Nohad Machnouk
Nohad El Machnouk is the Lebanese Minister of Interior and Municipalities and a Member of Parliament representing Beirut’s second district. He is a member of the “Future Bloc” coalition and serves on the Human Rights and Foreign Affairs parliamentary committees. He also serves on the ministerial committee charged with responding to the Syrian refugee crisis. Having started his career as a journalist, El Machnouk was hired by Lebanese weekly magazine Annahar and wrote extensively on regional issues. In 1983, he assumed his first political role as co-founder of Al Lika’a Al Islami, a political gathering of prominent politicians and civil society leaders that called for an end to Syrian dominance of Lebanon and a halt to civil conflict. In 1992, he was appointed senior political advisor to Prime Minister Rafik El Hariri. He served in this position until 1998, when he was forced into exile by the Syrian intelligence apparatus for his efforts to reduce Syrian tutelage of the country. Upon the withdrawal of Syrian troops in 2005, he resumed his journalistic career as a weekly columnist for Lebanese Daily Assafir, before running for parliament in 2009. In 2014, he was named Minister of Interior and Municipalities in Tammam Salam’s national unity government. As minister, he devised and implemented a comprehensive security strategy to gradually impose state sovereignty on all the Lebanese territory. This put an end to the rounds of sectarian infighting that had taken place in North Lebanon for a decade and helped dismantle the criminal networks that served as support infrastructures for terrorist groups operating in the northeast of the country. His three-dimensional guiding framework to combat ISIS and other extremist organizations – improving the professionalism of the security apparatus, strengthening national unity, and promoting theological courage – has played a leading role in shaping the government’s overall strategy to fight terrorism and protect Lebanon from the spillover effect’s of Syria and Iraq’s conflict.
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