Bombers Kill 26 Near Iranian Embassy in Beirut

At least 26 people were killed, and 140 others reported wounded when a pair of suicide bombers detonated outside of the Iranian embassy in the Lebanese capital city of Beirut.

Though the initial assumption would’ve been the attack was more spillover from the Syrian Civil War, this does not appear to have been the case, as a domestic al-Qaeda faction, Abdullah Azzam Brigades, claimed credit for the strike, saying it was an attack on Lebanese Shi’ite faction Hezbollah, a close ally of Iran.

Of course it’s impossible at this point to fully disconnect Syria’s war and Lebanon’s growing sectarian tensions, but the al-Qaeda group’s  has repeatedly blamed Hezbollah for the assassinations of Sunni politicians inside Lebanon.

Iran condemned the attacks as having been carried out by “Zionists and their mercenaries,” and insisted that they will not be chased out of their embassy by such attacks. It isn’t clear how many Iranians were among the slain, but Iran’s cultural attache to Lebanon, Ibrahim Ansari, was confirmed to have died of his wounds shortly after the attack.