The director-general of Lebanon's General Security Directorate, Brig. Gen. Jamil al-Sayyid, does not appear to have lost any sleep lately. If Lebanon were any other country in the world, one might conclude that the man in charge of the country's principal domestic security agency had a bad year in 2002. Leaving aside the ostensibly natural deaths (such as the sudden heart failure in January of a Christian MP rumored to have dallied with the anti-Syrian opposition), the list of major "unsolved" murders that took place during the first eleven months of last year would have cost even J. Edgar Hoover his job. On January 24, ex-militia chief and former minister Elie Hobeika was killed by a car bomb. On April 20, the grossly disfigured body of Ramzi Irani, the student coordinator of the opposition Lebanese Forces (LF) party, was found in the trunk of his car. On November 21, an American missionary in the southern port of Sidon, Bonnie Penner, was murdered - the first time a US citizen had died from foul play in Lebanon in over ten years. In addition, the culprits who bombed all but one of the major American fast food chains in Lebanon (and evidently have a soft spot for Burger King) have yet to be identified.

The spate of violence kicked into high gear during the first week of December with the killing of an Iraqi dissident, the assassination of a shadowy Lebanese intelligence operative and drug dealer (along with his nephew), and the bombing of a mausoleum near Syrian intelligence headquarters in Anjar. While it is not possible to identify the culprits with any degree of certainty, the circumstances of these three incidents reveal a great deal about why none of them has been deemed worthy of an exhaustive investigation.

Death of a Double Agent

On December 6, a 5-kilogram bomb exploded along the main road between Ibl al-Saqi and Kawkab in south Lebanon and ripped apart a black Mercedes-Benz carrying Ramzi Nohra, a notorious 44-year-old drug smuggler, and his 30 -year-old nephew, Elie Issa, an operative for Lebanese military intelligence.

Nohra was born in Ibl al-Saqi in 1958 and joined the pro-Iraq wing of the Baath Party as a youth. During the late 1970s, he became an operative for Iraqi intelligence and established himself in the Lebanese drug trade. At some point (it's not entirely clear when), Nohra was arrested by Syrian intelligence and began working for Damascus as a double agent. After Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon, he was recruited by both Israeli military intelligence and Israel's Shin Bet security service to provide information about armed Palestinian groups in the country and the radical Shi'ite Hezbollah movement. In exchange, Israeli forces in south Lebanon turned a blind eye to his drug smuggling. Although he was arrested for smuggling hashish into Israel in 1989, he was allowed to serve his three-year jail term at a police station in Tiberias, where he was often seen out and about on the town, having lunch with Israeli friends in the security forces. After serving only two years of his sentence, he was released and returned to Lebanon to resume drug smuggling.

In 1996, Nohra was recruited by Lebanese military intelligence to abduct Ahmed Hallaq, a Lebanese assassin responsible for the December 1994 killing of Fouad Mughniyah, the brother of Hezbollah's head of special overseas operations, Imad Mughniyah. Hallaq had since been living under the protection of the South Lebanon Army (SLA) in Qlaya, using the assumed name Michel Kheir Amin. After establishing Hallaq's true identity, Nohra befriended him and the two spent months socializing regularly. Meanwhile, he was developing a plan to kidnap him with the help of his brother, Mufid, and a Lebanese taxi driver by the name of Fadi, who regularly passed through the Jezzine-Bater crossing at the northern tip of the security zone.

On February 20, 1996, Nohra invited Hallaq to his house in Ibl al-Saqi for a drink. After the two had settled down and finished off several glasses of whiskey, Mufid and Fadi burst into the room with silencer-equipped guns and handcuffed the startled guest. Nohra later recounted that Hallaq begged to be shot on the spot, rather than face the horrors that awaited him in under interrogation, but he was given no such mercy. With Hallaq bound and gagged in the trunk of his taxi, Fadi drove out of the security zone and delivered the captive to a Lebanese army base.¹ Seven months later, Hallaq was executed. Following Hallaq's disappearance, Israeli forces arrested Nohra and he was sentenced to four years in prison by a Tel Aviv court. In July 1998, when Israeli exchanged 50 Lebanese detainees for the remains of an IDF commando killed in Lebanon, Nohra was released and deported north of the security zone.

Following the Israeli withdrawal from south Lebanon in May 2000, Nohra returned to Ibl al-Saqi and resumed drug smuggling with two of his brothers - Mufid and Kamil. Living in an area under the de facto authority of Hezbollah, the two were allowed to keep their ill-gotten gains in return for helping the militant Shi'ite movement build a spy network inside Israel.

There have been persistent rumors that Nohra was involved in the Hezbollah's abduction of three Israeli soldiers in October 2000. According to one version of events, the three Israelis were lured to the border by the promise of a drug deal and were talking with Mufid on the other side when they were ambushed. As a result of his service to Hezbollah, Nohra spent the last two years of his life in a state of intense paranoia. Bulletproof shutters and state-of-the-art security cameras were installed in his luxurious mansion. He reportedly spent most of his time indoors, a 9 mm pistol within easy reach.

