Lebanese security forces have arrested a man accused of transferring nearly half a million dollars to the ISIS group in neighboring Syria, a judicial official told AFP on Tuesday. Forces "arrested a man who had stolen $400,000 from his father's safe, and investigations showed that he had transferred the money to Syria" for ISIS, the official said on condition of anonymity. The inquiry also showed that the individual was "part of a cell active between Lebanon and Syria" that included three members who are in prison in the Lebanese city of Tripoli and "handled coordination with ISIS in Syria", the official added. Two other suspected cell members are believed to have crossed Lebanon's porous border into Syria after the matter was uncovered. The group "was responsible for funding ISIS with the aim of carrying out terror acts, whether inside Syrian territory or in Lebanon", the official added. Lebanese authorities previously said they had detained a Syrian ISIS commander in late June, accusing him of being the group's leader in central and southern Syria. Last year, Lebanon's military said it arrested the suspected leader of ISIS in the country, implicating him in planning several operations. Once in control of swathes of Syria and Iraq, ISIS was territorially defeated in Syria in 2019, but remnants of the group are still there, particularly in the country's vast desert. The group occasionally claims attacks mainly targeting Syrian security forces. Syria's new authorities last year joined the US-led coalition against ISIS. In Lebanon, extremist groups that pledged allegiance to ISIS fought several battles with the army in the 2010s and carried out a series of deadly bombings targeting the Lebanese group Hezbollah and its supporters. But they were largely defeated militarily in 2017. Hezbollah fought in support of now-ousted Syrian ruler Bashar al-Assad during the country's civil war. Also on Tuesday, authorities in Syria announced the arrest of an unspecified number of individuals accused of belonging to ISIS in the northern province of Aleppo. Earlier this month, Syrian authorities said they captured an ISIS-linked cell responsible for two bomb blasts during French President Emmanuel Macron's recent visit to Damascus.
