It seems that there in an insistence by Syria at the state level to link the repercussions of its domestic crisis to neighboring countries, and especially Lebanon. Such insistence goes beyond the border areas where Syrians fleeing the violence in their country seek refuge, to reach the core of Lebanese life. It is well known that Syrian refugees in Lebanon, as in other neighboring countries, consist of families that include women and children, who seek to escape with their lives from the killing machine in their towns and villages. In Lebanon in particular, the assistance provided to them is nearly limited to civil society groups, after the state has by virtue of the domestic balance of power given up on doing its humanitarian duty in this respect. Yet the authorities in Damascus, which are harshly critical of the policy of disassociation from the developments in Syria, are pressuring through their allies the Lebanese government to expel these refugees and turn them over to Syrian authorities, under the pretext that they are affiliated to armed groups and represent a rear base for gathering weapons and sending fighters to Syria. Lebanese media outlets loyal to Damascus have for a while been persistently broadcasting “reports" about bases held by the Free Syrian Army (FSA) in Lebanon, in anticipation of the campaign by the Syrian state in this direction. Then the events in the Northern city of Tripoli, close to the Syrian border, came to provide an additional argument for the presence of armed and Salafist groups fighting against the Syrian regime – knowing that what sparked these events was the ambiguous and unlawful arrest of one of the city's inhabitants on charges of having fought in Syria and of supervising the sending of Jihadist fighters there, when nothing could be proven against the accused except that he was active in the field of helping Syrian refugees. Yet the incident in itself and the way the arrest took place at the hands of a security service which is not usually concerned with such cases, and whose leadership is connected to a Lebanese party that supports Damascus, all lead one to conclude that the order to arrest, as well as the charges, came from beyond the border. In fact, Damascus and its allies in Lebanon would not have been forced to take such a crude measure had the President of the Republic and the Prime Minister been providing full political cover to Syria's plan in Lebanon. And it seemed that, even after the events in Tripoli and within the framework of resolving them at the security level, the Prime Minister in particular was not convinced that it was necessary for security forces on the ground to take the side of Syria's supporters in Tripoli – thus refusing to grant cover to the accusation leveled at the city's inhabitants of being Salafists and armed groups that must be warded off. It is believed that such defiance on the part of the President and Prime Minister in refusing to completely identify with the Syrian state narrative in Lebanon about armed groups and Salafists is one of several reasons that have led to the letter presented by Syrian Ambassador to the UN Bashar Jaafari about the latter's activity in Lebanon. The United Nations and the Security Council have dealt with the contents of the letter with a great deal of suspicion, considering it to lack any real value. Moreover, a Lebanese refutation was distributed in Beirut denying that there was any information about everything that was mentioned in the letter, making its source a non-official one. This means that there is fabrication on the part of Syria, perhaps with the help of Lebanese services that deal directly with Damascus, overstepping the executive branch of government in Beirut, aimed at implicating the Lebanese state completely in the Syrian state narrative, and at driving it towards a confrontation with a broad segment of Lebanese society under the pretext that it consists of Salafists and armed groups. In this sense, Jaafari's letter represents incitation to infighting among the Lebanese, which the state would be party to alongside the Syrian regime, and to moving the confrontation between the regime in Damascus and the Syrian opposition to Lebanon.
