EFFORTPOST Lebanon is having an especially spicy week of assassinations

Two high profile murders have occured in Lebanon in recent days and they seem to be linked.

Jbail, the biblical Byblos. (See what I did there?)

Pascal Sleiman was the leader of the Lebanese Forces party in Jbail. According to army intelligence, a gang of Syrians pistol whipped him and dumped him in the trunk of his own car where he suffocated. They took his car and drove back to al-Qusayr just across the Syrian border. The motive was just to steal his car and had nothing to do with politics.

Pascal Sleiman.

Many people don't buy it. The Lebanese Forces is one of the two main Christian parties and the most important faction opposing Hezbollah. Hezbollah controls al-Qusayr and has long been notorious for protecting criminals in the nearby Bekaa Valley. And why would carjackers bother to kill him and bring his body back to Syria?

Syrian troops celebrating the fall of of al-Qusayr after a joint operation with Hezbollah, 2013.

On the other hand there are reasons to believe the official story. If Hezbollah did it then why would their allies in the army arrest the suspects? Why not just make up the same story but say they got away?

Karantina, January 18, 1976. The defenseless Beirut neighborhood was destroyed by Christian militias with hundreds killed and r*ped.

LF supporters have understandably gone apeshit and insist it had to be an assassination. They're reacting like you would expect, blocking the coast road in Jbail and attacking random innocent Syrians, of whom there are still a million or more living in Lebanon after fleeing Syria's civil war. Hezbollah's leader pointed to this and compared it to the LF's role in starting the civil war in 1975. Nadim Gemayal, an ally of the LF, responded by putting 100% of the blame for the civil war on the Palestinians and made a truly deranged comment claiming that the LF were actually the real victims when they carried out the Karantina and Tal el-Zaatar massacres.

Nadim Gemayel's father Bashir was the hottest of Lebanese warlords but he looks weird and effeminate like his uncle Amine instead. Also fat.

Major plot twist: It turns out that an important Hezbollah associate who had disappeared a few days before Sleiman's death had actually been murdered as well. Mohammad Sarur was known to play an important role in passing money from Iran to Hamas. He was found a week after disappearing in a house in Beit Mery, tortured to death with 10 gunshots to his legs. A large amount of cash was found with him, ruling out robbery. The killers were pros who have managed to disappear without a trace. It is virtually certain he was assassinated by Mossad.

Mohammed Sarur.

So is this a coincidence or are the two murders linked? It would be wildly irresponsible to speculate, so I'm going to speculate now. The LF has been allied with Israel on and since the 1970s. Did Hezbollah realize their guy had been killed and retaliate by killing a leader of the LF? Or did they believe the LF had some hand in his death? After all, Beit Mery is a mostly Christian town where the LF must have some presence. Why choose Sleiman? Jbail is of no significance to Hezbollah. Did Sleiman have some secret importance or tie to Israel that Hezbollah knew about?

The view from Beit Mery, a resort town in the mountains above Beirut.

Whatever the truth is, we can guess the future will be a total shitshow. Any time when the Maronite patriarch is begging people to show restraint you know things are about to get ugly. Hezbollah's popularity is probably at an all-time low right now. Some Lebanese support its rocket attacks on Israel but many more, especially among Christians, resent being dragged into war by an unelected militia that seems to care more about Palestine, Syria, and Iran than their own country. Everyone remembers the 2006 war when Israel failed militarily but inflicted massive damage to civilian infrastructure that has still never been repaired. Even before the Gaza war began, Hezbollah had already been deeply unpopular for its role in keeping the government totally dysfunctional. Its enemies see this moment as an opportunity to take it down a few pegs, so expect them to make more aggressive moves in the near future.