Nir Rosen - Aftermath

Juzu repeated the common observation among Sunnis that the Americans had changed the regional balance, empowering Iran and Shiites. “The destruction of Saddam and Iraq helped Iran,” he said, “Now Iran controls Iraq.” Juzu himself was a friend of Sheikh Harith al-Dhari, head of Iraq’s Association of Muslim Scholars. Dhari was among Iraq’s most sectarian Sunni leaders. The resistance organizations he backed had cooperated with Al Qaeda in attacks against Shiites. “Sheikh Harith fights and defends his country and his identity, and is fighting Iran and the Americans,” Juzu explained.

Juzu defended the need for Sunnis in Lebanon to arm themselves. “It’s natural when a man feels he is in danger to protect himself,” he said. “It’s easy to make war in Lebanon. The army would split in two if a civil war happened. If there are two equal poles, it’s good, it will prevent war; if one side has more power, there can be war.” Despite all this, he said, “If there is a war against Israel I am with Hizballah. Anybody who fights Israel—an Iranian, a communist—the Arab people will support him.”

The Sunnis of Lebanon are, of course, very diverse and not at all monolithic in their values or motivations, and the struggle within their community, as well as within Lebanon, is not between radicals and moderates. It can more accurately be described as a competition between haves and have nots. In Lebanon, as elsewhere, the poor have only two choices: to accept their fate or rebel. While rebellion in the 1960s or ’70s might have come under a leftist, secular, Marxist, or nationalist guise, today the language of rebellion is often that of Al Qaeda.

Although Lebanese Maronites—Syriac Eastern Catholics—have a mythology of being victimized by the Syrians, the Sunnis of Tripoli suffered much more when their city was bombarded. The Syrian presence was more pronounced in the north as well. In the 1980s there was a major face-off between Salafis and Syrians in the north. In 2000 Najib Mikati, a Sunni politician competing with Rafiq al-Hariri, began to rehabilitate Sunni Islamists from Tawhid and elsewhere. He even tried to free the prisoners from Dinniyeh, though he failed to do so—this maneuver was left to Saad al-Hariri in 2005. Mikati began his campaign to court Salafis when he feared the Muslim Brotherhood would not support him. It was only in 2004 that the Future Movement approached northern Salafis, and their relationship remains ambiguous to this day. The Future Movement had turned the formerly anti-Syrian elements of Tawhid into their street gangs in Tripoli, while other Tawhid veterans sided with pro-Syrian politicians such as Mikati. Lebanon’s Salafis were divided, and Hariri did what he and other rich Sunni politicians usually do: he bought people’s loyalty and calm.

Clerics close to the Future Movement such as Bilal Barudi tried to buy Fatah al-Islam off, but the group was neither a March 14 creation nor a Syrian one. State sponsors were no longer needed for these sinuous, nonstate entities. This pattern of buying support was not unique to Tripoli; in Sidon, in southern Lebanon, the Future Movement co-opted the Communists. “They were indiscriminate in accepting support as long as they received votes or loyalty, whether from Al Qaeda or former Communists,” says As’ad Abu Khalil, a Lebanese-American professor of political science at California State, Stanislaus. “Mikati capitalized on longstanding fanatical Sunni sentiment. Mikati and Rafiq al-Hariri had the same problem: yes, they did have the support of Syrian intelligence, but they wanted to institutionalize their bases of support. They needed permanent sources of support so they . . . went to areas where they fielded candidates and tried to co-opt existing forces on the ground.”

Salafis typically rejected the very notion of elections, viewing democracy as an alternative to religion and hence apostasy. But in Lebanon, especially beginning in 2005, Salafis campaigned and voted despite the fact that the system required a Christian president. Their motivation was to protect Sunnis, and clerics advised their followers to vote for the March 14 coalition. Traditional Salafis perceived the Hariri assassination as an attack on Sunni power. They received money from Saudis as well as the Hariri network and justified their interpretation of Islam in terms of defending Sunnis against an alleged Shiite threat. The Saudis had been battling a domestic Al Qaeda franchise since 2003, and as a result they had cut off support for jihadist Salafis. This allowed Future to come in and provide funds in exchange for moderation and cooperation, regarded by some of the rank and file as a betrayal.

