Alex Rowell/Now Lebanon
The violent fallout from the Syrian conflict has increasingly taken the form of bombings
Since October 2012, the violent fallout from the civil war next door has increasingly taken the form of deadly vehicle explosions ![]()
Since the outbreak of the Syrian crisis in early 2011, Lebanon has witnessed a multifarious deterioration in security, as tensions between domestic supporters and opponents of the Bashar al-Assad regime have sporadically broken out into armed clashes, assassinations, rocket attacks and roadside bombings.
Moreover, since October 2012, the violent fallout from the civil war next door has increasingly taken the form of deadly vehicle explosions, including suicide bombings. After almost a year of calm since a double suicide bombing in Tripoli in January 2015, attacks resumed in November, with two in the space of one week in the border town of Arsal and south Beirut’s Burj al-Barajneh neighborhood. Many of the bombings have been claimed by extremist Islamist groups with links to al-Qaeda, such as Jabhat al-Nusra, who have framed their attacks on predominantly Shiite civilian population centers as retaliation for Hezbollah’s paramilitary intervention in Syria. The most recent attack, which killed at least 43 residents of south Beirut, was claimed by al-Qaeda’s rival, ISIS. In all, a total of 205 people have been killed so far by 29 explosions.