Bombing in Lebanon said to be Islamic State's work

IRBIL, Iraq -- The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant expanded its operations to Lebanon on Friday, security officials said, almost assassinating a top Shiite Muslim security official with a suicide car bomb just hours after a series of government raids captured at least 17 suspected members of the group in a Beirut hotel.

Maj. Gen. Abbas Ibrahim, the director of the powerful General Security Directorate, had passed a checkpoint in the Beqaa Valley on the highway linking Beirut and Damascus on Friday when a suicide car bomb exploded, killing an officer and wounding 19 people. His convoy was unscathed.

Lebanon went on high alert last week after the Islamic State, which occasionally has been fighting the Lebanon-based Shiite radical group Hezbollah in Syria, took over a large swath of northern Iraq as part of its goal to turn the entire Levant region, which includes Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Jordan, into an Islamic caliphate. The Islamic State controls much of eastern Syria and western and northern Iraq and has been pressing a conventional military offensive, backed by disenfranchised Sunni tribes, on Baghdad.

In Iraq, the nation's top Shiite cleric during a sermon Friday urged Iraqis to unite to expel militants from the country and called for the formation of a new government.

Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani said a new government would help avoid "past mistakes," a thinly veiled critique of Nouri al-Maliki, a Shiite politician who has served as Iraq's prime minister since 2006.

While al-Maliki's State of Law bloc won the most seats in the parliament in Iraq's April 30 election, his hopes for a third term are now in doubt, as rivals are challenging him from within the broader Shiite alliance. To govern, his bloc must first form a coalition with other parties.

"It is necessary for the winning political blocs to start a dialogue that yields an effective government that enjoys broad national support, avoids past mistakes and opens new horizons toward a better future for all Iraqis," al-Sisanti said in a message delivered by his representative, Ahmed al-Safi, in the Shiite holy city of Karbala.

The cleric described the Islamic State as a "plague" on the region.

Sunni militants overran one of the last government-held crossings on the Syrian border Friday after a fierce battle that left at least 34 Iraqi soldiers dead.

Police and government officials reached in Qaim, the western border city of about 250,000 near the crossing, said Iraqi army troops were overwhelmed by "hundreds" of fighters from the Islamic State. A small part of the city and the border crossing remained under government control late Friday, according to local officials and a Western military expert.

Friday's deadly car bombing in Lebanon came just hours after a series of raids by Lebanese security forces on a central Beirut hotel led to the arrest of at least 17 people and saw armed men chasing suspects through the streets of one of the capital's most cosmopolitan central districts. Earlier, the government announced that it had uncovered a plot to assassinate Ibrahim and Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri, both prominent Shiite Muslim political figures and close allies of Hezbollah.

It was not precisely clear whether the attack was aimed at Ibrahim in that spot, as some local security officials claimed, but he had been named a target by the Islamic State in the past.

Lebanon had been the victim of a dozen suicide bombings spanning from last summer until February by groups including al-Qaida and the Islamic State in revenge for Hezbollah's strong support for the Syrian regime, a move that angered large swaths of Lebanon's Sunni population, which mostly has supported the rebels.

After Friday's bombing, troops began enforcing strict measures at all entrances to Beirut's southern suburbs, setting up checkpoints and searching cars.

Security forces also deployed at all the entrances to Beirut, preventing trucks from entering the Lebanese capital for fear of more bombings.

A series of arrests and military operations by both the government inside Lebanon and by Hezbollah along the Syrian-Lebanese border appeared to end the attacks. But fear that the Islamic State would reconstitute a militant network appeared to come true Friday.

"This is why we're fighting in Syria," a Hezbollah commander said by instant messaging from Beirut. He asked to speak anonymously because the group does not allow members to speak to the media. "These Takfiris have shown they want to take over the entire region and have an agenda to fight Iran and destroy the Shiite government in Iraq. We know they will come for Lebanon again and are ready to fight them every day."

A powerful truck bomb also exploded Friday in a government-held village in central Syria, killing at least 34 civilians and wounding more than 50, as fighters from the Islamic State stormed the town of Muhassan on the Euphrates River after rebels from the Western-backed Supreme Military Council defected to the jihadi group, activists said. The village is in the eastern oil-rich province of Deir el-Zour.

The capture of Muhassan, about 60 miles from the Iraqi border, and two nearby villages comes a week after the group swept across wide areas in northern and central Iraq, capturing that country's second-largest city of Mosul, and carving out a large region straddling the border.

Information for this article was contributed by Mitchell Prothero of McClatchy Newspapers; by Sameer N. Yacoub, Bassem Mroue, Zeina Karam and Matthew Lee of The Associated Press; and by Alissa J. Rubin and Duraid Adnan of The New York Times.

A Section on 06/21/2014

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