As fierce fighting continues in Syria, the death toll according to the United Nations has now reached at least 93,000 and the number of refugees fleeing the country has exceeded 1.5 million.

On the ground, assaults are being conducted on all sides and we have seen increased intervention from other parties, such as Hezbollah. On the international stage efforts are being made to bring all parties to the table and the debate about arming rebels is still raging.

We will be joined by five journalists who have covered the situation in Syria extensively since the uprising began in early 2011. They will be discussing recent developments, on the ground and on the international stage, and asking what changes we could see in coming months.

Chaired by Lyse Doucet, BBC Chief International Correspondent.

The panel:

Dr Halla Diyab is an award-winning screen-writer, producer, broadcaster and the founder and the director of Liberty Media Productions.

Anthony Loyd is an award-winning war correspondent and writer. He is currently roving foreign correspondent for The Times. He has travelled to Syria eight times in the past 15 months to cover the conflict. A former army officer, he served in Northern Ireland and the First Gulf War. He left the army in 1991. He is the author of My War Gone By I Miss It So.

James Harkin has been covering the conflict in Syria from all sides for the last two years, from Damascus, Homs and Aleppo and for The New Republic, The Atlantic Monthly, Newsweek, The Nation, the Guardian and a range of papers throughout Europe. He is director of the think-tank analysing new media and social change, Flockwatching.

Patrick Cockburn has been a Middle East correspondent since 1979, first for the Financial Times, then for The Independent. He has covered the conflict in Syria extensively since protests began in 2011. He is author of several books including The Occupation: War and Resistance in Iraq and Muqtada Al-Sadr and the Battle for the Future of Iraq.

Well, no, not really. In the past couple of weeks we’ve seen reports about an explosion at a Hezbollah arms factory, a military build-up across the border in Israel, an al Qaeda video claiming responsibility for rocket attacks in the south, and 10 people arrested for plotting to attack UN peacekeepers. Oh, and fighter jets have been in the skies over Beirut.

The tension began two weeks ago when a series of blasts in the southern town of Khirbet Silim triggered a slew of conflicting explanations from Hezbollah, the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) and the Israelis. Despite being Hezbollah-controlled territory, a friend of mine was told by the group’s spokesperson that he hadn’t heard about the blast – six hours after it had occurred. 

Eventually it transpired that the building had been a Hezbollah arms depot, which the UN quickly highlighted as a violation of Resolution 1701, and when UNIFIL sent a team of investigators to the site they were pelted with stones and forced to retreat with several peacekeepers injured.

Israel said the explosion was a clear sign that Hezbollah was actively rearming and initially responded by massing troops along the border before reportedly moving tanks into the area yesterday. And if that wasn’t worrying enough, there were also claims that a gun-battle between Israel and the LAF had been narrowly avoided last week when Lebanese authorities claimed an IDF watchtower was illegally positioned. For once, it seems the Blue Helmets managed to step in and calm the mood.

And then, out of nowhere, came a video thought to feature the voice of Osama bin Laden claiming responsibility for rockets launched from southern Lebanon into Israel in January. Whether al Qaeda had anything to do with it or not (I’ll save that for another post), it’s never a good thing to hear bin Laden talking about your country. Especially just after 10 suspected terrorists, thought to be members of the al Qaeda-aligned Fatah al Islam group, were arrested.

So there you have it: two weeks in the NYT’s top tourist destination for 2009. And although many Lebanese are adamant peace will hold, when the country’s fighter jets took to the skies above Beirut this week, after last being deployed over 30 years ago, it was hardly surprising that the city’s visitors from the Gulf were scrambling to evacuate.

If the tourism ministry wants to hit its target of 2 million tourists this year, they’d better warn everyone next time the vintage Hawker Hunters are taken for a spin.

Fair enough, Obama did direct his crucial speech in Cairo last week to the Muslim world, but don’t be fooled into thinking that anything he said in the Maghreb was powerful enough to convince Lebanese voters to choose one politician over another. In fact, in the entire 50-minute speech Obama made just one reference to Lebanon – fearing accusations of interference – and that was to illustrate it’s religious diversity and emphasis the role of the Maronite minority. And of the Beirutis that I’ve spoken to, their most memorable part of the speech was when the President mispronounced hijab as hajib.

