WORLD_ ISIS seeks bases inside Lebanon, says security chief

The Gulf Today

ISIS seeks bases inside Lebanon, says security chief

January 04, 2015

BEIRUT: Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) militants holed up in the Qalamoun mountains on the Syrian-Lebanese border are seeking to gain control of nearby Lebanese villages to support their fighting positions, the head of Lebanon’s main security apparatus told reporters.

Major General Abbas Ibrahim said Lebanese forces were on high alert to prevent the hardline militants from seizing any Lebanese territory near the Qalamoun mountains, which demarcate Lebanon’s eastern border with Syria.

Ibrahim, who is the head of Lebanon’s General Security office, said ISIS had recently boosted its numbers in the Qalamoun area with the aim of securing cross-border territory to support its Syrian operations.

“ISIS does not want to dominate Qalamoun ... but they want to use it to secure their backs in the region through controlling (Lebanese) villages in contact with the Qalamoun area,” he said.

“The (Lebanese) military and security forces are on full alert,” he said at his village home in southern Lebanon.

Such cross-border incursions would add to concern that Lebanon, which suffered its own civil war in 1975-90, could be drawn further into the conflict in neighbouring Syria.

Fighting from Syria has regularly spilled into Lebanon since the war erupted nearly four years ago. In 2014, ISIS’s Al Qaeda wing attacked the border town of Arsal and took Lebanese soldiers captive. Gunmen including militants linked to Islamic State also clashed with the army in the coastal city of Tripoli.

Ibrahim said ISIS had become the dominant armed group in Qalamoun.

“In the recent period about 700 new fighters pledged allegiance, and so they are now more than 1,000 fighters,” he said.

Fighting has escalated in Qalamoun and other areas along the border since the summer, pitting ISIS and other insurgents against forces fighting on behalf the Syrian government.

Referring to ISIS and other militant groups like Nusra Front, the Lebanese army chief warned in November that Lebanon was facing “the most dangerous terrorist plot in the whole region.”

Lebanese residents near the border have said they are ready to take up arms to defend their homes.

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