Nir Rosen - Aftermath

Most of the bearded men in Afghan attire were gone in the morning, save a few of their leaders, who sat in a cafe and coordinated with their men by radio. Locals were hostile to the media, and warned that they would not accept Al Jazeera or the local Lebanese channel, New TV, which were perceived as pro-Hizballah. The Saudi-owned Arabiya network was welcome, though. They demanded that Future TV be allowed to operate again and that the siege on the airport be removed. “Hariri airport is not Nasrallah airport,” one man said. “We are mad because Sunnis were broken,” another said, but they were not angry at Saad. One man who had fought in Iraq in 2003 told me it was part of the same conflict.

Mustafa Zaabi, the man who had guided me through the area in the past, told me that “Sunnis here won’t be quiet.” I walked by a cafe with a poster of Saddam at his trial, in which he was holding the Koran. It said, “Long live the Muslim community, Long live Palestine, Arab freedom.” Mustafa had led his own group of fighters during the clashes. He carried an RPG launcher. He and the older men knew how to fight, he said, but the younger guys didn’t. He seemed ecstatic. “It’s an experience, fighting,” he said. “We felt as if they took us back twenty-seven years. We went back to the same positions we were in before.”

Hundreds of Tabbaneh residents had been massacred by the Syrians and their allies in the 1980s. The civil war had never ended there. The bitterness remained and occasionally erupted into violence, but with the influx of Salafis and jihadists and the interpretation of local conflicts through the paradigm of a regional conflict between Sunnis and Shiites, it was becoming more explosive. The Salafis played a crucial role in the latest battle. “We depend on them,” Mustafa told me. “They have a creed.”

Local militiamen scrounged their money and relied on donations from wealthy Sunni patrons and politicians. All the Sunni leaders in Lebanon had provided them with assistance, including Najib Mikati, Omar Karameh, and Saad Hariri. And their various supporters all fought together against the Alawites. They bought many of their weapons from the Palestinian camps. “If we had part of Hizb Ashaytan’s [the devil’s party] weapons, I would be talking to you from the mountaintop,” Mustafa told me. Musbah al-Ahdab was particularly loved in the area for his public anger and financial support. “Musbah was 20 percent popular before he went on TV and said that people should organize themselves and get their weapons so what happened in Beirut won’t happen here,” one man told me. “Then his popularity became 100 percent.” Some people told me that Ahdab had also provided them with weapons and ammunition. Khaled Dhaher was a good guy, they all agreed. (“He didn’t abandon us,” Mustafa told me. “He took care of us.”) Many of them had footage of the Halba massacre on their mobile phones. Dhaher’s people had been involved, everybody said proudly; his people were well armed. Mustafa bragged that Dhaher had killed some of the victims himself. It was rumored that the families of the two Sunni supporters of the Future Movement who were killed in Halba during the clashes each received one hundred thousand dollars from the Hariri family. Locals told me that Dhaher’s people had distributed ammunition to the militias of Tabbaneh. “Jund Allah dazzled us with their weapons and the amount of ammunition that they had,” Mustafa said of Kanan Naji’s militia. Two Future officials, Muhamad al-Aswad and Khalid al-Masri, also had armed groups in Tabbaneh.

The way the clashes erupted sounded familiar. Nobody knew who started shooting first, Mustafa told me. Zaaran from both sides were insulting one another and throwing stones, and then the shooting started. It was a result of an old anger in their hearts, he told me, which went back to the Syrian occupation. “It’s an old war,” he said. “There isn’t a house or a family in Tabbaneh that doesn’t want revenge on the Alawites, that doesn’t have a blood debt with the Alawites,” another man told me.

People had been told to expect a battle that day, so they had prepared for one. And indeed, a battle happened in Tabbaneh and other poor areas around it. Suddenly all the old armed groups that had once dominated Tripoli re-emerged, but their men were too old and the young men on the streets lacked proper training. As a result Sunnis often turned to current or former members of the security forces. An Alawite leader claimed that the first RPG had been fired by a pro-Syrian Sunni group.

The army had come the previous night during a truce, but when fighting resumed it withdrew again. Mustafa’s area was a front line. He broke a hole in the back of his building so his men could sneak out to the other side. One of his men showed me a wad of cash he had just received to buy more ammunition. The price for a hand grenade was now seventeen dollars. Before the fighting it had been four dollars. A rocket-propelled grenade was now seventy dollars. Mustafa would buy weapons from Palestinian dealers in the Minyeh area close to Bedawi.

One of his men had gone down to Tariq al-Jadida with several hundred others from the north for the Beirut fighting. They were only given clubs, he complained, not guns, and had barely been fed. He felt betrayed. “No,” said another, “Saad didn’t want bloodshed.”

“There is a strong Sunni awakening in Lebanon,” Mustafa’s younger brother Khudhr told me. “We all became terrorists,” another man said. “Hassan Nasrallah made us all terrorists. We don’t want to fight Israel.” Instead, they told me, they would fight the Shiites with all they had.

“We as the shabab of Tabbaneh are fighting as Islamists, not as the opposition or the majority,” Mustafa explained. “We are in solidarity in defense of our religion.” He told me that they feared a repeat of the massacres they had faced in the 1980s by the Syrians and their allies.

Whenever power was used against Salafis and Islamists, they became more devout and defended their religion, Mustafa told me. There was no area in Lebanon that had poverty and neglect and didn’t have people embracing their religion. “The comfortable citizen doesn’t think about the gun,” he said. “In this area it’s like you’re in a Palestinian camp.” If they could have left their area, they would have gone down to Beirut to defend Sunnis, he told me. They were resentful of the Sunni leadership, which had betrayed them. “During Nahr al-Barid they accused the shabab of belonging to Fatah al-Islam because they were Sunnis. They killed who they killed and imprisoned who they imprisoned just because they were Sunnis. But Hizballah did what they did in Beirut, and nobody questioned them or confronted them.”

“If we close the airport road, they will say we are terrorists,” one man said. “Yesterday I started to pray because I felt like I am in the hands of God. And that’s how I became a terrorist. They pushed me and abandoned me, and I am alone. What can I do? I seek shelter with God.”

One day I showed up in front of Mustafa’s shop and found him wearing a new military vest he had just purchased for twenty dollars. The other guys wanted one too. His Salafi cousin Shadi Jbara gave him money to purchase more. There had been fighting the night before. One of the men bragged that in all their fighting ten civilians had died in the clashes but none of the fighters had been killed.

Shadi had just been released from prison two weeks earlier and was opening a bakery. Along with several other Al Qaeda wanna-bes, he had tried to blow up a local Kentucky Fried Chicken. Shadi’s father had been assassinated during the battles of the 1980s, and he bragged that his mother had become a mujahida, carrying an AK-47 and shooting RPGs at the Alawites of Jabal Mohsen. Shadi had known some of the Fatah al-Islam men in prison. One of them, an Algerian, told Shadi he had come to Lebanon to defend Sunnis from Shiites.