ACCORDING TO A FORMER military commander of the Tawhid movement who had spent eleven years in a Syrian prison, “Tripoli is a reservoir for Sunni jihadists in Lebanon.” Hundreds of men had left Tripoli to fight in Iraq, and veterans of the Dinniyeh incident from Tripoli who had been released had also joined Fatah al-Islam. A veteran of Islamist movements, he believed that Fatah al-Islam was not allied with Syria or the March 14 coalition. There was a confluence between the interests of Syria and some of the Salafis, he said, but March 14 supported the “official Salafis” such as those in the Independent Islamic Gathering. He attributed some of the motivation to statements by Ayman al-Zawahiri, who had declared Lebanon a land for jihad and described the UN peacekeeping mission in the south as a crusader occupation. The Mujahideen Shura Council in Iraq had decided to fight the Americans in Lebanon, he said, and dispatched fighters there as well.

While Fatah al-Islam was not a creation of Saudi Arabia, or the Future Movement, or even Syria, as various parties in Lebanon allege, it did find a welcoming environment in northern Lebanon. Tripoli has a tradition of armed militancy and is full of armed groups and experienced veterans. When a Saudi militant named Juhayman al-Utaibi took over the Grand Mosque in Mecca in 1979, a key moment in jihadist Salafi history, three of his accomplices were from Tripoli. In addition to the Tawhid movement and Kanan Naji’s Jund Allah, there is also Suyuf Allah, or the Swords of God, founded by a judge in a religious court. As a result there was no need for Sunni leaders to turn to jihadists, since they had an available pool of veterans from the 1980s Tawhid experience. While conspiracy theorists have blamed Sunni leaders in Lebanon for arming their people, and there have been some independent initiatives of this nature, it is just as likely that the Sunnis were responding to pressure from below. Not responding would mean losing ground and popularity. The Muslim Brotherhood, embodied in the Jamaa Islamiya movement in Lebanon, was weakened in Tripoli because it failed to propose any solution for the events in Lebanon, according to Patrick Haenni of the International Crisis Group in Beirut. Haenni, who has also studied the Brotherhood in Egypt, explained that it normally operates under the slogan “Islam is the solution,” but in Lebanon, as the Shiite Hizballah movement had also conceded, this cannot be offered. As a result people have been pushed toward private initiatives, while the traditional Salafis have lost ground because they are too close to power and too moderate. In late 2006, in the Bab al-Tabbaneh slums of Tripoli, one banner that went up above the streets called for Saad al-Hariri to “arm us and leave the rest to us.”

Tripoli was once the main city in Lebanon; in the nineteenth century, Beirut was a backwater in comparison. The main publishing houses and intellectuals were all in Tripoli. When Lebanon was cut out from Syria, Tripolitans protested in opposition. Traditionally Lebanon’s Sunnis were hostile to the idea of Lebanon itself, which many viewed as a Christian project at odds with Arab nationalism. Tripoli’s economy suffered after it was separated from Syria. Rafiq al-Hariri helped spread Saudi money to buy votes in the north. Young people who might have gone to study in Jordan or Egypt instead went to study in Saudi Arabia. Saudi money also made its way to traditional Salafis as long as they avoided overt politics. When the jihadists appeared there was a sense among some in the March 14 coalition that the newcomers were their friends and could be political allies. The increasingly sectarian rhetoric used by Lebanese politicians and clerics provided the space for jihadist Salafis to feel at home. Tripoli, Lebanon’s second-largest city, is a majority-Sunni city with few other groups represented. During the civil war Sunni militias battled the Syrians there. The quality of life in some parts of Tripoli, and in the poor villages of Akkar nearby, resembled the Palestinian camps.