BEIRUT: With minorities facing death and persecution at the hands of the Islamic State in Iraq and Greater Syria (ISIS), Lebanon's Christians must lay aside their rivalries and agree on who should fill the vacant presidency, MP Walid Jumblatt has warned.
Walid Jumblatt, the most influential figure in Lebanon's Druze community, says he is as alarmed as anyone by the rise of the radical Islamist group guided by a puritanical vision of Islam that is a major threat to religious minorities including his own. Christians and Yezidis have fled its advance in Iraq.
Jumblatt said Christian leaders in Lebanon, itself the target of a deadly incursion by ISIS fighters from Syria this month, needed to recognize the danger of what is going on the region and agree on a new head of state.