Pro-Assad cleric killed in Lebanon

TRIPOLI: A Lebanese Sunni cleric close to the Syrian regime of President Bashar Assad was shot dead in the northern Lebanon town of Tripoli on Tuesday, a security source said.
“Sunni sheikh Saadeddine Ghiyeh was mortally wounded by a bullet to the head while he was getting into his car in the Bahsa neighborhood in the center of town,” the source told AFP.
“Two masked men on a motorbike pulled up alongside him and one of them shot and seriously injured the cleric, who was declared dead upon his arrival in hospital.”
The 43-year-old was a member of the Islamic Action Front, an umbrella grouping of pro-Syrian regime Sunni groups in Lebanon.
He was wounded several months earlier by a grenade that was thrown at him.
He was reportedly close to the head of the Front, Hashem Minkara, who was arrested four days ago on suspicion of involvement in an August 23 double bombing in Tripoli that killed 45 people.
Violence has usually pitted the Sunni neighborhood of Bab Al-Tebbaneh, which backs the Syrian uprising, against the neighborhood of Jabal Mohsen, which is populated by Alawites.
Meanwhile, the Western-backed Syrian National Coalition opposition grouping named a provisional government on Tuesday for rebel-held areas after three days of heated discussions in Istanbul, and despite Western opposition, coalition members said.
The United States and other Western backers of the coalition are hoping that proposed peace negotiations in Geneva will produce an interim administration as a way out of the civil war, which began in 2011.
The West fears that by preempting that with a de facto Cabinet, the opposition will hamper progress. However, although the SNC serves as a channel for Western support for the rebels, its leaders are all outside Syria and their influence on the disparate rebel groupings is patchy at best.