Date and time: Wednesday, August 19, 12 noon Eastern Daylight Time (UTC-4)
Register on Zoom here [1].
Featuring Tony Badran, Lebanon expert at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
Lebanon, once called “the Paris of the Middle East,” has been suffering from decade upon decade of corruption, mismanagement and hyperinflation. Even before the August 4 explosion, which rocked the entire city of Beirut and left over 165 people dead, about 5,000 wounded and 300,000 homeless, there had been demonstrations on the streets because of the cost of bread and milk.
Increasing evidence has come out that Hizbullah was in control of the warehouse on the port of Beirut where approximately 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate had been stored.
What is next for Lebanon? How does one get aid directly to the people and circumvent the suffocating clutch of Hizbullah on Lebanon’s infrastructure?
Here to answer these questions and more is Tony Badran.
Badran is a research fellow at FDD, where he focuses on Lebanon, Hizbullah, Syria, and the geopolitics of the Levant. Born and raised in Lebanon, Tony has testified to the US House of Representatives on several occasions regarding US policy toward Iran, Syria, and Lebanon. His research currently focuses on the relationship between Iran’s Hizbullah model and regional states, as well as the history of and future scenarios for Israel-Hizbullah wars. His writings have appeared in publications including The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The New York Post, The Atlantic, Foreign Policy, Foreign Affairs, and The Weekly Standard. He is a columnist and Levant analyst for Tablet magazine.