Independent voices from the TWT Communities

The Syrian rebels' top military commander says more than 12,000 Lebanese Hezbollah militants have infiltrated Syria and are fighting alongside President Bashar Assad's forces.

Gunmen loyal to opposite sides in neighboring Syria's civil war battled on Wednesday in the streets of a northern Lebanese city where two days of clashes have killed at least six people and wounded more than 50, officials said.

Gunmen loyal to opposite sides in neighboring Syria's civil war battled on Wednesday in the streets of a northern Lebanese city where two days of fighting killed at least five people and wounded 45, officials said.

The leader of Hezbollah claimed responsibility Thursday for launching the drone aircraft that entered Israeli airspace earlier this week, a rare and provocative move by the Lebanese militants at a time of soaring regional tensions.

The head of the U.N. observers in Syria said Friday a spike in bloodshed is derailing the mission to monitor and defuse more than a year of violence, raising questions about how effective the unarmed force can be in a conflict that every day looks more like a civil war.

Firing assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenades, Lebanese gunmen clashed in street battles Monday as sectarian tensions linked to the 14-month-old uprising in Syria bled across the border for a third day.

Sectarian violence linked to the unrest in neighboring Syria shook the northern Lebanese city of Tripoli on Sunday, with street clashes killing one soldier and two civilians, the state news agency said.
Former Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora is warning that a congressional effort to cut funds to the country's armed forces would be "a gift" to Hezbollah and its Iranian allies.

Sunni Muslims staged violent demonstrations Tuesday after Lebanese lawmakers announced that the candidate Hezbollah supported for prime minister — telecommunications mogul Najib Mikati — had won the post.

The U.N. says it has raised none of the $18.5 million needed to provide food, medicine and cash to 30,000 former residents of the Nahr el-Bared camp who were displaced by battles between Fatah al-Islam militants and the Lebanese army in 2007.
Iran kicked off five days of air-defense war games Tuesday to display the country's capabilities in protecting its nuclear facilities from possible attack, state television reported.

For 30 years, when it has come to addressing Iran's acts of war against the United States, we have reacted like a "ship of fools." Iran has been treated as a "sanctuary" from which it openly continues to conduct acts of state-sponsored terrorism against the United States and also train, equip and lead through proxies and the Quds Force the adversaries we are fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. Each administration since President Carter's has chosen to ignore or pretend that the Iranian theocracy is not behind the repeated acts of terrorism or combat killings of hundreds if not thousands of our military and civilian personnel. Never has there been such a stain on our honor.

he most serious fighting in Beirut since 2008 appears to have been touched off by a traffic dispute that escalated into deadly, hours-long street battles between the Shi'ite Hezbollah group and a small Sunni faction, witnesses said Wednesday.
Despite the meeting of the United Nations Security Council following an unprovoked cross-border attack by Lebanese forces upon the Israelis, the only comment emanating from the international body has been one calling for calm on both sides ("U.N. disputes Lebanese claim Israel violated border," Web, News, Aug. 4).

U.N. peacekeepers said Wednesday a cypress tree an Israeli soldier was cutting down just before a border clash with Lebanese soldiers erupted was in Israeli territory, contradicting Lebanese claims that their frontier was breached.