Blasts Near Iranian Embassy in Beirut Kill at Least 23

Suicide bomb blasts near the Iranian embassy in Beirut killed at least 23 people including a diplomat, in the third attack in the Lebanese capital since Hezbollah militants joined the civil war in neighboring Syria.

Ibrahim Ansari, a cleric who acted as the embassy’s cultural attache, died in the explosions yesterday, which also wounded at least 147 people, Lebanon’s state-run National News Agency said. A group affiliated with al-Qaeda claimed responsibility for the attack, al-Jazeera said.

Sectarian violence has surged in Lebanon since May when Hezbollah, a Shiite militant group supported by Iran, acknowledged it had joined Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s forces in his war against mainly Sunni Muslim rebels. Two bombs in Beirut’s southern suburb, a Hezbollah stronghold, killed more than a dozen people in July and August.

The blasts are the work of Syria’s armed opposition, showing it’s “fighting back, and hard, against high-value targets,” said Theodore Karasik, director of research at the Institute for Near East and Gulf Military Analysis in Dubai. Iranian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Marzieh Afkham said in an interview that the explosions were the work of “the Zionist regime and its agents.”

One attacker used a motorbike carrying about 5 kilograms (11 pounds) of explosives, while the other was driving a four-wheel-drive car that contained about 10 times that quantity, the Lebanese army said. Television footage from the scene showed charred vehicles and blast-damaged buildings, with rescue workers picking through the wreckage.
Claiming Responsibility

The Abdullah Azzam brigades claimed responsibility and said attacks would continue until Hezbollah withdraws from Syria and members of the al-Qaeda-linked group are released from Lebanese prisons, al-Jazeera television said.

“This was an attack on Iran for its support for the Syrian government,” said Fawaz Gerges, a professor of Middle Eastern politics and international relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science, in a phone interview.

In addition to military support through Hezbollah, Iran has been bankrolling Assad’s war efforts. The Iranian government signed a $3.6 billion oil credit line with Syria and offered $1 billion in loans to help Syria import goods.

Iran will resume talks on its nuclear program with the U.S. and other world powers in Geneva today, while the Swiss city is also due to host a United Nations-sponsored meeting on Syria next week. Diplomatic efforts have failed to halt the country’s civil war, which the UN says has killed more than 100,000 people since 2011.
Deepening Rifts

Hezbollah’s involvement in Syria has deepened rifts between Sunnis and Shiites in Lebanon, leaving the country without a permanent government since April as the group’s opponents demand it pulls its fighters out.

The Shiite group said extremists linked to the Syrian rebels were behind the August bombings, which were followed by attacks targeting Sunni mosques in Lebanon’s northern city of Tripoli. Hezbollah is considered a terrorist organization by the U.S. and the European Union.

The U.S. “strongly condemns today’s senseless and despicable terrorist bombings,” Secretary of State John Kerry said in a statement yesterday. “Our hearts go out to the Iranian people after this violent and unjustifiable attack.”

Lebanon’s economy has suffered amid the turmoil, growing at an average pace of 1.5 percent since 2011, compared with 7 percent in 2010, according to International Monetary Fund data. The country’s credit rating was cut one level by Standard & Poor’s on Nov. 1 to B-, six levels below investment grade.

The cost of insuring Lebanon’s dollar debt against default rose five basis points, or 0.05 percentage point, to 400, at 3:46 p.m. in Beirut, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

“Lebanon persistently looks to be on the edge of a sectarian civil war, but recently there have been a number of ominous signs of increased violence,” Emad Mostaque, a strategist at Noah Capital Markets in London, said in an e-mailed note that pointed to the increased presence of radical Sunni Islamists in the north.

To contact the reporters on this story: Alaa Shahine in Dubai at [email protected]; Donna Abu-Nasr in Dubai at [email protected]