Political Snapshot

How Iraq spawned wider terrorist chaos

(1 votes, average: 5 out of 5)

 Loading ...

(Via Salon News.)

On the outskirts of Tripoli in northern Lebanon, the jagged ruins of Nahr el-Bared rise over the Mediterranean Sea. Once one of Lebanon’s largest Palestinian refugee camps and an urban center of more than 30,000 people, Nahr el-Bared today recalls images of Berlin or Dresden from 1945 — its buildings blasted to rubble from endless mortar and machine-gun fire and its main thoroughfare reduced to a graveyard of hollowed-out foundations and burnt wreckage. Since its founding 60 years ago in the aftermath of the first Arab-Israeli war, when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled the nascent state of Israel to neighboring countries, Nahr el-Bared had grown into a modest-size city that boasted one of northern Lebanon’s most popular markets. Today, its muddy roads are choked with the skeletons of automobiles, its few scattered residents living in ramshackle garages and shanties, or in the crumbling debris of what were once apartment buildings lining its streets.

Nahr el-Bared’s destruction owes much to the spread of militant jihad to and from U.S.-occupied Iraq.

Back in early 2005, Porter Goss, then head of the CIA, warned Congress that the war would spawn a new breed of Islamic militants who would “leave Iraq experienced in and focused on acts of urban terrorism.” Middle East experts have long warned that U.S. actions in Iraq would stir up a deadly hornets’ nest, with consequences potentially spreading throughout the region. On a trip into ravaged Nahr el-Bared this January, what I saw and heard there confirmed those dark predictions.

Full story here.