
Bilal Erdogan visited Beirut to discuss Turkish support and potential replacement of Unifil forces
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The UNIFIL force's mandate in Lebanon expires next year. Lebanon's army is struggling to disarm Hezbollah in the southern parts of the country.
The Beirut parliament passed the military cooperation agreement on Friday shortly after Bilal Erdogan visited the parliament building. The most important part of the agreement deals with Turkish training of Lebanon's weak national army. During the next year, the UN force UNIFIL will leave Lebanon, after Israel and the US refused to extend its mandate.
Christian President Joseph Aoun and Sunni Prime Minister Nawaf Salam know their armed forces are too weak to tackle their main task, disarming the Iran-backed Shia militia Hezbollah, which dominated Lebanese politics entirely between 2008 and 2024.
During this week's three-day visit, Bilal Erdogan offered Beirut partly to replace Unifil with Turkish troops along the border with Israel, partly aid to demilitarize and rebuild the Shiite villages that were Hezbollah's strongest strongholds before Israel entered Lebanon in the fall of 2024.
The leaders in Beirut know that Israel will object to Turkish military near the border. But they are tired of the protracted negotiations with Israel and the US on a solution for southern Lebanon. This summer, the United States forced Beirut and Jerusalem to accept a program in which Israel will withdraw as Lebanon's army disarms Hezbollah. The disarmament is not a success – Hezbollah's men refrain from confronting the soldiers and move in and out of the area as needed.
They hope to win over Donald Trump for a more active Turkish role in Lebanon.
Lebanon's leadership fears and mistrusts Hezbollah as much as Israel does, but Beirut's priority is to allow the refugees from the border area, a quarter of a million people, to return home. With the rapprochement with Turkey, President Aoun and Prime Minister Salam want to put pressure on Israel to speed up the evacuation of southern Lebanon.
The fact that the US has no objections to Turkey's involvement should worry Jerusalem. Israel has so far acted in southern Lebanon with the good memory of the United States. But President Erdogan and son Bilal - the increasingly likely "heir to the throne" in Ankara - are seeing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's star fall in Washington. They hope to win over Donald Trump for a more active Turkish role in Lebanon. Trump, completely oblivious to the Turkish regime's increasingly brutal treatment of critics and the opposition, continues to heap praise on President Erdogan - while his praise of Netanyahu has cooled precariously since the Israeli and US elections.
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