Now, the latest episode of the crisis has become a uniquely Lebanese story, entwining bird migration, civil aviation, mysterious gunmen and the long story of Lebanon’s struggle to become a functioning state that can at least take care of its trash, more than 25 years after emerging from a long civil war.

Last year, as a Band-Aid solution to the garbage crisis, the municipality opened the Costa Brava landfill here on the shoreline, not far from Beirut’s Rafic Hariri International Airport. And so for many visitors to Beirut, a city whose shabby-chic architecture, great cuisine and French colonial influences are otherwise enchanting, the first thing to greet them was a strong whiff of garbage.

The landfill also attracted birds — lots of them — not just the sea gulls that normally fly around the coast, but others on migratory patterns from Europe and North Africa. “In other words,” wrote one local blogger, “a giant free Lebanese restaurant for birds.”

More seriously, this posed a problem to civil aviation. When an airliner with Lebanon’s Middle East Airlines hit a bird this month — an episode that recalled Capt. Chesley Sullenberger’s crash landing in the Hudson River eight years ago after hitting a flock of birds — Lebanon’s trash problem suddenly became a matter of aviation safety.