BEIRUT — The roadblocks and sandbags are back, cafes and hotels are nearly empty, and many of the tourists are gone.
Anxiety is gripping Lebanon after a spate of suicide bombings. An ongoing security sweep targeting militants — some of them who had been staying in four-star Beirut hotels — has triggered cancellations of hotel and flight bookings in a country already on edge.
The militants involved are said by security officials to be part of a network of alleged terrorist sleeper cells planning suicide bombings targeting security leaders and civilians alike. That has fueled concerns that Sunni extremists surging in Iraq and Syria were taking their fight to Lebanon next.
Along Beirut’s Mediterranean corniche, crowds are thinner. Not far away is the seaside Duroy hotel — one side of it slightly blackened after a suicide bomber blew himself up during a police raid on his room June 25. At the high-end Beirut Souks shopping complex in downtown, the passages between shops are nearly empty of shoppers.
“In the month or two before the incident at the Duroy, we were seeing a lot of Saudi, Iraqi tourists,” said a 36-year-old bookstore manager in downtown Beirut. “We really thought that the start of this summer was better than the last one.”
“Then the bombings and arrests happened, and we didn’t see them anymore,” she added, asking to remain anonymous because she was not authorized by her employer to speak to journalists.
Lebanon, a tiny country with a history of civil strife, has been profoundly affected by the civil war in neighboring Syria. In addition to the influx of more than 1 million Syrian refugees to the country, the conflict has inflamed tensions among long-feuding sects, causing violence, including street clashes and bombings.
Tourism Minister Michel Pharaon said the number of tourists in 2013 dropped by 1 million, compared with the 2.3 million tourists who visited Lebanon in 2010. The number of visitors for the first five months of 2014 was down 9 percent from the same period last year, although the ministry had no figures for June and July.
Pharaon said Lebanon’s security situation is better than other countries in the region. But, he said, if there is a militant “insistence to target Lebanon, this will impact not just on the tourism sector but the overall situation in Lebanon.”
