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May 21st, 2012 
FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda
The fighting erupted after reports emerged that army troops had shot dead an
anti-Syria Sunni cleric when his convoy failed to stop at a checkpoint in
north Lebanon on Sunday.
The cleric’s killing followed a week of intermittent clashes that left 10
people dead in the northern port city of Tripoli between Sunnis hostile to
the Syrian regime and Alawites who support Assad.
The Alawite sect is an offshoot of Shia Islam to which Assad belongs and which
has controlled Syrian politics for decades.
The violence in Lebanon has raised fears of a repeat of sectarian unrest in
2008 that pitted Sunnis against Shiites and brought the country close to
civil war.
The revolt in Syria has exacerbated a deep split between Lebanon’s political
parties where the opposition backs those leading the uprising against Assad
while a ruling coalition led by the powerful Shiite Hizbollah supports the
regime.
The opposition has accused Assad of seeking to sow chaos in Lebanon in order
to relieve the pressure on his embattled regime.
Lebanese
newspapers on Monday carried ominous headlines warning of civil strife.
“Lebanon boils after sheikh killing” said the front-page headline in
The Daily Star.
The English language paper warned in an editorial that the killing of the
Muslim cleric on Sunday and other recent incidents had further inflamed
tensions linked to the Syria unrest.
“These ingredients create a recipe for the possibility in Lebanon of
civil or sectarian strife, the likelihood of which some have been warning
about for a while now,” it said.
The French language L’Orient-Le-Jour stated in its headline: “Lebanon
forcibly dragged into the Syrian storm.”
“The destabilisation of Lebanon, with the Syrian crisis as a background,
is ongoing,” added the daily.
More than 12,000 people, the majority of them civilians, have died in Syria
since an anti-regime revolt broke out in March last year, according to the
Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
Syria long held sway in Lebanon politics and had troops stationed in the
country for 29 years until it was forced to withdraw them in 2005 following
the assassination of ex-premier Rafiq Hariri.
It has denied accusations that it was involved in his killing.
Source: AFP
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