Nir Rosen - Aftermath

Hossam’s father had killed a man, and the two families were feuding, which was why he always carried a pistol. But in the battle against Shiites the two families were together, he said. “I never carried a rifle before,” he said, “but since the Shiites attacked I started carrying one.” Hossam had taken part in sectarian clashes between Sunnis from the nearby town of Saad Nayel and the Shiites of Talabaya. A few days earlier Sunnis and Shiites had fought each other in the nearby town of Sawiri as well. Hossam claimed he had forced Shiite officials at the Masnaa border crossing to stop working there. This was why security officers were paying a visit to the town. “We and the state are opposed,” said the thuggish man.

“Before May 8 I used to love life,” said Hossam. “I would never sleep. I was into women, drugs, alcohol—I was living life to the fullest. Something happened in my heart I can’t explain to anybody. Since May 8 I am a different person. I started praying five times a day, feeling more confident when I’m fighting.” Now he fantasized about becoming a suicide bomber. “I should be doing martyrdom operations too,” he told me, his eyes darting to Nabil, looking for approval. “I would like to blow myself up during Nasrallah’s speech when there is a large group of people.” He got so much pleasure from shooting, he said, and he surmised that if he went on a martyrdom operation his soul would feel even better. Nabil expected suicide operations like those in Iraq to occur in Lebanon, targeting Shiites. “I won’t be surprised if it happened,” he said.

Nabil didn’t seem to have a job, but I soon realized he had a lucrative underground business selling weapons. I asked him why he always carried a pistol with him. He quoted a hadith about how one must always be armed. I asked if he was not worried about the authorities. “The army is not allowed in here,” Nabil said. I asked who didn’t allow them. “We don’t allow them,” he said. “None of them will survive. Do they want another Nahr al-Barid?” Likewise the police were not allowed to come into town, he said: “If they do, the whole town will fight.” I was reminded of the accusations that Hizballah was a state within a state. Outside Beirut there was little sign of any state willing or able to assert itself, and unlike Shiites, the Sunnis of Lebanon had no comparable social movement to fill the vacuum.

As we drove through the narrow alley leading to Nabil’s house, a man asked him to sell him two thousand rounds of ammunition. “Come to my house,” Nabil said. One day when I visited Nabil I found his living room converted into an armory. He had an RPG launcher, many boxes of ammunition, and eight rifles, including AK-47s, a PKM, and a Degtyaryov machine gun. In a box that originally contained a Syrian dress, Nabil had stuffed an assortment of grenades. He took some out to play with, to my displeasure, and showed me how to take them apart.

Nabil introduced me to Marwan Yassin, or Abu Hudheifa, a gentle, friendly man he called his sheikh and emir. Abu Hudheifa was not formally educated in Islam, but he studied Sharia at home and memorized the Koran at the late age of twenty-five. He had six children. He had just been released from prison after serving ten months. I asked him if he had been tortured. “Not this time,” he said with a smile. In 2004 the Syrians arrested him trying to enter Iraq. He spent eight months in a Syrian prison before he was transferred to a Lebanese prison, where he served three more months. He was tortured in both countries.

Majd al-Anjar was special, he said, because it had a lot of religious people of the same color, meaning Sunni. “We have a lot of people who went to Iraq and were killed there, so we have people who love jihad,” he said. “Iraq is under direct American occupation. Here, it’s an indirect Iranian occupation.” Sunnis in Lebanon were in a weak position, he said.

One night in June Nabil called around midnight to tell me he had just received word that two local boys, Abdallah Abdel Khalaq and Firas Yamin, had blown themselves up in Iraq on two consecutive days. Twenty-year-old Abdallah, whose nickname was Abu Obeida, called his family the night before to say goodbye and explain that the next day he would either park the car and detonate it or, if there was too much security, detonate it while driving. At noon the next day he blew himself up while driving in a crowded Baghdad street. Two hours later his companions called his parents to let them know the happy news about their son’s martyrdom. The family was religious and proud of him, and distributed candy. Firas, who was called Abu Omar, had gone to Iraq with Abdallah without telling anybody in town. Nabil had a film of them both with a Kuwaiti fighter who had been to Afghanistan. “If I had a chance I would go,” Nabil said.

Nabil took me to meet a group of friends in an office. They were drinking tea. Several had long hair and long beards. One had the physique of a bodybuilder. I asked them what they expected to happen. “Very bad things,” said one. Nabil spoke of prophecies in the Koran about a final battle occurring in Sham, or Greater Syria. The American invasion of Iraq was one sign of it. I had heard many jihadi Salafis in the region predict this imminent final battle, one that would be fought with swords. An older man in traditional Arab dress was the father of a young man who had been martyred in Rawa. As I chatted with the men, Nabil played absentmindedly with the pistol on his lap.

One morning one of Nabil’s friends drove me around town. He spoke on his cellphone to a woman. “We are ready,” he told her. “We didn’t sleep since last night.” The night before, Nabil said, the Lebanese army had arrested the father of one of the guys in their group in Masnaa. There were regular clashes with local Shiites, whom the men called Hizballah, probably inaccurately. “Last night we went down to Marj,” Nabil’s friend said, “patrolling with our cars with tinted windows, driving back and forth in the main streets of Majd al-Anjar and Marj. We had guns, we were ready.”

Nabil introduced me to a friend they called Dr. Saadi because he had a PhD in history from the University of Damascus. Only in his thirties, Saadi had a guest room well stocked with books on Islam. He’d been imprisoned for alleged involvement in the 2000 “millennium plot” to blow up the American Embassy in Jordan. After his release, he traveled to Falluja at the height of the jihad in 2004 and met Omar Hadid, a famed fighter in that town.

There was no Sunni party in Lebanon with a creed, Saadi complained, only those who fought for money. The Future Movement had become mercenaries without belief, he said. They controlled Lebanon’s Sunnis but obeyed the Americans, and Salafis were marginalized. But one day soon only the Salafi ideology would survive, and they would raise the Sunni flag in Lebanon. The May event had given a fillip to extreme movements in Lebanon such as Al Qaeda. The country’s unique diversity had moderated Saadi’s extremism, like it had for all of the Salafis I met in Lebanon. The variety of sects living in Lebanon meant that no single group could dominate the others, he said.

As we spoke, AK-47 shots suddenly erupted not far away. All the men burst out laughing, especially when they saw me flinch. A friend had just been released from prison and he was shooting into the air. “Army intelligence captured him,” Nabil explained, “and we threatened to block the roads. Now he is shooting into the air in celebration for himself.”

Like many Salafis I had met, Saadi was envious of Hizballah for confronting Israel but at the same time dismissive because Hizballah limited its activity to liberating Lebanese territory. “Hizballah protects the Jewish border with orders from the Syrian regime,” he said. Moreover, by respecting UN resolutions, Hizballah proved that it had no genuine commitment to liberating Palestine. Hizballah had proved it had no principles, he said, by forming an alliance with a Christian party, the Free Patriotic Movement. The goal of Hizballah’s “takeover” of Beirut was to weaken Sunnis in the Arab world, he said. The group was acting like the Mahdi Army in Iraq, proving it was only a Shiite militia. “Sunnis around the world are mad after what happened in Beirut,” he said. “The result will be a thousand Zarqawis coming after Hizballah.” Nabil was a great admirer of Zarqawi. “Behind the sword was a merciful heart,” he said, “an eye that cried for the whole Islamic nation. There will be thousands of Zarqawis now.”