Western countries have shown no willingness to open a Libyan-style military campaign against the regime of President Bashar Assad, who has launched a bloody crackdown on the seven-month uprising against his rule, and NATO’s chief said last week the alliance has “no intention whatsoever” of intervening in Syria.
In a speech late Sunday, Grand Mufti Ahmad Badreddine Hassoun, a state-appointed cleric and Assad loyalist, issued a clear warning to the West.
“I say to all of Europe, I say to America, we will set up suicide bombers who are now in your countries, if you bomb Syria or Lebanon,” Hassoun said in a speech late Sunday. “From now on an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.”
Hassoun spoke to a delegation of Lebanese women who came to offer their condolences for his son’s death by unknown gunmen earlier this month. “Don’t come near our country, I beg you,” Hassoun said.
The international community’s unwillingness to get directly involved stems from a mix of international political complications, worries over unleashing a civil war and plausible risks of touching off a wider Middle East conflict with archfoes Israel and Iran in the mix.
Hassoun’s comments follow another warning by Syrian Foreign Minister Walid Moallem, who told the international community Sunday not to recognize a new umbrella council formed by the opposition, threatening “tough measures” against any country that does so.
Moallem did not specify what measures Damascus might take. But he went on to say that countries that do not protect Syrian missions could find their own embassies treated in the same way.
The Syrian National Council, announced last week in Turkey, is a broad-based group which includes most major opposition factions. No country or international body has recognized it so far as a legal representative of the Syrian people, but the European Union is intensifying its contacts with the nascent Syrian opposition.
