wrong way down a one-way street onto the main road.

    I was in a hurry and in Beirut one-way signs are just part of the urban decor, so for the first time in my two years here (honest), I took the short cut. Only to find myself collared by the long arm of the Lebanese constabulary lurking around the corner. The young traffic cop then swiftly flagged down a sleek black Mercedes which had followed my rash example. He proved impervious to our excuses about the truck obstruction.

    “I have to give you a ticket,” he told the protesting Lebanese driver, “otherwise this foreigner will get a bad impression.”

    “And I have to give you a ticket,” he gently explained to me, switching into competent English, ”because I’m booking the Mercedes.”

    I pleaded for a while, telling him how absurd it was that I’d been caught on my first offence. “Yes, it’s bad luck,” he sympathised, continuing to write out the ticket.

    Just then sirens wailed and a convoy of black SUVs carved a path through traffic, lights flashing. For a few moments, my policeman gestured furiously at drivers to make way. “That was our minister, Mr Baroud,” he said as the cavalcade tore on noisily towards the airport road.

    “Ah, he’s the reason you are giving me a ticket,” I suggested.

    “Exactly, I don’t want to lose my job, I’m so sorry,” he apologised with a smile, handing me a receipt for my driving licence, to be redeemed later that day after a long wait and payment of a $40 fine.

    Well, I had to admit it was a fair cop. And I can only applaud Baroud’s quixotic effort at enforcing the rules of the road  – the message on seat belts is already getting through. If he succeeds,  who knows, he might be able to crack down on the bribery, tax evasion and abuse of power which explain Lebanon’s lowly ranking of 102 on Transparency International’s most recent Corruption Perceptions Index — comparable to the likes of Tanzania, Bolivia and Mongolia. 

       But Baroud is a member of a government with a very short shelf-life. His main task is to prepare for parliamentary elections in May or June next year. And when it comes to tackling the unruly habits of the Lebanese, on or off the road, there are no short cuts.  

Hungary has negotiated a $25 billion economic rescue package with the IMF, the EU and the World Bank. What else is new? As that non-Hungarian philosopher of gamesmanship Yogi Berra put it, it’s ”like déjà vu all over again”.  

Consider the words of historian Paul Lendvai who wrote: ”Its economy in tatters, Hungary accepts a loan of 250 million gold crowns.” “Fiscal stability was restored, a currency reform was introduced…and after a modest upswing the value of industrial production stood 12 percent higher…”

The date? The 1920s. The lender: The League of Nations. Only the details have changed.

Hungary seems never to have encountered a global financial crisis it didn’t jump into head first.

If you want to see pictures of banknotes discarded on the street as trash (one is widely available on the Web) just dig in the archives for photos from post-World War Two Budapest.

Inflation in Zimbabwe has hit astounding heights of 230 million percent, but in 1946 prices in Hungary rose by more than 40 quadrillion percent a month.

Over the past century, Hungary has had three different currencies — the korona, the pengo and the forint, each introduced when the previous tanked.

The perky forint — the same currency that is in a bit of a pickle today — made its debut in 1946 at an exchange rate of one forint equal to 400 octillion pengo — a number that was essentially more than all the pengo then in circulation.

Hungarian inflation today of under 6 percent is not remotely in the ballpark of the 1940s and the chances of total collapse are slim to non existent.

Hungary is a member of the European Union and NATO and its economy is substantial. One of Hungary’s local banks, OTP, is a regional heavyweight. The Audi car plant in Gyor, western Hungary, churns out engines and the hot Audi TT sports car.

But there is cause for concern. Why has Hungary been hit harder than most, putting it in the company of  Pakistan, Ukraine and Belarus which have also been talking to the IMF.

Hungary’s external debt amounted to 89.9 billion euros, or 93.8 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), in the second quarter of 2008. This is not good at a time when banks are reluctant to lend to each other, let alone to a central European country with a history of currency collapse.

A good part of Hungary’s debt is Swiss franc or euro currency loans taken out to buy property or cars. As investors pull money out of Hungary, the forint declines in value and repaying those loans becomes harder.

“What I am paying a month all of a sudden rose above 110,000 forints ($532.80) from 90,000 (forints), so we need to restructure our spending,” a businessman with a mortgage in Swiss francs said.

At the same time, Hungary has gone from golden child of emerging Europe after communism collapsed to laggard in the race to adopt the euro. With chronic budget deficits, including a whopper in 2006 that was triple the EU guideline, Hungary’s joining date has been postponed again and again.

In good times, world leaders talk about globalisation and mutual cooperation. In bad times, everyone tends to scramble for cover.

Hungary’s rescue package is substantial and, as Yogi Berra said, “It ain’t over till it’s over.” But if it is, Hungarians have been there before — and know how to sweep the banknotes into the gutter.

