Lebanon is consumed by the fire of the dollar and the drug “mafia”.
Burning bank branches in Beirut… smugglers kill 3 soldiers in the Bekaa
Friday – 26 Rajab 1444 AH – 17 February 2023 AD Issue No. [
16152]
A demonstrator throws a stone at a bank branch that was set on fire in downtown Beirut yesterday (AFP)
Beirut: «Asharq Al-Awsat»
Between the streets of the Lebanese capital, Beirut, and the outskirts of the Bekaa region near the Syrian border, the crisis in Lebanon yesterday revealed two aspects of the suffering of the citizens. On the one hand, they face the “fire” of the exponential rise, which has become without controls in the price of the dollar, and on the other hand, drug dealers continue to harm the country’s reputation and its foreign relations, while the Lebanese army made a decision to pursue them after they became a kind of “mafia”, out of sight. security forces. Yesterday, as a result of these pursuits, three members of the Lebanese army were killed, who clashed with wanted persons in a village in the Bekaa region, and three of them were killed and three others were arrested, while some of them fled towards the border outskirts with Syria.
In Beirut, the anger of the depositors whose money the banks withheld while they were suffering from the continuous rise in prices exploded, so a number of them set fire yesterday in a number of bank branches, while the protests were previously limited to storming them from a number of depositors. Dozens participated in the movement called for by the “Depositors’ Cry” association, which has recently spearheaded judicial and field actions against banks. Later, a number of depositors gathered in front of the house of the head of the Association of Banks, Salim Sfeir, and burned tires, and some of them threw stones over the walls into the house.
In terms of pursuing drug dealers, security sources told Asharq Al-Awsat that the decision “has been taken to pursue them, dismantle their activities, and hand over the wanted persons to the judiciary,” noting that the raids “are carried out almost daily, amid information that some of them have taken refuge in the Syrian border villages inhabited by Lebanese.” In Al-Qusayr, in the southern countryside of Homs.
Popular anger explodes in the face of Lebanese banks, and two branches are burned in Beirut
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