Lebanon

The leader of Hezbollah told thousands of mourners Thursday that his Shiite Muslim militant organization would strike Israel to avenge the assassination of one of its most elusive top commanders. Israel has denied orchestrating the car bomb attack that killed Imad Mughniyah on Tuesday in Damascus, the Syrian capital.

A U.S. decision to dispatch a warship toward the Lebanese coast was denounced Friday by the Iranian- and Syrian-backed militant group Hezbollah. Bush administration officials said that positioning the destroyer Cole from the island of Malta farther east toward Lebanon was an attempt to bolster security in the Levant, which was the site of a 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah. "The purpose of the U.S.

The assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri was carried out by a network that is linked to other attacks in Lebanon, the chief U.N. investigator in the matter said Friday. In his first report to the Security Council, Daniel Bellemare said that a group conducted surveillance of Hariri, and that some members continued to operate after he was killed in a 2005 bombing. Bellemare said the commission would not disclose any names to preserve confidentiality.

Lebanon's long-simmering political crisis lurched deeper into violent civil conflict Thursday as bands of Shiite and Sunni gunmen battled in the streets for a second day and politicians took to the airwaves to denounce each other for pushing the country toward war.

Army troops moved into the streets of Tripoli on Monday, restoring a precarious calm in northern Lebanon after 10 people died in heavy clashes in recent days, military officials said. "The situation is back to normal since this afternoon, when the army entered all the neighborhoods where the fighting happened," said a high-ranking military officer, who requested anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media. "Our intervention came after a political agreement between all parties."

The Israeli Cabinet's approval Sunday of a prisoner swap with the militant group Hezbollah touched off cries of victory in Lebanon and sparked fresh debate within the Jewish state over the price of its determination to retrieve missing soldiers. After weeks of emotional public speculation and a six-hour Cabinet debate, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's government voted 22 to 3 in favor of a deal that would return two captured Israeli soldiers. Olmert acknowledged Sunday that they were probably dead.

Closing an uneasy chapter of its 2006 war against Lebanon's Hezbollah guerrillas, Israel prepared to swap the most notorious Lebanese convict in its prisons today for the remains of two Israeli soldiers whose capture sparked the fighting. The deal, approved by Israel's Cabinet on Tuesday, revived raw emotions on both sides of the 34-day conflict: Israel's frustration over its failure to crush an Arab foe and Hezbollah's euphoria in holding off a powerful army until a U.N.-brokered truce.

When it comes to strange Middle East bedfellows, Lebanon's latest political partnership may be the most unlikely: The leader of one party has a reputation as a playboy with ties to neoconservatives in the Bush administration. The other group is widely viewed as a community of extremists whose puritanical strain of Sunni Islam inspired Osama bin Laden.

When the warlord finally tried to repent, no one would accept his apology. They'd already formed their opinion of Samir Geagea, once the leader of a fearsome Christian militia. His supporters loved him regardless of what he did. And his rivals and enemies would never see him as anything but a caricature of the excesses, brutality and impunity of Lebanon's civil war. But there are twists to Geagea's tale.

As Hala Haddad watched thousands of families return to their towns and villages in southern Lebanon last summer after a devastating war between the Islamic militant group Hezbollah and Israel, she remembered the night she was forced to flee her home. After bombing intensified over their village, her father summoned Haddad and her four siblings to leave everything behind and run away. An 11-year-old then, she had to walk for miles, as her tiny, slippered feet swelled with pain.