In downtown Beirut, resurrected from the rubble of the 1975-90 civil war, one is spoilt for choice of smart restaurants, trendy bars and lively clubs. Performances by sexy Lebanese divas and belly dancers contribute generously to Lebanon’s gross domestic product by attracting Gulf Arab tourists enchanted with Lebanese talent and beauty — not necessarily in that order.

There is isn’t a single international designer who has not found his or her way to Beirut’s elegant boutiques and jewellery shops. On the other hand, Lebanese designers such as Elie Saab are dressing Hollywood stars these days.

On the streets of Beirut one can see the latest Mercedes, Jaguars and BMWs jostling with Maseratis and Ferraris, even before they appear in Europe. Appearances aside, Lebanon has one of the best-educated peoples in the Middle East, with its young men and women having a global reach into the worlds of business, banking and academia.

It was comforting to see downtown Beirut teeming again with tourists enjoying the delights the city can offer. Beaches were packed with Beirutis in bikinis and hotels were overbooked with returning visitors who left during the crisis that erupted between the pro-Iranian opposition led by Lebanon’s influential Shi’ite Hezbollah and the U.S.-backed Sunni-led Lebanese government after the assassination in 2005 of former Prime Minister Rafik al-Hariri. This crisis has been put on hold following a Qatari-brokered agreement in May.

Yet underneath the glitzy facade is a country mirroring the real currents of militancy and Sunni-Shi’ite sectarianism unleashed by the Iraq war.

The conflict in Iraq has brought back to the surface the historical Sunni-Shi’ite feud throughout the Middle East. It overthrew a Sunni dictator, brought Iraq’s Shi’ites to power and tipped the balance of power in favour of Shi’ite Iran and its Hezbollah allies in Lebanon.

This, in turn, has incensed Sunni Arab countries and left a bitter legacy across the Arab world, Lebanon in particular which is traditionally a proxy battleground where regional forces settle their disputes.

In Lebanon, the Sunni-Shi’ite rivalry is in danger of taking a vicious turn. Fundamentalist Sunni Salafi groups have established a foothold in the northern city of Tripoli, which admittedly had been a hotbed for Sunni Islamist groups in the 1980s before they were crushed by Syria, then the dominant power in Lebanon.

Now these forces have found their way to the southern city of Sidon and to eastern Lebanon and some Palestinian refugee camps.

Added to the Iraq war factor is the humiliation inflicted on Sunni prestige in May by Hezbollah when it overran West Beirut, traditionally a Sunni bastion, after a row with the government. That proved without a doubt that they called the shots in the country.

As a result, Sunni groups are seething, with some tilting towards radical Islamism.

The growing influence of these groups is no longer just in the poor neighbourhoods of Tripoli but it has reached the more affluent parts of the southern port city of Sidon — through mosques and preachers setting out to indoctrinate young Sunnis.

A friend recently recounted how her nephew and some of his friends, all American-educated and from affluent Sunni conservative families, were victims of this indoctrination and turned into zealots after attending prayers at a mosque near Sidon.

“Now he spends his days in his room reading the Koran and listening to militant chants. In his eyes we are non-Muslims and following the infidel way of life. Nobody is able to communicate with him or get through to him,” the friend told me.

Lebanon, it seems, is being used once again by its politicians and their regional patrons as a laboratory.

Anti-Syrian Sunni Lebanese politicians, backed by Sunni heavyweight Saudi Arabia, have not only ignored the growing influence of Salafi groups but have courted them in some instances in their attempt to roll back the rising tide of Shi’ite influence embodied by Hezbollah.

Syria, which after the 2003 U.S.-led war encouraged and facilitated the flow of jihadists to Iraq and into Lebanon, has warned of growing Islamist militancy in north Lebanon and said a vehicle used in a suicide attack in Damascus last week had crossed into Syria from a neighbouring country, implying it could have been Lebanon, Jordan or Iraq.

With these local and regional actors playing with fire, how long before their policies backfire

One of the problems with countries like Syria - secretive and authoritarian - is that whenever a bomb goes off or someone is assassinated, the list of possible suspects is extensive.

One can draw up a long list of enemies who could have plotted and carried out Saturday’s rare car bomb attack on a major road near a Syrian state security complex and an intersection leading to a famous Shi’ite Muslim shrine. The blast, which killed 17 people including a brigadier general and his son, poses another test to Syria’s reputation for keeping a tight grip on dissent and maintaining stability in a troubled area. 

High on any list of possible perpetrators are Sunni Salafi jihadis active in Syria now, and who for years were able to cross through the Syrian borders into Iraq to fight U.S. troops. This stopped recently when Damascus tightened its borders following pressure from Iraq and the United States and opted for a policy of detente and moderation starting with indirect peace talks with Israel through Turkish mediation and a diplomatic drive to end its international isolation.