Despite this, however, the western press pack were quick to play up the President’s role. The worse offender in the UK was Simon Tisdall of The Guardian. Tisdall, in his piece Lebanon feels the Obama effect, wrote:

"the Beirut turnabout is the first, circumstantial evidence of a tangible "Obama effect" in the Middle East."

Since the voters holding the deciding votes in this election were the Christians, it’s more likely that they took note of the warnings made by Maronite Patriarch Boutros Sfeir that a M8 win would be "a threat to the Lebanese entity and its Arab identity".

It’s possible, though, that undecided Christian voters made their minds up when Hezbollah’s leader, Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, gave a speech on the one-year anniversary of his forces storming Beirut. In a televised appearance, Nasrallah said that events in March 2008 had been ‘a glorious day for the Resistance in Lebanon’. Glorious? Despite Hezbollah vowing never to turn their arms on their own people, these battles across Beirut left 100 dead. As Qifa Nabki suggested at the time, the Hezbollah leader looked to have overstepped the mark with his victorious tone.

But it’s hard to believe that someone as calculated as Nasrallah could make such a pivotal error in the run up to elections, so it’s tempting to side with the conspiracy theorists: perhaps the comments were designed to push undecided Christians towards M14. After all, if elected, a government formed by the Hezbollah-led coalition would surely have faced boycotts from the international community and calls for the Shi’ite group to lay down its arm and back the Lebanese Armed Forces. As it stands, the current status quo allows Hezbollah to keep hold of its weapons, despite outside pressure, and keep its strength at the bargaining table.

And the speech given by Nasrallah on Monday, following the release of official results confirming a M14 victory, supports this theory. After declaring that group’s arms were not up for discussion, the remainder of his speech could almost have been written by the same person who penned Obama’s lines for Cairo. Take this line, for instance:

“Let us build the republic based on truth, clarity and transparency, and not on fears, threats and lies. Let us defend, build and develop our country together."

Yesterday, a spokesman for the Shi’ite party continued with the same reconciliatory rhetoric and told Reuters that the opposition will ‘behave in a highly positive manner and cooperate with the other side’. Whether Hezbollah mean this or not, it certainly puts M14 in a tough position when it comes to forming a government.

“Abu Skandar, who always drives by the university when he comes to Cairo from Heliopolis, has made this passegiata into his personal polling sample to measure the progress or regression of Islamic veiling. I secretly suspect him of privileging the qualitative aspect of the investigation over its strictly quantitative dimensions.

In his defense, it is necessary to admit that one is easily perturbed by the appearance of female students in the Middle East. Cairo, Damascus, Beirut: the explosion of sensuality as one approaches campuses means that even veiling ends up inscribed on the level of the most disreputable fantasies, instead of erasing femininity from the landscape as its partisans wish.

An entirely veiled silhouette opens only through a long slit where black eyes glitter; around her, colleagues shake out their wavy hair and move slowly, their feline walk emphasizing every curve of bodies outlined by very tight clothes. Veiled and ‘naked’ (according to the expressive terminology of the Islamist militants) merely highlight each other, bring each other out, serve as each other’s foil in a perpetually moving game of one-upmanship.” (from Gilles Kepel, Bad Moon Rising

And so it is in Beirut outside the American University. Classes have resumed after term was interrupted by the events of the past couple of weeks. Interestingly, The Daily Star reported on Monday that most of the students to leave the country were Arabs (be it Syrian, Lebanese or from the gulf) and that most foreigners stayed.

I recall even in 2005 that my university back in London considered recalling all its Arabists from Damascus (and the Scandinavians among us did leave) in the aftermath of the Danish cartoon riots.
The Beirut that I returned to last week was a different city from the one we used to visit on long three-day weekends from Damascus. Then, the trip took four hours in an old rusting Mercedes: black leather sofa-like back seats, windows wound down and our only inconvenience the entry and exit forms we had to fill in for both countries.

Arriving in Beirut at Charles Helou station down by the Port, we’d wander round, pop into a bookshop to stock up on novels or whatever piqued our interest, eat fresh fish at a restaurant next to the Mediterranean Sea at sunset…
Call it the ‘Paris of the Middle East’ or whatever you want, the post-civil-war post-Hariri-reconstruction Beirut was never marketed as a backpacker destination. Aiming higher, the idea was (and still is) to appeal to those seeking luxury and a taste of ‘oriental superficiality’. Don’t mention the war, don’t mention Hizbollah, don’t mention the Palestinian refugees. Just pass the wine.

