Nir Rosen - Aftermath

I went with my friend to see Khaled Dhaher at his mountain redoubt in Bibnine. When we arrived in town we called Dhaher, who told us to give a few thousand liras to any taxi driver and ask him to lead us to his house. “Everybody knows where it is,” he said. A taxi driver agreed, and suddenly a man in civilian clothes approached the driver’s window, asking who we were and why we had weapons. We said we didn’t have any. He called Dhaher to see if we were authorized. Then he flashed his wallet open and told us he was an undercover officer for the Interior Ministry, but there was no government ID card in it.

Four fit young men slinging AK-47s stood outside Dhaher’s house, which was also a school. Inside there were three older men in a courtyard who were also armed. Dhaher was making and receiving phone calls when he arrived. “Tell them to stay away, and let’s wait until the dialogue is over because we might have to do to them what we did in Halba,” he told somebody, referring to the negotiations in Doha, Qatar, to resolve the crisis and threatening another massacre. “Let’s tell the brothers to gather and we can visit Mufti Rifai. At this point there is no turning back,” he said in another phone call. Then he called a lieutenant named Arabi and thanked him for his cooperation. Finally he spoke to an associate. “Stay in your position even if there is shooting at you,” he said. “Keep your eyes wide open. Never retreat, never surrender. An attack might happen tonight.” Dhaher’s brother was also there; he had come to ask about obtaining a gun license for somebody. “Who needs a license?” Dhaher asked. “Send some bodyguards to my center. There is no need to carry a license these days.”

Dhaher was a short, chubby man with dark skin and a beard. He was a spokesman for the Independent Islamic Gathering, which had been established in December 2006. Now the Gathering had a presence on the ground, he said. “In Akkar we have twenty thousand retired soldiers from the Lebanese army ready to put their efforts and experience in order to protect the Sunni reservoir of Lebanon here in the north,” he said. The recent fighting was a result of an Iranian, Safavid, Persian project, he told me, echoing a familiar litany. The Sunnis of Beirut were the people of bureaucrats, education, business, he said. They weren’t fighters like the people of the countryside. Now Sunnis were arming themselves in the north and the Beqaa and establishing a national Islamic resistance to create an equilibrium. “Now we are getting ready, we are arming ourselves so we can confront them and challenge them. Don’t forget that 60 percent of the army is Sunni. There are more then ten thousand trained and retired soldiers here, around us in Akkar. Sunni officers have resigned from the Lebanese army.” He was getting calls from sheikhs, he told me, adding, “Now we are all fighters.”

He explained that the Halba incident happened after the mufti of Akkar, Osama Rifai, called upon the Sunni street in the north to demonstrate against what had happened in Beirut. The Syrian Social Nationalist Party wanted to control Akkar, he said; they opened fire on the demonstration, killing two. The fighting wasn’t led by the Future Party, he told me; it was the citizens and sons of the area reacting to what happened in Beirut. “It’s only a simple reaction to what happened in Beirut. I personally protected the prisoners and gave them to the army,” he said. “We won’t give our weapons to the state until they do, and we will add to them and buy more arms. It is forbidden for Hizballah to occupy Sunni Beirut.”

Sunnis had lost their trust in the security forces, he told me, especially after seeing the Lebanese army side with Hizballah. “We will defend ourselves,” he said. He had met with members of the Lebanese army who supported what they were doing and would join them to fight by their side when needed, he told me. Dhaher’s brother chimed in: “The Sunnis of Beirut were hit, but we will hit back one hundred times.” Another brother added, “We don’t have a choice but to defend our honor.” They were disappointed in Saad al-Hariri, who hadn’t supported the sect enough. Dhaher added that they were coordinating with Sunnis in the Beqaa and in Arsal.

I went to Arsal, a town bordering Syria that I had not heard of before talking to Dhaher. I saw more posters for Saddam Hussein on the walls than for Rafiq al-Hariri. “We all sacrifice ourselves for you, Saddam,” read graffiti on the road approaching the town. Elsewhere I saw “We are all yours, glorious Saddam,” “All the Muslim community is for Saddam,” and “Saddam and 100 million Saddams.” The town was sprawled across a valley, invisible at first beyond desolate hills. Its homes were unpainted, incomplete, with rebar sticking out. The land around it was arid and barren.

We stopped at a cellphone shop and asked a man there to guide us to the mukhtar . Arsal was surrounded by a sea of Shiites, he bragged, disparaging other Sunni towns for being “faggots.” He got in his van, which had a Saddam sticker on it, and led us to the home of Basil al-Hujairi, the mayor. Hujairi was also a teacher who ran an Islamic school. His home overlooked the town from a hill. It was incomplete but ostentatious, with columns at the entrance. As we climbed the steps to the house, numerous calls to prayer echoed back and forth across the valley.

Hujairi had been mayor for four years. He was a supporter of the Muslim Brotherhood, he told me, but he admitted that in the recent fighting the Brotherhood had not had a strong stand. Only the Salafis had been strong. His town had forty thousand people, he told me, and they all had a strong Sunni identity. It was a poor town that relied on farming and smuggling. The Syrian border, only twenty kilometers away, was not controlled. Before 2005 the townspeople had clashed with the Syrians.

The town had at least ten mosques. Another was being built in honor of Ismail Hujairi who was martyred in Iraq the day Baghdad fell. His brothers, who brought his body back, were paying for it. Others from the town had fought in Iraq and returned.

Only three officers in the army were from Arsal, though many townsmen were enlisted. There were no government services in town. Electricity was four hours on, four hours off. I was thus surprised to learn that townspeople from Arsal still identified enough with the state to go down to Beirut and demonstrate so often. They had gone to protest the Danish cartoons and to show support for Saad Hariri. Sometimes on the way to and from these demonstrations, townspeople would clash with Shiites in the neighboring villages.

Shiites want revenge for the death of Hussein, Hujairi told me. They believed they would go to paradise if they killed Sunnis, he said, but Sunnis would defend their dignity. “Life without dignity or death—people will choose death.”

Although many Western journalists live in Beirut, and many others descend on it whenever there is a crisis, few venture outside Beirut. This is despite the fact that Lebanon is such a small country. So the neglected Sunni population and the anger of that community are relatively unknown. Likewise, most Lebanese don’t venture outside their areas, let alone into the areas of other sects or the slums and villages of the poor. In many of these towns, there is little electricity or other services, and people rely on remittances from relatives abroad for survival. Despite the presence of several Sunni billionaires in the country, there was no party equivalent to Hizballah that could provide social services to poor Sunnis.

Continuing my travels through the Beqaa, I visited the hillside town of Qaraun. Its houses were made of white stones with red roofs. In the town square I found a poster for Prime Minister Siniora and Rafiq and Saad al-Hariri. The town did not appear overtly religious, and I did not get the same hostile looks that I had received in Majd al-Anjar and Arsal. It had three mukhtars , and I met the most important, Nasr Dabaja, at the gas station he owned. His father had also been mukhtar and was famous for resisting the Israelis when they occupied the town in the mid-1980s. The town’s population was 8,500, he told me. A quarter were Christian, and the rest were Sunni Muslims. There were only two mosques in town, and only one was in regular use. The Future Movement had no local office.