ISIS hits Beirut

This is still very much a developing story, but ISIS has claimed responsibility for a double suicide bombing (which may actually have been intended as a triple suicide bombing, based on the latest evidence) today in the Beirut neighborhood of Burj al-Barajneh, which has killed at least 37 people and injured over 180 more:

The terrorist group Islamic State (Isis) claimed responsibility for the attack on social media, saying the first bomber had parked an explosives-laden motorcycle in the neighbourhood and a second bomber detonated his suicide vest in the gathering that arrived on the scene after the first attack.

Isis said the aim of the attack was to kill Shias. Local media identified the three suicide bombers, saying two of them were Palestinians and one Syrian. Burj al-Barajneh is a heavily populated, poor and crowded neighbourhood that is often associated with Hezbollah. It was not possible to verify Isis’s claim of responsibility.

ISIS has done this kind of thing in Lebanon before, like in January when it perpetrated a double suicide bombing of a cafe in an Alawite section of Tripoli, and certainly Lebanon is by now no stranger to violence spilling over from Syria. Past attacks in Lebanon by groups with Al-Qaeda links, like the Abdullah Azzam Brigades and Jabhat al-Nusra, have explicitly been intended as retaliation for Hezbollah’s support of Bashar al-Assad, but in this case I don’t think Hezbollah was the intended target so much as Shiʿa civilians were. The intent may simply be to destabilize Lebanon along sectarian lines and create the kind of environment that’s conducive to ISIS’s expansion. Lebanon’s national government is a wreck at the moment, so the country may be particularly vulnerable to a breakdown of order between its Sunni, Shiʿa, and Christian communities.

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