The jihadis, angry at Syria cutting off their routes, relaunching peace talks with the Jewish state and detaining their militants, could have turned their guns against Damascus. And this could have involved a mix of personnel — foreign expertise helping local Islamists.

Another motive for the latest attack could be Sunni-Alawite tensions in Lebanon. Sunni militant groups based in northern Lebanon have been fighting a sectarian war with Lebanon’s Alawite sect, an offshoot of Shi’ite Islam which has close links to Syria, whose ruling elite has been dominated by minority Alawites for over four decades.

Syria said an Islamist suicide bomber was responsible for the attack and that the vehicle had entered Syria from a neighbouring Arab country on Sept 26. It did not name the country but Syria’s Arab neighbours are Iraq, Lebanon and Jordan.

Assad, whose country has dominated Lebanon for three decades and was forced to withdraw its troops after the assassination of former prime minister Rafik al-Hariri, warned this month of a danger from what he called foreign-backed Sunni extremists in the predominantly Sunni city of Tripoli. He called for a solution to “the rising threat” of Islamist militants in the city.

The bombing was reminiscent to attacks that were carried out in the past by Syria’s Islamist opposition led by the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood which has been locked in a bloody feud with the secular government since the 1980s when late President Hafez al-Assad launched a major crackdown against their followers and supporters in the northern city of Hama.

That left thousands of Muslim Brotherhood activists dead — some estimates are as high as 20,000 –  languishing in prisons or forced underground.

A riot by Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamists at a military prison near Damascus in July suggests the bitter fight between the authorities and the Brotherhood is far from over. There were conflicting accounts of the incident but human rights groups said Syrian security forces killed dozens of prisoners during the riot at Sidnaya prison.

A Syrian official said the disturbances began when Islamist inmates took prison officers hostages and set conditions for their release. Special anti-riot units were brought in from Damascus to end the riot which was quashed violently, according to various accounts.

Syria, which has been ruled by the secular Baath Party since 1963, has sometimes used Islamist groups as proxies to pursue its interests in neighbouring countries, even though it showed no mercy domestically to the 1982 uprising at Hama by the Muslim Brotherhood.

It will likely pursue the hard line policy against militants but Saturday’s attack, which follows the assassination of the military commander of Lebanon’s Hezbollah in Damascus and a senior military aide to President Assad in northern Syria earlier this year, has dented Syria’s watertight security image.

The killing of Imad Moughniyah, in particular, who was on Washington’s most wanted list for two decades for hijackings and suicide bombings against U.S. Western and Israeli targets worldwide, raised serious questions about whether the Assad regime was master in its own house. 

More generally, the recent attacks suggest that Syria itself may become victim to its government’s dabbling in jihadism, like so many other sorcerers’ apprentices across the region who tried to harness Islamist militancy for their own ends only for it to blow back on them.

Hezbollah literally rolled out the red carpet to welcome home five prisoners released by Israel in a U.N.-mediated exchange deal. Securing the release of the last five Lebanese held by Israel was a major triumph for the group, which in turn handed over the bodies of two Israeli soldiers captured in a 2006 raid into Israel.

Having achieved a long-held goal, Hezbollah is holding up the exchange as further evidence that its uncompromising, armed approach to dealing with Israel brings results, directly challenging the policies of Arab leaders who have engaged in negotiations or signed peace treaties with the Jewish state. The New York Times called the prisoners’ homecoming a triumph.

Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, visibly delighted by the prisoner release, addressed the issue during a rare public appearance. He saluted “the true identity of the peoples of our region … the identity of resistance”.

Broadcast into homes across the Arab world by satellite stations, Nasrallah’s rhetoric resonates with viewers who have seen few results from years of talks over the establishment of a Palestinian state.

Spoken by a man widely recognised as the Arab world’s most effective orator, the rhetoric is a challenge to states such as Jordan and Egypt. Both are ruled by U.S.-allied governments that have made peace with Israel and are concerned by the rising
influence of Iran, Hezbollah’s main sponsor.

But while Hezbollah’s charismatic leader still wins admiration across the Arab world, his Shi’ite group no longer enjoys the broad respect it once did in fractious Lebanon.

Nearly two years of political conflict with other Lebanese, including the country’s main Sunni leader, have opened deep sectarian wounds. Hezbollah’s brief takeover of Beirut in May increased the concerns of Lebanese critics who were already suspicious of the group’s vast arsenal.

Hezbollah is riding high in its conflict with Israel. It is now seeking reconciliation with Lebanese adversaries to avoid more conflict at home.