As cracks appear in the relative peace that has held since Lebanon's bloody 15-year civil war officially ended in 1990, a long-standing Lebanese pastime seems to have gone into overdrive. If there's one thing people from all four major Lebanese sects--Sunni, Shia, Christian and Druze--appear to agree on, it's that there's a conspiracy going on, and opposing sects, backed by nefarious foreign powers, are the masterminds.

In fact, according to Elias Muhanna, an assistant professor at Brown University and author of Qifa Nabki, a blog on Lebanese politics, conspiracy theorizing has always been a way for Lebanese to make sense of their government's labyrinthine politics and shifting alliances with other nations. He says the sectarian nature of the Lebanese state creates an environment in which conspiracy theories flourish.

"I think what makes it confusing from an outsider's perspective is that there are so many relevant political actors," says Muhanna. "You don't have sort of large, hegemonic political parties that can get their message together and have one clear platform. What you have instead are lots of little parties that have their own following and think they have the right to be heard and play a role in the political process...It becomes sort of an echo chamber, and they're all talking to each other and about each other. For all the punditry that goes on...the internal world of Lebanese politics is actually pretty opaque to Lebanese citizens...so it's just easier to look for that one silver bullet that explains everything."

And that silver bullet changes, depending on whom you're speaking to. Hussein, whose name has been changed, is a Hezbollah fighter. Tall, thin and soft-spoken, he explains how he thinks Sunnis in Lebanon, with the help of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the U.S. and Israel, were behind attacks on Hezbollah, including two Grad rockets that struck Dahiyeh, a Shiite suburb of Beirut, in May.

"This was something we were expecting," he says calmly. "They're going to chase us wherever we go. The Information Branch is giving them intelligence on our locations and activities. Our goal is not a sectarian goal. We have Sunnis working with us. But others are all Al Qaeda, which is under the protection of the U.S., and they are our enemies...what we are witnessing today in the region--these people are cutting off heads, eating hearts. You will never hear this about the Shia. Even when we capture an Israeli, they go home fat."

Hussein believes there is an alliance between major Western powers, Israel, and the Gulf nations against Iran and Hezbollah, and their combined influence has enabled the rise of militant Sunni radicals like Assir in Lebanon.

"It's natural that the Sunnis in Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, the U.S. and Israel have the same goals," he says. "They all work together. Look what the Muslim Brotherhood did in Egypt. They closed the Syrian embassy and opened the Israeli embassy. We believe we can defeat them all. Our ideology is stronger than Al Qaeda, and we're not terrorists like them."