Nir Rosen - Aftermath

At first Shadi wasn’t sure if he could talk to me because he hadn’t received permission from the sheikh he followed. He had once been like any other guy, he told me, going out at night, chasing women. In 1991 he met a man who led him to the right path—the path of God. He went to Saudi Arabia in 1993 and met with Afghan Arabs and leaders of Salafi movements. He worked in a restaurant, and at night he would study there. After five years he returned from Saudi Arabia. Osama bin Laden gave orders to attack U.S. businesses; the easiest targets for Shadi and his friends were restaurants, so they decided to attack a Kentucky Fried Chicken. They placed one kilogram of TNT by the restaurant early in the morning so nobody would get hurt. They didn’t want to cause casualties, just damage to the restaurant to gain media recognition.

Shadi explained that his friends had made a tactical error when they attacked a McDonald’s. Before leaving their explosives, they had sat down to eat and were captured on the security camera. Most of the men from the group were from Tabbaneh. They were rookies and confessed to the police immediately, informing on the KFC group as well. Prison was like a university, Shadi said. He spent five years behind bars and met men from different groups. At their peak Salafis like him numbered 420 in the prison. They were categorized as terrorists and separated from other inmates. In prison they had access to DVDs and CDs with lectures by Zarqawi and other famous jihadists. “Zarqawi, God have mercy on him, influenced the shabab more than bin Laden did,” he told me.

Fatah al-Islam was not a Syrian creation, he insisted. Many of its men had fought in Iraq or Bosnia. Some had belonged to Zarqawi’s Al Qaeda in Iraq. Most were Palestinians from Syria’s Yarmuk camp. Syria was like a reservoir for these groups, he told me, but thousands of men had been arrested there. Lebanon was a small country, and it was hard for Al Qaeda to operate there, he explained. Most of the Al Qaeda men in Lebanon weren’t planning operations in Lebanon but were looking to Iraq.

Sunnis in Lebanon were very weak, he said. “The Sunnis of Beirut are not fighters; they are traders. If there were fifty Salafi jihadi guys in Beirut, then Hizballah would have lost a lot. The only people who can face Hizballah must have an ideology and a military. We were very angry at Saad. Hizballah is a military party; you can’t fight them with politics.” Shiites in prison were celebrating and shouting for Ali after the Hizballah victory in Beirut. But Salafis in prison were happy when they heard about the Halba massacre. I asked Shadi where I could hear a strong sermon. “Sermons don’t affect people,” he told me. “It’s the small studying sessions that affect people. The guys who talk about jihad in the sermons tell people to stay home and not go to jihad.”

Shadi thought Prime Minister Siniora was an infidel, apostate, and ally of the Americans. But the Hizballah-led siege of Siniora’s government was not about Siniora, he said; it was about the sect. Shadi had friends who had fought in Iraq, but it was harder than ever to go there. Because there was so much pressure on veterans of the jihad in Iraq once they returned to Lebanon, many mujahideen preferred to die in Iraq, Mustafa approached his Salafi brother and Shadi and gave them instructions. “We need you sheikhs to take the mountain in the front, and we will follow.” Shadi responded that they were lacking ammunition and needed to better organize themselves. Shadi told me he understood that the people of Tabbaneh were being used by the Sunni elite in the country. And he knew that when that elite pressed a button again, the fighters of Tabbaneh would once more be activated.

The walls of Tabbaneh were covered with posters of Khalil Akkawi, the slain leader of the Tawhid movement. In the early 1980s he had been an ally of Kanan Naji. Together they had fought the Syrians. Akkawi was assassinated in 1986. I spoke with his son, Arabi, who remained very respected and connected throughout Tripoli because of his father’s legacy of resistance. Arabi had been nine years old at the time of his father’s death. Policemen smuggled him out of Tabbaneh with his mother and sister in the back of a pickup truck because the Alawites were looking for them to kill them.

