Explainer: As Israel bombards Beirut, we take a look at Britain’s military role in Lebanon.
UK and Lebanese paratroopers train near Beirut last year (Photo: Marwan Naamani / Alamy)
In his first public speech as chief of MI6 in 2021, Sir Richard Moore said his intelligence agency was “actively focused on Iran”.
This was part of what he described as a “dramatic change in the security landscape” in which there was “a growing threat from state actors”.
But alongside Iran, Russia and China as the UK’s demons, he also identified Iran-backed Hezbollah as “a state within a state, contributing directly to state weakness and political turmoil in Lebanon”.
Countering Hezbollah has long preoccupied British planners. The UK has for years pumped money into the Lebanese military to build it up as an alternative national security force to its Iran-backed rival.
Labour ministers, who backed Israel’s assault on Gaza, are now urgently calling for a ceasefire amid the invasion of Lebanon, which could spark a still wider conflagration.
The UK government dispatched 700 troops to Cyprus, ostensibly to prepare for an evacuation of around 10,000 British nationals in Lebanon, with the SAS apparently already on the ground.
Yet Britain’s military was in Lebanon years before Israel’s invasion. So what’s it been doing there, and why?
Alternative to Hezbollah
Lebanon has long been teetering on the brink. The main fear of Anglo-American planners has been that Lebanon’s political and economic crisis will translate into ever-increasing influence for Hezbollah and tilt the country even more towards Iran.
Western planners have similar considerations in another ‘buffer’ state, Ukraine, in which Nato sees Russia as a rival for control over the territory and the wider region.
To retain Lebanon in the Anglosphere, the British and American militaries have long cultivated the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF), seeing it as “a national representative institution to provide an alternative to Lebanese Hezbollah”, as a senior US official said in 2021.
Labour’s new foreign minister Hamish Falconer recently put it just as clearly. He told parliament: “Our assessment remains that a strong, sovereign Lebanon with strong state institutions, including the Lebanese Armed Forces, is the best way to tackle Hizballah’s [sic] influence in Lebanon”.
Hezbollah draws its support from the country’s Shia Muslims, who comprise around 30% of the population. The rest of Lebanon is mainly Sunni Muslim or Maronite Christian, with the LAF meant to be a national, multi-communal security agency, capable of playing a balancing act in political crises.
To Washington and London, however, it’s more that the LAF are an obvious force through which to exert their influence, to counter Iran’s Shia theocracy and its proxy force in Lebanon.
The US has poured $3bn in military aid into the LAF since 2006 and trained thousands of its troops, to provide that counterweight to Hezbollah.
The LAF is led by General Joseph Aoun, himself a US-trained soldier who visited America in June for talks with Pentagon officials and is tipped to be a future president of Lebanon.
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Deterring Iran
The UK’s support has been smaller but still significant. Britain has pumped over £100m since 2009 into the LAF, mainly to help it patrol the border between Lebanon and Syria, which is vulnerable to smuggling and ISIS.
Britain has trained over 26,000 LAF personnel and provided military vehicles and spare parts to Lebanon’s Land Border Regiments.
British military involvement has also extended to training Lebanon’s special forces. Last year, the Parachute regiment held the largest ever joint military exercises with Lebanon’s Air Assault regiment.
The UK embassy in Beirut noted at the time that “British military training teams continue to work alongside all branches of the Lebanese military – Army, Navy, Air Force and Special Forces – to support them in their essential roles and UK is proud to be a principal partner of the LAF, providing equipment, training and infrastructure.”
Hundreds of soldiers in the UK’s elite Rangers regiment have been in Lebanon for months, ostensibly to support an evacuation, but with their role going much further.
Speaking to the House of Commons defence committee in November 2023, the head of the army, General Sir Patrick Sanders, pointed to what the purpose of these forces is.
He said: “We have our special operations forces, the Rangers, in Lebanon. They have been there for many years, and they have built up a very close relationship with the Lebanese armed forces. That provides an insight and influence on Lebanese decision making and seeing things from the other side of the northern border, which clearly concerns Israel.”
Sanders added that the range of contingencies the UK military was looking at in Lebanon was “primarily to deter any Iranian action but also to reassure other partners”.
Precisely what Lebanon’s special forces will now do in light of Israel’s invasion is unclear. Equally uncertain is the role of the British-trained LAF.
Lebanese troops recently opened fire on Israeli forces after two LAF soldiers were killed. At least 18 LAF personnel have been killed by Israel since the conflict with Hezbollah escalated.
The LAF redeployed a few miles north of the border after Israel’s invasion, and is a much weaker force than the better-armed IDF.
This leaves Hezbollah to defend south Lebanon’s Shia communities, which will only boost the group’s standing should it survive Israel’s onslaught.
Internal security
Another sign of Whitehall’s concerns about Lebanon is that British training has also focused on the country’s “internal security”.
A joint memorandum of understanding signed in December 2022 extended a £15.9m British police training programme running to 2025, to give “support to the Ministry of Interior’s vision to strengthen the resilience of the Internal Security Forces” – a para-military police unit.
This followed a similar police training programme worth £18.5m between 2019-2022. Declassified previously showed that part of this programme sought to instil “responsibility amongst those living within the Palestinian camps” in Lebanon which are described as “volatile communities”.
That the American and British military programmes in Lebanon are complementary – as they tend to be throughout the world – is suggested in a 2006 file revealed by WikiLeaks around the time that the current military support programmes were initiated.
This cites a senior US official who said the Lebanese government was encouraged to accept a British offer of military support since “the British proposal is a solid complement to the efforts to reinvigorate the relationship between the American and Lebanese armies”.
What covert activities the British are likely to be running in Lebanon has never been made public. A small group of US special forces in Lebanon operate a ‘secret’ war against terrorist groups like Islamic State and Al Qaeda, and have conducted operations against Hezbollah itself.
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Great game
Richard Moore’s predecessor as head of MI6, Sir Alex Younger, recently toldthe BBC that Iran and Israel were engaged in a “shadow war” in the Middle East.
Tehran’s proxy forces in the Middle East are being used “to destabilise the region for the United States and for Israel”, he said.
There is no doubt that Britain and the US are seeking to curb Iran’s influence in the region, and ideally change a regime in Tehran that acts as the biggest deterrent to Western domination of the Middle East.
But what role do they see Israel playing in that shadow, or perhaps real, war? Is it still playing the role of western attack dog, its strategic asset?
Or in annihilating Gaza, blitzing Lebanon, and hoping to attack Tehran, perhaps western policy-makers will finally realise that their key ally is actually an enormous liability.
And is Britain, despite its calls for a ceasefire in Lebanon, going to throw away its investment in the Lebanese military by letting Israel storm through another neighbour?