Half a Ton of Questions on the Dahr al-Baydar Road

In August 2012, former Lebanese Minister Michel Samaha crossed the Syrian-Lebanese border carrying hundreds of kilograms of explosives and $170,000 in cash, which he had received from security agencies affiliated with Bashar al-Assad's regime. Samaha was not a smuggler working for his own account, nor was the shipment intended for military confrontation with Israel. It was part of a plot to carry out bombings and assassinations on Lebanese soil, targeting political and religious figures, and capable of igniting sectarian strife in a country that does not need much effort to be set ablaze.

The perpetrator of the mission was not an anonymous officer, but a former minister and advisor to the Syrian president, transporting explosives in coordination with one of the regime's most prominent intelligence officials, Major General Ali Mamlouk. However, this incident was not a sudden deviation from the nature of the relationship between Damascus and Beirut. In a country accustomed to having its affairs managed from outside its institutions, it was not surprising that security decisions crossed borders just as political decisions bypassed state institutions.

That incident was an extension of the logic governing Lebanon for years. In Anjar, where Ghazi Kanaan and Rustam Ghazali successively managed Syrian intelligence, the boundaries between security and politics were unclear, nor were those between Lebanese decision-making and Syrian will. The influence of officers extended from monitoring politicians to affecting their positions and decisions. The state was not absent; it existed enough to give others' decisions an institutional form.

Under this equation, the military and security alliance between the Syrian regime and Hezbollah became entrenched, and Syrian territory formed a main corridor for Iranian military support toward the party. After the withdrawal of the Syrian army in 2005, the alliance remained, and the supply route continued, before Hezbollah itself turned into a military party fighting to defend the survival of the Assad regime.
Then the Assad regime fell, ending a complete phase of security relations that governed the region. But the end of the regime is not enough to prove the end of networks and practices that emerged under it. History does not inherit criminal responsibility, but it leaves behind facts that must not be erased whenever the names of those in power change.

The Dahr al-Baydar incident brought back to the forefront tons of questions that Lebanese people thought, or wanted to think, that time had surpassed. Last Thursday, hundreds of kilograms of highly explosive materials, including TNT and C4, were seized at the Dahr al-Baydar checkpoint, while information attributed to the investigation mentioned the presence of nails and iron balls within the load. Leaks indicated suspicion of the two detainees' connection to Hezbollah, and that they were transporting the shipment from the Bekaa Valley towards the southern suburbs, to deliver it to a person known as "Hajj Dhulfiqar."

It is said that history does not repeat itself, but rhymes. In Lebanon, the rhyme seems more stable than the regimes that succeed each other in writing it. The names of officers change, alliances collapse, faces disappear from the scene, but explosives find their way back to the forefront, along with the question of whether the tools of external wars might one day return as tools for settling internal scores.
It is difficult to separate these questions from the history of arms transport in Lebanon. In August 2023, a Hezbollah ammunition truck did not need more than overturning in Al-Khaleh to reveal what was being transported away from public eyes. The problem then was not that the truck overturned, but that a single slip was enough to reveal the fragility of the line separating the safety of Lebanese people and decisions they do not participate in making.

But the political scene today is different. Hezbollah, which emerged from years of military confrontation with significant losses, faces mounting pressure to confine weapons to the state, at a time when the power equations that governed its relationship with the Lebanese interior are no longer the same. The discussion is no longer only about the position of resistance vis-à-vis the state, but about the future of a authority whose fundamental aspect was built on possessing weapons and the ability to make independent military decisions.
The hardest question raised by this stage is whether the decline in the ability to impose conditions will lead to reconsidering them, or to clinging to them regardless of how high the cost becomes for others.

In this context, the hypothesis of preparing for an internal security operation takes on exceptional gravity. If investigations reveal an intent to use explosives to target Lebanese personalities or gatherings, we will be facing a potential attempt to transfer the conflict over power from politics to blood. And then, the question will no longer be who wanted to assassinate whom, but what political calculation can see the death of Lebanese people as a means to improve its position.

Here specifically, the case of Michel Samaha regains its meaning, not as evidence of the identity of the current shipment's owners, but as a reminder that the hypothesis of using bombings to reshape political balances in Lebanon is not a literary invention. The assassination of Rafic Hariri and the subsequent assassinations have remained part of a political memory whose questions are still larger than the answers provided by the judiciary.

History is not judged, but it multiplies questions. It does not prove the identity of the perpetrator in Dahr al-Baydar, but it explains why reassurance that the shipment did not explode is not enough.
The danger of the issue is not limited to the possibility of an explosion occurring, but includes the possibility that violence may once again turn into a language for negotiating the future of power in Lebanon.

On the Dahr al-Baydar road, a shipment of explosives stopped. As for the question that did not stop, it is whether Lebanon has truly exited the era in which the balance of power is drawn by fear, or whether that era is still looking for another path to cross?

"MTV Lebanon"