Nir Rosen - Aftermath

Two adjacent buildings were also attacked. Hundreds of men surrounded them and shot from all sides. “God is great!” they shouted as they burst into apartments and ransacked them. Residents were terrified; there was nobody in charge. They broke into one family’s house and threatened a mother and her children, pointing their guns at them. “We will kill you,” they said. One of the boys was nine years old. As one group of attackers left the apartment another would charge in, and the terror would begin again. As the families from the apartments fled down the streets, they walked past bodies and pools of blood. One of the apartments belonged to a Christian Lebanese army officer and his family. Like their neighbors, they watched their furniture get destroyed, their clothes flung about, their apartment shot up. “When there is so much violence and hatred, it’s impossible to build a state,” the officer later told me. The eighty-year-old father of one of the Christian SSNP members was also in a nearby building. Despite being weak and sick, he too was detained for much of the day and threatened with death. The office of Arc en Ciel, an aid organization that helped the handicapped and was located above the SSNP headquarters, was looted and destroyed. A nearby gas station whose owner was affiliated with the SSNP was also torched.

Survivors of the attack on the SSNP office who made it to local hospitals were attacked by mobs that were waiting for them. Nasr Hammoudah was killed when a fire extinguisher was shoved into his mouth and emptied into him. Mohamad Hammoudah, Abed Khodr Abdel Rahman, and Ammar Moussa were also attacked on their way to the hospital and upon their arrival.

Khaled Dhaher was one of the leaders of the mob. Witnesses implicated him in ordering some of the executions and even of shooting the SSNP prisoners himself. Dhaher protected Muhamad Tahash from execution and interrogated him, asking him how many men were in the office and what kind of weapons they had. One of the men approached and shot Tahash in the belly. Dhaher’s bodyguard, who was Tahash’s childhood friend, helped spare his life. He prevented a man from executing Tahash, so instead the man kicked Tahash in the face and broke his teeth as Dhaher looked on. While in captivity, Tahash observed Dhaher giving detailed orders to the mob. Dhaher told his men to attack the local Syrian Baath Party office. They told him it had been closed for three years. “I don’t care,” Dhaher responded. “Break in and burn it.” Muhamad al-Masri, a local Future Movement leader, was also present. Dhaher’s bodyguard locked Tahash in a room and called the Internal Security Forces to pick him up. They drove him to the hospital in a white civilian Mercedes-Benz. Tahash saw the mob waiting to kill survivors of the massacre. “I was left in the Mercedes by myself,” he said. “Men came and tried to cut my arm off. They couldn’t, so they twisted it and broke it. Then they emptied a fire extinguisher in my mouth and all over me. While they were attacking us, they accused us of defending Hizballah and the Shiites.” Tahash’s wife learned of the attack in Halba from the news. She called her husband’s mobile phone, but a stranger answered. “Muhamad was burned to death,” he told her. “Fuck you and fuck Antoine Saadeh [founder of the SSNP].”

As the men lay dying on the dirt, their attackers and other gleeful onlookers filmed them with their cellphones, bringing the lenses in close and squatting to get better angles. The men were kicked in the head. Some of them were forced to reveal their genitals so the attackers could determine if they were Muslim or Christian. All but two of the victims were Sunni Muslims. Some had been beaten to death; others were still struggling to move or breathe. Their bodies, turned to bloody pulps, lay strewn on the ground. The attackers disappeared. Fires continued to crackle inside the building. One of the men still had his shirt pulled up and his pants open. By 5 p.m. eleven men were dead, crushed, beaten, and shot to death. Soon crowds came to view the bodies. Old men and young boys filmed the dead. The Lebanese Red Cross finally arrived, and then the Internal Security Forces and the Lebanese army. The bodies were taken away in ambulances. Army vehicles rumbled into town, taking positions on the streets. As in January 2007, the offices of the SSNP were attacked because it was an easy target with no sectarian base and less immediate consequences. But the SSNP had a long memory and a history of seeking revenge, party members in Beirut warned me. They believed that the mayor of the Akkar town of Fnaydek and his brother were among the leaders of the mob and that the attacks had been ordered by senior Future Party men and Sunni politician and Parliament member Musbah al-Ahdab.

