BEIRUT: Negotiations between the Lebanese government and militants holding 27 Lebanese servicemen hostage will likely take a positive turn this round, former mediator Sheikh Mustafa Hujeiri said, adding that they had yet to resume. According to the Arsali sheikh, who maintains strong ties with the Nusra Front, Qatar’s envoy, Ahmad al-Khatib, representing the Lebanese government in talks with militants, had yet to arrive on Arsal’s outskirts.
Hujeiri, who had visited the outskirts earlier Wednesday, said that “by the time I left, the mediator had not yet arrived.”
The Nusra Front and ISIS militants who captured more than 30 servicemen during an attack on the northeastern town of Arsal in August are demanding the release of Islamists detained in Roumieh prison, but the two groups have yet to deliver a list of exact names, Hujeiri said.
“The militants are waiting for the Lebanese government to accept the principle of a swap deal before issuing exact names,” he said.
According to Hujeiri, also known by his nom de guerre Abu Taqiyyeh, the militants do not have any qualms with the current mediator.
“They don’t care if the mediator is Syrian, Lebanese, Qatari or Turkish, all they care about is that their demands are met,” he said.
The sheikh expressed his belief that negotiations were going in a positive direction.
He said that he had “sensed a sincere seriousness from Health Minister Wael Abu Faour, who worked relentlessly to stop the killing of the abducted soldiers.”
The Nusra Front had threatened to execute Ali Bazzal, one of the Lebanese soldiers it is holding captive, at 5 a.m. Monday after accusing the Army of “cheating to gain time” and failing to meet its demand to end an military offensive against militants in Tripoli. The group did not carry out this threat.
Hujeiri said that militants had been planning on executing other hostages, one after another, not only Bazzal, if the military failed to end its offensive in Tripoli. According to the sheikh, the militants were persuaded to halt the executions after Abu Faour intervened.
Meanwhile, families of the victims burned tires outside the Grand Serail Wednesday, after a committee formed by the government to oversee the hostage crisis did not brief them on the results of a meeting it held at the Grand Serail.
“The ministers promised that they would update us after the meeting, so we waited for them for hours, but it turned out that they had left without telling us a word” Rana Fliti, the wife of abducted soldier Bazzal told The Daily Star.
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