AL-AIN, Lebanon, Sept 16 (Reuters) – Hezbollah began bringing Iranian fuel into Lebanon via Syria on Thursday, a move the Shi’ite Muslim group says should ease a crippling energy crisis but which opponents say risks provoking U.S. sanctions.
Dozens of truck carrying Iranian fuel oil entered northeastern Lebanon near the village of al-Ain, where Hezbollah’s yellow flag fluttered from lampposts.
The financial and economic crisis in Lebanon is dragging the country towards mayhem at a quickening pace, according to various reports. Lebanon is running out of critical medicines and is witnessing fuel shortages. The economic collapse has stripped the national currency of most of its value and left four out of five Lebanese citizens below the poverty line.
The World Bank has described the crisis as among the worst in over a century.
The crisis, however, has not stopped the Lebanese authorities from again displaying their hostility towards Israel.
In international politics, what do you do when you don’t know what to do but wish to appear to be doing something?
The answer is: you convene an international conference.
The gimmick started with the notorious Versailles Conference after the First World War that morphed into a series of photo-ops while real decisions were taken elsewhere and behind the scenes. More recently we had the grand Madrid Conference that was supposed to produce an unlikely peace in the Middle East but became an introduction to a new era of conflict in the war-torn region. Last week we have had a virtual version of the international conference on Lebanon, the second in 12 months and designed to mark the anniversary of the deadly explosion that tore Beirut apart.
I think Lebanon is safely slotted into the pantheon of permanent failed states. Should the west even bother?
Where can you find children starving in the streets, homes without electricity or gas, and a designated terror group that controls the government?
This living tragedy is Lebanon, whose capital was once known as the Paris of the Middle East and was one of the leading financial centers in the world.
According to the World Bank, Lebanon has entered one of the worst financial crises in recent history, whereby in 2020 its GDP fell by 20.3% and its inflation surged to 84.3%. While many leading media pundits have cried out over the humanitarian crisis that has developed, they have simultaneously chosen to ignore its root cause: the Iranian terror proxy, Hezbollah.
The response to the explosion in August 2020 has been marked by chaos and paralysis in what is now a failed state
At ground zero of Lebanon’s apocalypse a stench of dead rats seeps from hulking piles of rotting grain. Broken silos teeter above, their sides ripped apart by the catastrophic blast that also broke the soul of Beirut; the contents that should have fed a nation still lie spilt over the gaping ruins of its main port.
A year ago this week, one of the planet’s gravest industrial accidents caused one of its biggest ever explosions, shattering a city that was already at a tipping point. The mushroom cloud of chemicals that soared above the Lebanese capital on 4 August 2020 and the seismic force of the shock wave that ravaged its homes and businesses were carried around the world in high-definition horror. Even amid the chaos of a country that had allowed this to happen to its people, this was surely a moment of reckoning.
There is growing concern among the Lebanese and other Arabs that Iran is planning to exploit the severe political, economic and financial crisis in Lebanon to complete its takeover of the country.
Iran already has a political and military presence in Lebanon through its terrorist proxy, Hezbollah. The current crisis, however, is likely to facilitate Iran’s mission of adding Lebanon to the list of countries it already occupies: Syria, Iraq and Yemen.
A whole nation is on the scrounge. As Lebanon collapses in slow motion, its people have turned to whatever means they can to survive.
Adham Maamari, a hospital director in Tripoli, sources generator oil on the black market. He has already stopped taking in critical-care patients for fear of what will happen to his ventilators if the power cuts out, and he is running out of medicine. “How do they expect us to treat people,” he asked. “Black magic?”
A medical secretary spends two hours every morning scouring pharmacies for her elderly mother’s medicine. The pharmacist is ringing a friend in Dubai to ask what drugs she can bring with her when she comes back from holiday.
