gotchanewsdaily.com 
Just before the interview, as the sun set, a loud boom echoed and bounced off the mountains, prompting his aides and armed guards to glance north in the direction of the Shiite village of Maaysrah. Just days earlier, an Israeli airstrike there killed five people from the same family and wounded 14 others. But in the absence of any billowing smoke, the guards concluded the bang was a sonic boom from Israeli warplanes.
Geagea’s compound was built more than 30 years ago, during the 1975-1990 civil war. “We started building during war-time. So we took into consideration it should be solid in order to sustain shelling. So it is solid,” he says.
He suspects that the 2012 assassination bid was mounted after weeks of secret surveillance of the compound, with the plotters establishing his pattern of his comings and goings.
It was in the Maarab compound that, in 2016, Geagea struck an agreement with the Free Patriotic Movement (FPM), a rival Christian group. This paved the way for its leader Michel Aoun to become Lebanon’s president — ending, albeit briefly, decades of animosity between the two main Christian leaders. Their forces clashed heavily in 1990 in East Beirut.
Divide and rule?
Geagea is not the only war leader from the past scrambling to plot a course for Lebanon. In another mountain fort, in the Chouf Mountain, south-east of Beirut, Druze leader Walid Jumblatt is also trying to weave a path forward.
He, too, has called for appointing a president, but he’s publicly more cautious than Geagea and parts company with him over how to handle Hezbollah. Jumblatt is far less confrontational with the Shiite movement, fearing the Israelis are playing their old game of divide and rule and seeking to exploit divisions between Lebanon’s Shia, Sunni Muslims, Christians and Druze. The Lebanese Force’s civil war-era collaboration with Israel plays an important role in overall Druze suspicion of Geagea.