In Tripoli that day I saw a banner that said, “No to Wilayat al-Faqih,” a reference to the Iranian system of government. That evening I interviewed Ahdab in his ostentatious Tripoli apartment. He had a small militia of dozens of fit armed men protecting him. One of his security guards belonged to Afwaj Trablus, the Tripoli Brigades. He was paid by Secure Plus. There were six or seven thousand men like him, he told me, who had been trained but not in the use of RPGs. A few had received advanced training in Jordan. “It would be better if the Syrians were here,” he said ruefully. “At least there was security.” Ahdab’s eyes were bloodshot and wide in near hysteria. His breath smelled strongly of alcohol. An Iranian militia had taken over an Arab capital, he told me. As we spoke, we got word of clashes in the slums of Bab al-Tabbaneh.

I raced over with a Lebanese friend. There was no power, but the buildings were illuminated by the occasional thunderous flashes of RPGs. At a nearby traffic circle, we saw dozens of men running toward Bab al-Tabbaneh carrying launchers and RPGs. They had long beards and were obviously Salafis. We stopped to talk to several men who stayed behind. They were fighting the Nusayris, they told me, using the pejorative term for Alawites, in the hilltop neighborhood of Jabal Mohsen, which overlooked Bab al-Tabbaneh. “They’ve hated us for 1,400 years,” one man told me, referring to Shiites. “The rich are in Beirut,” a garage owner who was watching the fighting said. “We are the poorest area of Lebanon.” “They are afraid of Tabbaneh. They are afraid of Sunnis,” another man told me. “We have assabiya for our sect.”

Hundreds of fighters rushed into the blackness. “This fight is revenge for Beirut,” one man said. I asked them why they didn’t go and fight in Beirut. “We are waiting for permission from Sheikh Saad,” someone told me. “Saad realized he didn’t want to fight Shiites, he doesn’t want a military conflict. Future is a moderate current. If Future disappears, then Sunnis will die. If you cut our wrists, the blood will come out and spell Saad, and spell Sunnis.”

My friend was a Sunni from the Ras Beirut area of the capital, which is identified as Sunni. He was stopped by several irate armed Salafis who demanded to see his ID card to confirm his address. “If you are not from Ras Beirut, I will slaughter you now,” the leader of the group barked at my friend.” One of the men disparaged the Sunnis of Baghdad, who had failed to stand up to Hizballah. “The Sunnis of Beirut want to have nice jackets, nice cars, and nice apartments,” he told my friend. “They like to go out on a Saturday night and stay out. Here we are day laborers, and we save money to buy guns because we know we will need them. That’s why we blame you.” As I left I realized Saad al-Hariri was actually a moderating force, preventing Sunnis from pursuing further violence.

The next morning I returned. One woman had been killed in the clashes, but no fighters had been hurt. I visited the home of nineteen-year-old Ibrahim Jumaa, who had gotten married a month and a half earlier and had just moved in. An RPG had gone through his wall, through his living room, and into his toilet. The Lebanese army was on the streets of Bab al-Tabbaneh. They had also been there before the previous evening’s clashes started. Like in Beirut, the fighting was preceded by youth throwing stones at one another. When the army withdrew, the shooting started. “We all fight,” one man told me. “It’s our neighborhood, our land. We are on fire after the battle of Beirut.” Some of the people tried to console my friend, who was a Sunni from Beirut. Others asked him why Tariq al-Jadida had fallen so quickly. Their radios crackled. “Hide your weapons, the army is coming,” somebody said. The men told me they hid their weapons when the army showed up for the sake of the army’s feelings. “The problem with the army is as soon as they hear a shot, they leave,” said one man.