Hannah McCarthy: Al-Aqbieh latest in a series of attacks on peacekeepers in South Lebanon

Disinformation and propaganda from Hezbollah means United Nations troops are more vulnerable than before

Irish and UN flags are flown half-mast at Unifil headquarters in the southern Lebanese town of Naqoura on Friday. Picture: Mahmoud Zayyat/AFP via Getty Images

The attack in South Lebanon which led to the tragic death of Private Sean Rooney and a serious injury to Trooper Shane Kearney is the latest in a series of hostile altercations between local groups and troops serving with the UN peacekeeping mission in Lebanon (Unifil).

In December 2021, a UN vehicle was vandalised near Bint Jbeil, a stronghold for the Iran-backed militia Hezbollah. The following month, in January 2022, UN patrols in South Lebanon were attacked twice, including around the village of Ramyeh, where a Ghanaian soldier was injured and equipment was stolen. 

Unifil troops have also been blocked from accessing sites in South Lebanon with increasing frequency.

As with most things in Lebanon, the reasons for these hostilities are complicated, ranging from genuine grievances to growing lawlessness to a calculated campaign of manipulation and intimidation by the militant Hezbollah.

Lebanon is a country awash with guns and has inherited a legacy of armed militias from the bloody civil war that ended in 1990. Eighty per cent of the population now lives below the poverty line and cash-strapped security forces have struggled to maintain law and order in the small crisis-riddled Mediterranean country.

A series of armed hold-ups of banks have taken place across Lebanon in recent months, while six people died in a gun battle last year between sectarian militias on the streets of Beirut.

Despite the undercurrent of volatility, the area around the Blue Line in South Lebanon which demarks the line withdrawal for Israeli forces has seen relative stability and peace for 16 years.

Protest by locals

In an interview with the Irish Examiner in February at Camp Shamrock in Atiri in South Lebanon, Lieutenant Colonel Fiachra Keyes said some of the incidents involving peacekeepers may be a form of protest by locals who view the presence of UN vehicles as intrusive. 

Some families now have genuine grievances about the presence of large military vehicles moving in their neighbourhoods or at certain times of the day — in the same way many Irish neighbourhoods could find heavy vehicles regularly driving in their locality disruptive and invasive.

Local leaders in South Lebanon have emphasised that those involved in the spate of altercations with peacekeepers do not represent the wider community. And the reality is that Unifil brings much-needed cash to the area and many local businesses would struggle to survive without the presence of so many peacekeepers.

Irish soldiers at at Camp Shamrock. Picture: Hannah McCarthy

Hezbollah — which waged a war against Israel in 2006 — is now widely believed to be better armed than the Lebanese army. Part of Hezbollah’s strategy in South Lebanon has been to capitalise on genuine frustrations in order to discredit the work of peacekeepers and spread rumours that Unifil is aligned with Israeli forces and carries out surveillance for the neighbouring state with which Lebanon remains officially at war with.

The Israeli military routinely fires missiles through Lebanese airspace at targets in Syria. Many Lebanese are frustrated with Unifil’s inability to stop these violations of Lebanese territory. 

Unifil does not have the powers to stop these violations, but this is not widely appreciated by locals and the issue is often poorly reported on by local media, which are mostly aligned with Lebanese political groups.

For the most part, Unifil patrols take place with members of the Lebanese Armed Forces — the Lebanese military remains well respected by local communities in stark contrast to Lebanon’s political class. UN peacekeepers do undertake smaller patrols by themselves on occasion and have permission to travel freely through the country.

Hezbollah disinformation

Members of Hezbollah and media outlets backed by the militant group have repeatedly spread disinformation that peacekeepers are not allowed to operate independently in South Lebanon. 

A mural at Camp Shamrock. Picture: Hannah McCarthy. 

This makes UN vehicles travelling without an escort from the Lebanese armed forces more vulnerable to attack and given the proliferation of weapons in Lebanon, these types of events have the potential to quickly descend into an armed assault without much notice, as we saw tragically this week in Al-Aqbieh.

The kind of resentment that Hezbollah has been able to stoke among some Shia communities towards peacekeepers is not a uniquely Lebanese phenomenon. Disinformation is increasingly used as a weapon against peacekeeping missions in African states.

In the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Mali, anti-UN messages and imagery involving false claims that peacekeepers support armed groups or terrorists are often distributed online and used to divide communities against peacekeepers.

Information warfare has become an increasingly effective tool to destabilise fragile regions and governments and militaries will need to develop better ways to protect peacekeepers from these insidious forms of attack.