This image keeps snagging on what’s really going on in Lebanon – itself representative of a wider conflict at play in the Middle East and Islamic world. Reading about Hizbollah’s occupation of West Beirut in an internet café in Nairobi, I decided to fly there with Philip to get a sense of how different the city had become since I last visited.
We couldn’t fly directly to Beirut – the ‘opposition’ had blocked the main roads leading to and from the airport – so chose Amman instead.

Arriving in Jordan at three in the morning on the fourth day of the problems in Beirut, we took a taxi up to Damascus (you can’t get a visa at the airport in Syria, but you can at the border), found out that fighting east of Beirut meant the usual route from Syria to Lebanon was closed. We drove north to the border crossing near Tripoli.
Then a quick three-hour drive down to Beirut past the initial deployments of the Lebanese Army to restore calm in the north.

So, the backstory: a general strike supposedly organized in opposition to a Lebanese government minimum wage offer turned into a storm of words between the various political heads, burning tyres on the airport road and skirmishes and street fighting in Beirut itself. The Druze leader Walid Jumblatt – along with members of the US-backed government – had made moves and called for the Shi’a movement Hizbollah (literally ‘the Party of God’) to dismantle its military communications network as well as to sack the head of airport security at Beirut airport, who he claimed had installed a secret camera on one of the runways.

The next few days saw a massive escalation of the conflict; Hezbollah and allied militias swiftly took control of West Beirut from Sunni supporters of the government – itself an indication of considerable prior planning – and fighting spread east outside the city as well as in the north. The deaths of at least 65 people in the worst fighting since the 1975-1990 civil war caused the intervention of the Arab League, lead by Qatar, who helped defuse the crisis and force political players back to negotiations in Doha, where finally rival leaders reached an agreement yesterday at the last minute amid fears no consensus would be reached.

The government rescinded its two decisions that had provoked the crisis, and Hezbollah celebrated forcing the government’s hand. But Hezbollah had turned its guns against fellow-Lebanese, something their leader Hassan Nasrallah said would never happen. This is the main reason Hizbollah have been somewhat reticent these past few days – barring the half an hour of firing-into-the-sky to celebrate the government’s decision to reverse its two decisions.

Philip and I arrived mid-way through the crisis, and as such our arrival was seen as suspicious. The area where I stay in Beirut is very much on a front line (in as much as Beirut’s tall apartment buildings are conducive to the idea of a front line) of the two parties. Shi’a Amal militiamen had set up a roadblock cum checkpoint nearby, and pro-government Hariri’s television station, Future TV, is a couple of hundred metres up the road.

Green Amal flags (see above) marked checkpoints in some areas – manned by members of the notoriously ill-disciplined militia group and Hezbollah’s main Shi’a political rival – but on other streets the green-on-yellow Hizbollah flag was dominant.
The checkpoints and closed-off roads were unexpected, and the most tangible sign of what had changed since I last visited. Gone the feeling of calm, gone the assumptions of safe passage.

I found myself planning out routes between locations and, after a brief but unsettling run-in with Amal, considered leaving. Luckily, the Arab League intervened (led by Qatari Emir Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani) and, four or five days into my stay, the checkpoints were taken down. The flags still fly – I suspect nobody dares take them down.
Last night Philip and I had dinner in Downtown, the chic designer-shopping area previously full of tourists. Lebanese photographers and camera crews were out in force following the “historic peace” declared in Doha following the deal reached at the last minute on Wednesday morning.

Talks had threatened to collapse on Monday evening, but a six-man emergency electoral policy committee meeting on Tuesday evening managed a breakthrough.
A feeling of relief was palpable on the streets in Beirut yesterday evening, therefore, especially with the opposition removing and dismantling their tents at the site of their 18-month sit-in – parliamentary speaker and opposition member Nabih Berri declared that ending the sit in was “a gift” from the opposition to the Doha agreement.