The people of Tabbaneh did not view the Beirut fighting as a political dispute, Arabi told me. To them it was simply Shiites attacking Sunnis. They felt they were slapped in the face and had to react in Tripoli. If the Future Movement was weakened, then the Salafis would take their place. “Salafis are raging, and it’s the right environment for Salafis and Al Qaeda to grow,” he told me. Some Salafis had brought weapons to Tabbaneh with the support of officials from the Interior Ministry such as Gen. Ashraf Riffi. “On the street people are saying, ‘We wish Fatah al-Islam still existed.’ Al Qaeda became acceptable now. The environment is welcoming.”

There was no alternative to the Future party for Sunnis, he told me, and Future had not lost popularity. “Whenever sectarian conflict increases, then Future gains in popularity.” Arabi believed it was his father’s former ally Naji who had started the most recent battle with Jabal Mohsen. He told me that Naji’s men launched RPGs at the Alawites and opened fire on their neighborhood, so the Alawites thought the Sunnis were attacking them. Naji was backed by Dai al-Islam al-Shahal, Lebanon’s most prominent Salafi.

I returned regularly to the neighborhood. Tensions would occasionally increase, the army would withdraw, and people would return to their fighting positions. One explosion took down much of an apartment building. Men with military vests and AK-47s materialized suddenly. One of them had a body full of tattoos: “Because I love you,” said one; another said, “I’m not afraid of death but my mother’s tears kill me.”

I returned to see Shahal again, in his office in the Abu Samra area of Tripoli. There was a more obvious armed presence outside and inside his office than before. On his desk next to plastic flowers was a leaflet that said, “The Salafi Current in Lebanon is calling for the Sunnis to organize to face any danger.” Before we started, he closed his eyes and recited a long prayer. Then he opened his light blue eyes and started talking. A big fitna (internal strife) had happened, he told me; if it wasn’t contained it would open the door to dangerous events. Sunnis in Beirut were under heavy pressure because it was the capital and they were weaker than Sunnis in the north. There was a plot against Sunnis, but the north was their real stronghold, where the shabab were Salafis and stronger and disciplined. That’s why they could give balance to the Sunnis and halt the conspiracy against them. All Sunni forces in Lebanon united. “In Beirut and here there are weapons, personal weapons, and it isn’t enough. But we have faith. We don’t need Al Qaeda. The Salafi Current is on the ground. It has forces.”

As long as the Salafi movement existed, there was no need for Al Qaeda in Lebanon. “The Salafi street in Lebanon has its presence, its strength, and we will hopefully work on strengthening it,” Shahal said. “Salafis in Lebanon are intelligent, and they know the ground. They know the Lebanese situation, and they can play the game by its internal rules [meaning they had a local agenda], and they are not incapable of military conflict when it’s needed. We don’t need human support from outside Lebanon. What we need is psychological support and financial support. This is not a call to jihad. It’s a call to self-defense. We don’t expect any support from the regimes but from those who are convinced in our religion and our call.”

Sunni militias were beginning to form, and in Majd al-Anjar, a Sunni stronghold in Lebanon’s Beqaa, irate shabab closed the key Masnaa border road to Syria. On May 12 I drove there to check it out. Few roads led into the tightly connected narrow streets, where the plethora of mosques and the austerity and solidarity, among other things, reminded me of Falluja. I stopped to see if the mukhtar , Shaaban al-Ajami, was home. He was not. A muscular policeman with long hair stood in front of a mosque across the street, watching us. Suspicious locals stopped me to ask who I was. A hardened woman led us to a roadblock, just past a large intersection leading to the Syrian border crossing at Masnaa. Lebanese soldiers perched indolently atop their armored personnel carriers, phlegmatically watching anarchy as several hundred men with automatic rifles, rocket-propelled grenade launchers, pistols, and hand grenades manned roadblocks of earthen barriers and fires. Some wore masks. There was nobody in command—it was a mob, not a militia, and so even more frightening. The men were angry, afraid, suspicious, shouting at strangers and one another, each one an authority unto himself. They carelessly swung their weapons around, oblivious to where they were pointing. Some rested the barrels of their rifles on top of their feet, a sign they had no professional training. A car approached with a family inside. They surrounded it, shouting at the passengers. A woman inside shrieked in fear. Local police showed up in an official pickup truck; the young muscular policeman with long hair emerged and greeted the armed men, warmly kissing and embracing them.