In light of Nohra's connections with Hezbollah, most observers speculate that Israel was responsible for his assassination. Coincidentally or not, Nohra was killed just meters away from the site of a February 1999 roadside bomb attack that killed the senior Israeli commander in south Lebanon, Brig. Gen. Erez Gerstein. At his funeral on December 7, Hezbollah officially declared Nohra to be a "martyr" - the first time it has bestowed this "honor" on a Christian.²

However, less than a month before his death, an Israeli court named Kamil Nohra has having recruited an Israeli Druze lieutenant colonel charged with passing intelligence information to Hezbollah. With Nohra's cover entirely blown, he was of little use to either Hezbollah or the Syrian-Lebanese intelligence establishment. Given his propensity for switching sides at the drop of a hat, either of his two latest employers may have decided to cut short his life while they were still ahead. Moreover, the bomb which killed Nohra - an explosive device with a fiberglass veneer designed to make it look like a rock - closely resembled the kinds used by Hezbollah in the past.

Bombing in the Beqaa

In the pre-dawn hours of December 4, just before the holiday of Id al-Fitr, a Muslim mausoleum on the outskirts of Anjar in the eastern Beqaa Valley was destroyed by the nearly simultaneous detonation of four 1-kg dynamite charges. The tomb of Nabi al-Aziz had been a popular site of pilgrimage by local Sunni Muslims since its construction, about 800 years ago according to area residents.

Anjar is a predominantly Armenian Christian town, and its residents have been embroiled in a decades-long dispute with the Sunni waqf (religious endowment) that runs the mausoleum and adjacent buildings. The Armenians, who fled Turkey in the early 20th century, settled in the region at the invitation of the French mandatory authorities. The Sunnis do not consider decisions by the French to be legally binding and have claimed that land given to the Armenians belongs to Sunni villagers to determine land ownership.

However, it appears unlikely that an Armenian group carried out the bombing. The dispute had not spilled over into violence in many years and Armenian leaders emphatically denounced the destruction of the mausoleum. The consensus among both Armenian and Sunni leaders was that the bombing was meant to instigate sectarian conflict in the Beqaa. "This criminal act is part of a scheme to plunge Lebanon anew into the long-forgotten nightmare of sectarian strife," said Sunni Grand Mufti Muhammad Rashid Qabbani. Armenian MP George Kassardji called the bombing an "attack on national unity, coexistence and the ties of brotherhood among Lebanese." But who would have the motivation to inflame confessional disputes in Anjar?

As with all other incidents of violence in the country, some pointed fingers at Israel in public speeches. Sheikh Bilal Said Shaaban, secretary-general of the Sunni fundamentalist Tawhid movement, called the bombing "a gutless act committed by Israeli agents." While it is plausible that Israel could stand to benefit from sectarian tensions in the Beqaa, civil unrest in Lebanon has nearly always generated insecurity for the Jewish state in the past. Moreover, there is no precedent in Israeli history for the destruction of a Muslim holy site and it seems inconceivable that Israel would risk being fingered for such an act.

Since Anjar is the headquarters of Syrian military intelligence in Lebanon, carrying out such an operation would be extremely difficult and risky unless local Syrian intelligence officers were either bought off or were involved themselves. The Syrians have always justified their military presence as an external check against the outbreak of sectarian hostilities in Lebanon. The destruction of a Muslim holy site would not be the first time that the Syrians have deliberately facilitated (or faked) outbreaks of sectarian unrest in order to shore up the validity of their army's raison d'etre.

A more likely explanation is that the bombing was the work of Wahhabi Islamist radicals, who have long condemned pilgrimages to tombs as an unIslamic form of saint worship. Saudi-funded Wahhabi groups typically target "shrines" such as the Nabi al-Aziz mausoleum wherever they operate.

If the Syrians were involved, Lebanon's security apparatus (which is staffed with officers hand-picked by Syria) will not be allowed to conduct an impartial investigation. In fact, it's likely evidence suggesting Wahabbi involvement will also be suppressed due to Saudi Arabia's generous financial assistance to Lebanon at the Paris II conference in November. The authorities recently pulled the plug on a Lebanese television station preparing to broadcast a program critical of the kingdom's human rights record - they will not hesitate to do the same to an investigation which threatens to expose the seamier side of Saudi "charitable" assistance to Lebanon.

Iraqi Eradicated

On the night of December 3, the bludgeoned body of Iraqi Shi'ite dissident Walid Ibrahim Abbas al-Mubah al-Mayahi was found in his apartment in the village of Abbassiyeh, near Tyre, with a rope around his neck. Mayahi's apartment, which he shared with other Iraqi dissidents, doubled as an office for the Sadr Center for Islamic Studies, named after the late Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Sader al-Sadr following his 1999 murder in Iraq.

Mayahi was a member of the Iraqi National Congress (INC) and it was rumored that he was preparing to travel to the US to train with Iraqi opposition forces at the time of his murder. The INC pointed the finger at Iraqi intelligence. According to local press reports, Mayahi had recently taken in three Iraqi refugees, all of whom have since disappeared, leading to speculation that they were agents of the Iraqi government.

The last time the Iraqi government killed a dissident in Lebanon, in 1994, the Lebanese government severed diplomatic relations. Now that Syria's relations with Iraq have improved, however, it is unlikely that Baghdad will even be accused of involvement in the murder.

Notes

  ¹ The Daily Star (Beirut), 9 December 2002.
  ² Al-Nahar (Beirut), 8 December 2002.