So does this mean everything can continue as normal again, back to the old Beirut? Around 65 people died in the clashes of the past two weeks, and that’s only the most recent issue to consider. The Sunni-Shi’a dimension – part of a wider conflict in the Muslim world – is also left unresolved and festering. An excellent article by Nicholas Blanford for the Christian Science Monitor earlier this week told of Sunnis rearming across the country:

“We were betrayed by Hariri,” says Omar Abed, a resident of the Sunni district of Tariq Jdeide in Beirut. “They should have given us weapons and training so that we could fight back. How can we fight Hezbollah with sticks and stones?”

It was only the non-partisan actions of the Lebanese army that prevailed during the incredible sectarian tensions of early 2007, and these same values were called upon over the past week time and time again as Shi’a Hizbollah groups attacked media outlets of Saad Hariri – the Sunni government politician and son of the assassinated former Prime Minister, Rafiq Hariri.

In both cases, what was not intrinsically a dispute between Islamic sects took on those tones incredibly quickly, this time most notably in fierce fighting in Tripoli, where some of the worst atrocities resulted when supporters of Saad Hariri took revenge on followers of a Syrian-backed party, the Syrian Social Nationalist Party.
Sunni fundamentalists – some of whom are allied to Fath al-Islam, the group that engaged the Lebanese army in a siege over May and June 2007 in Nahr al-Bared camp last year – took advantage of the chaos and confusion to wage their own battles, and even now the threat of the ‘Sunni wildcard’ that continues to cast its shadow over Lebanon.

Even before the Qatar-led Arab League delegation arrived in Beirut, the city was awash with rumours of a Sunni suicide bomber who would detonate himself in the coming days and destroy the fragile peace being held by army. The joke ran that since the Saudi ambassador had just departed on a luxury boat, Al-Qaeda would now be issuing visas to Lebanon on his behalf.
So at the end of this week, General Michel Suleiman will in all likelihood be elected as Lebanese president – the country’s defining political compromise was made in the days following independence from the French in 1943 as by these terms, the president must be a Maronite Christian, the prime minister must be a Sunni, and the speaker of parliament must be Shi’a.
Hizbollah got more or less what they wanted out of the Doha negotiations – even though opposition MP Mohammad Raad said that the agreement was not an ideal one, but nevertheless “enough to take Lebanon from one stage to another.”

And that there is the problem. The political landscape in Lebanon is trying to adapt to the social changes brought about by the July 2006 war with Israel – above all, Hizbollah’s uncertain relationship with the Lebanese state. As veteran political observer Sofia Saadeh puts it:
 

“Since the Lebanese system revolves around the sects sharing power, this is a very crucial shortcoming. So, every time a sect wants to move forward and upward in the political hierarchy, we end up with strife.”

So peace for now. But surely conflict – whether armed or not – to come.
For me, though, my trip here has come to an end and I’m winding down before heading back home to Kabul. I received an email with photos of my garden there yesterday (see below), and am eager to get back.

There was the constant roar overhead day and night. Then there was the constant buzz of the drones. Like malevolent model airplanes controlled by a Damian devil child, you could hear them diving down, the buzz growing louder and louder as if they had to be close enough to attack. But you could never see them. You knew someone in Tel Aviv was watching from the camera aboard. Waiting for a missile to strike could drive you crazy. Or to prayer.

The source of the fear was the Israeli announcement that anything moving on the roads would be considered hostile and a target. We saw they meant what they said. Roads were cut in half by huge bomb craters. One outside Srifa had a truck in the centre, a family’s suitcases still jumbled in the back. Burned wrecks of cars littered the roadside.

I thought it would be safer to follow ambulances who braved the roads to try to reach wounded civilians. That was until two ambulances, one from Tibnin and one from Tyre, were both hit by missiles while their medics were transferring victims from one to another. I saw the ambulances the next day; both had been hit by missiles, dead in the centre of the Red Cross on top of their roofs. Three medics were injured; one of their patients, who had been lightly wounded, lost a leg in the second bombing. There was no doubt the pilot knew what he was hitting; they had their blue lights on, their flags flying, and huge Red Crosses on their roofs. I talked to the three injured medics the next day; they were back on the job.

You can’t cover a war from your hotel room. In any war, both sides lie and you have to go out on those roads to find out what the Israelis were bombing, who were the victims, and what Hezbollah was doing. We all put big tape “TV” signs on top of our cars – we were very envious of someone who had brought special tape from Baghdad that was supposed to reflect on radar at night – but it seemed a protection more psychological than real. A young Lebanese journalist was killed when her car was hit from the air.

