בשעה 15:30 ינחת חרירי בנמל התעופה של דמשק

13:33 "المنار": الرئيس الحريري يصل الى مطار دمشق عند الثالثة والنصف من بعد ظهر اليوم.

Al-Arabia: Reports say Hariri’s Syria visit will last two days

ואז ב22 לחודש ביום שלישי ארדואן מגיע לשם

לפני שיצא לדמשק נפגש חרירי עם שר החוץ הירדני

Following his meeting with Prime Minister Saad Hariri on Saturday, Jordanian Foreign Minister Nasser Judeh said that Lebanon and Jordan have a special relationship, adding that “Lebanon is an important country on the Arab [World’s] map.”

Judeh said he told Hariri about the latest “concentrated effort” to re-launch the peace process and establish an independent Palestinian state.

The minister called for overcoming the obstacles impeding the creation of a viable Palestinian state.

In an earlier meeting with Foreign Affairs Minister Ali Shami, Judeh said his country supports Lebanon, which he called the “Arab’s voice in the Security Council.”

Judeh also met with President Michel Sleiman on Saturday.

-NOW Lebanon

פעילות דיפלומטית ענפה באזורנו.

כתבת תחקיר של NOW LEBANON על ה"טורה בורה" של לבנון

Sultan Yaqoub is not a usual Bekaa Valley village with small stone houses, dusty roads and villagers donning red and white kufyiehs. The houses in Sultan Yaqoub, a village at the foot of the Ante Lebanon Mountains, are all immense, white palaces, and they are all empty. They started to pop up in the 1980s, when the villagers who had migrated to South America started to come back and erect monuments to the wealth they had accumulated across the ocean. But then they left again and never returned.

“They were not happy here,” says a bearded man walking back and forth in front of his shop’s door, hoping to get lucky and receive a customer. Most people left the village in the 1960s and the rest followed during the civil war, he says. And then, between 1975 -1978 the Palestinian camp appeared on the mountain.

“It is not like any other camp,” the secretary of the municipality, who preferred not to be named, says. “We don’t talk to them, they don’t talk to us. We have no connection with the boys in there.”

“In there” is in fact a tunnel dug into the side of the mountain, where Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC) fighters are hiding. Outside the cave, there is a disused training ground where young Palestinian men from Syrian camps used to prepare for combat. The cave and training ground are well hidden, and nobody dares get near the area for fear of being shot.

The PFLP-GC, led by Ahmad Jibril, a former Syrian army officer, came into being in 1968 during the Syrian-backed split from the original Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Although based in Syria, the PFLP-GC still has three training camps in Lebanon: Sultan Yaqoub, Kfar Zabad and Qusaya.

Jibril’s workshops on the outskirts of his group’s Syrian camps were mentioned as the source of the bomb timing devices used in the Lockerbie plane highjacking. In Lebanon, the PFLP-GC has been involved in a number of clashes with the Lebanese security forces, and in October 2005, the Lebanese army surrounded all three of the organization’s camps and set up checkpoints. Lebanese authorities claimed that the PFLP-GC was receiving arms shipments from across the Syrian border and accused the group of acting on Syria's behalf to stir unrest. In 2009, the Lebanese government also accused the PFLP-GC of launching several rounds of rockets from South Lebanon into Israel. Just last week, Jibril vowed that his group would not surrender its arms to the Lebanese army.

Politicians in Beirut agree that the issue of Palestinian-owned weapons outside the refugee camps is a major concern for the country. “We don’t want any weapons outside the Lebanese army, be they Lebanese or Palestinian,” MP Elie Marouni told NOW. “But this is not just a Syrian or Lebanese problem. It’s connected to peace in the Middle East, and I doubt it is going to be solved easily.”

Two weeks ago an explosion the army deemed “mysterious” rocked Sultan Yacoub. Nobody in the village knows what really happened, but they say they heard the detonation and they suspect it was one of the mines the fighters usually place around their fortress. But the LAF can’t investigate the incident, as Lebanese authorities cannot enter the well-armed PFLP-GC’s territory, for fear they would start a war with the Syrian-backed group.

According to Mahmoud Chokr, a freelance journalist and publicist who covers the Bekaa area, because of the army checkpoints, the fighters have no chance of getting out and crossing the mountain to Syria to bring back weapons as they used to do in the past.


The Lebanese army checkpoint in Kfar Zabad. (NOW Lebanon)

But the villagers in Sultan Yaqoub say that the Palestinian fighters still leave the camp when they “go on a mission” or for “a food run.”

Few people from Sultan Yaqoub venture up the mountain. Villagers say it’s dangerous. “Two years ago they killed a woman because she was working in the field. They shot another one while she was driving her car to the hospital,” the shop owner said.

Nothing happened afterward, no arrest, no investigation. “Now they shoot at you if your car breaks down and you have to stop on the road,” a member of the local council told NOW while having his morning coffee with his neighbors in the back of his vegetable shop.

“They are probably four or five inside that cave up there. But they try to give the impression that they are more. They are placing mines around the camp. That’s why the explosion happened,” one of the men says.

The LAF “headquarters” placed on top of a mountain overseeing the former PFLP-GC training grounds consists of two huts and two trucks. The soldiers at the checkpoint don’t look old enough to grow their beards yet. They stop the few cars passing by, take a look at the driver and then let them go.

The second camp, in the Kfar Zabad area, a few kilometers south of Sultan Yaqoub, is in on a mountain around three kilometers from the border with Syria. The LAF again has checkpoints on all surrounding roads. But the steep footpaths in between the roads are difficult for the young soldiers to guard at night with no equipment other than their old guns.

“During the 2007 war in Nahr al-Bared, people in the village used to say that they could see men coming from the Syrian border to the camp in the mountain. The army increased security then,” Chokr said.

The young Lebanese army soldier at the Kfar Zabad checkpoint looks inside passing cars and lets them go on without checking for papers.

But in the Qusaya area, where the third camp is located, the soldiers at the checkpoint are more careful. They ask for the IDs of all the men in the cars passing by. The PFLP-GC camp here is far from the village, and it straddles the old French mandate border, half of it inside Lebanon, half in Syria.

Back in Sultan Yaqoub, the people say they’ve had enough. “We hate them. Ask the politicians why they keep it like this. And ask Syria, ask [Syrian President] Bashar al-Assad,” a shop owner in the village says.

איראן-שדה הנפט שלנו ואנחנו נשארים שם...

Iran on Saturday acknowledged its takeover of a disputed oil well in a border region with Iraq but insisted the well lies inside Iranian territory, trying to play down any diplomatic fallout.

"Our forces are on our own soil and, based on the known international borders, this well belongs to Iran," the Iranian armed forces command said in a statement, quoted by the Arabic-language Al-Alam satellite television.

Iran's foreign ministry's spokesperson Ramin Mehmanparast accused "external sources" of working to damage relations between Tehran and Baghdad, the official IRNA news agency reported.

"The claim that Iran has occupied an Iraqi oil well is strongly rejected," Alaeddin Borujerdi, head of parliament's national security and foreign policy commission, told IRNA.

The issue was "being examined through diplomatic channels," he said, blaming "foreign media for such propaganda."

-AFP/NOW Lebanon