LAST week a brief but bloody battle took place in the Middle East which went largely unreported in the Australian media.
It marked a significant and alarming development in the rise of the terrorist forces, now including a number of Australians jihadists, which are laying waste to Syria and Iraq.
While Sydney’s sadistic poster boy for terrorism, Khaled Sharouf, may have captured the headlines of late with his well publicised acts of depravity and brutality, the sheer scale of what is occurring and the inevitable repercussions it will have here at home, is something few Australians have grasped.
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It is not just Syria and Iraq that are now involved. There is another country to the west of these two troubled States that has now become a target for the terrorist army formerly known as ISIL or ISIS that has declared its caliphate under the name of the Islamic State.
It is a country that represents the homeland for the largest Middle-Eastern ethnic population in Sydney. It is of course, Lebanon. On August 2 the Lebanese army engaged with Islamic State forces within their own borders near the town of Arsal — in a battle which lasted five days.
According to the Lebanese army’s General Jean Kahwagi the terrorist forces were well armed and captured and killed dozens of Lebanese soldiers.
Their aim was to take parts of southern Lebanon and declare the country under its new caliphate — in other words to annex part of Lebanon into its new illegal terrorist state which now covers northern parts of Syria and Iraq.
According to local newspaper As-Safir, General Kahwagi said the Lebanese army had “saved Lebanon from jihadists before they could declare their own state”.
“The army saved Lebanon from killer ‘sectarian strife-seekers’ by the Arsal battle,” General Kahwagi said.
“Had the army lost, they (jihadists) would have entered Akkar and from there they would have reached the sea and declared their own state,” General Kahwagi warned.
It is believed the Shia-based Hezbollah also joined the fighting, on the side of the Lebanese army, and captured Islamic State fighters, who are predominantly Sunni militants.
The Islamic State, according to Australian defence sources is an army that commands the equivalent of three brigades — around 12,000 troops.
When they captured Tikrit and Mosul in Iraq, they also captured the fleeing Iraqi army’s weaponry, which was all supplied by the US.
It has also seized hundreds of millions of dollars.
The Islamic State is a terrorist organisation of the likes the modern world has never seen. These are not jihadists hiding out in the hills.
It is an army operating under a rigid command structure armed with heavy weaponry and armoured vehicles.
It is also rallying people around the world to its cause through social media — Western Sydney is emerging as a fertile recruitment source.
The engagement of Lebanon in the conflict has obvious implications for the region but also for Australia, which has large Lebanese Muslim and Christian populations.
News of the battle in Lebanon — and the sectarian tone of Shia fighting Sunni on Lebanese soil — is currently rippling through Sydney’s Lebanese community.
“The confrontation has thrown kerosene on the already combustible community relations in Western Sydney,” one informed observer of the situation remarked.
Supporters of the Islamic State in Sydney, which is an illegal organisation under Australian counter terrorism laws, are known to be already trying to apply pressure to some Sydney Muslim businesses to have them declare their allegiance to the caliphate — with the clear aim of then extracting money from them.
Many are now living in fear.
The risk for Australia is that the harmony that has been the fabric of the Lebanese community, which consists of Shia and Sunni Muslim as well as Christians, could easily be shattered by what is occurring in the Middle East.
The patriotic Lebanese are outraged at the Islamic State laying claim to their homeland and authorities in Sydney are concerned at the speed with which historical relationships are being shattered.
To put it bluntly, they are worried about the sectarian conflict spilling over into the Sydney ethnic communities.
What the world is witnessing, and has appeared impotent in dealing with until the US belatedly approved air strikes this week, is a fundamental redrawing of the strategic and political situation in the Middle East.
While it may appear sectarian from afar, the motivating force is a rampant and shockingly violent anti-Western sentiment.
In a briefing last week, based on a global threat assessment provided to the National Security Committee, key Australian intelligence officials warned that the world — and Australia — will be dealing with the dangerous consequences of this for years and possibly decades to come.
Those dire consequences appear to have already started playing out here at home in Western Sydney.
http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/ne...en-lit-in-sydney/story-fni0cwl5-1227024738750