I decided to go south to Tyre, the southern Mediterranean port, and stay in the old quarter on the harbour. I found a small family hotel in the Christian quarter which I thought would be a relatively safe because there was no Hezbollah presence. TV journalists set up in a resort on the beach because they needed to do live shots in open air and the quarter is cramped and crowded with narrow streets laid long before cars existed.

The walk from the hotel to the only restaurant open for food became increasingly comical. The fishermen were banned from going out by the Israeli naval warships off the coast and so drank all day at a bar on the waterside, their eyes on their painted boats. By nightfall, they were completely drunk and would shout increasingly rude greetings. One of them beat up the Sun reporter. I don’t know why.

The dangers were both real and imagined. I was in one of the first three cars to drive down to Tyre. Journalists had been bottled up in Beirut since the opening salvo of the war that destroyed the Beirut airport and bridges across Lebanon. We decided to go south because that was where the fighting was. Three cars seemed safer. Surely the Israelis in the sky would see it was a journalist convoy? We had no information, but the story was in the south.

The road was packed with refugee cars streaming north to Beirut. We were the only car going the other way. Then the roads were completely empty for an hour. It was unnerving. We could hear the planes overhead. In Nabatiyeh, there was real worry; we met a crew from al-Manar, the Hezbollah station, in full gear; helmets and flak jackets. They said Nabitiyeh had just been bombed, there was a huge unexploded bomb just ahead, and they weren’t going further south. Hezbollah is not going further south? I thought. There was one of those journalist conclaves where there is a lot of talk, no decisions, and we decided it was way too dangerous to be standing on a road, in a convoy of three cars, no decision having been made, we continued south anyway. A good friend in my car, Hassan al-Fitah of the New York Times, mumbled prayers from the Koran the entire way, turning once in a while to joke, “Import-Export,” meaning let’s go into some safe profession.

There were many moments of black humour as we made our forays from the hotel to the villages that were being bombed. The extraordinary Hassan provided comic relief. Every night after a near death experience on the road, he would vow that was the last time, he had a wife and a newborn, and he was not taking any risks. And every day he would go out again. Once I looked out the window of my hotel at the sound of a blast and saw geysers erupting from the sea about 30 yards from the hotel. I ran to say we were under attack. On closer inspection, it was fishermen dynamiting for that night’s meal.

I kept losing drivers and translators. The two who came down from Beirut with me, Adnan the translator and Hussein the driver, burst into the room at 6am and said the Israelis had ordered everyone south of the Litani out. They were leaving; we had to leave or die. It was very dramatic, but if the Israelis were invading, it was my duty as a journalist to report. Didn’t they care? Absolutely not. They left.

The New York Times and I hired another driver, Imad, who turned into an amazing King Rat figure. Imad drove us once, but then decided it was too dangerous. He took over the cooking at the hotel, he reorganized the accounts and helped the manager

Raymond sortet out who was living in what room, thus keeping him sane and the hotel open, and got into black market fuel, which meant we had petrol for our cars. Imad did everything but what we were paying him for: to drive. Could some of the Israeli jets flying overhead have been using scare tactics rather than really trying to kill? It’s possible.

On a drive to Tibnin, where I had heard refugees were streaming into the hospital from outlying villages under siege, warplanes dive-bombed the car. They came so low we jumped out and took refuge under the verandas of buildings, scant refuge it must be said because we’d seen what their bombs could do to buildings. Then they left. We got to Tibnin, and they started shelling the slope that led down from the hospital, setting fields on fire.

There was a reason for journalists to be there. We were not taking risks for bylines. When the Israelis announced they had taken Bint Jubail, I drove there. There was another mad moment; I was driving with an American radio reporter who had served in the military. She got out of the car and waved her sunhat at what appeared to be a drone descending on us. We couldn’t see it. Did he see us or just go away? Who knows.

Getting to Bint Jubail, we could say the Israelis had not captured it. There was clearly a gun battle and they had pulverized the main street from the air. We dragged several old women and an old man from the rubble. That was all that was left.

When Qana was hit, we arrived within hours. Israel had not hit a Hezbollah headquarters as they claimed. Instead they had hit a large family house. Civilians had been sheltering in the basement. We watched them being carried out of the cellar – fat women in their nightclothes, little kids with dirt in their mouths. That’s what we were there for.