Nir Rosen - Aftermath

Before we began talking, Dabaja asked us if we were Sunni. He eyed my friend from Beirut suspiciously and asked if he prayed five times a day. As we spoke a Shiite man walked into his office, and Dabaja told us to stop talking until the man left. Muslims in the town supported the Salafis, he told me.

During the Dinniyeh events of 2000, Lebanese intelligence arrested seven or eight men from Qaraun while three or four others absconded. They were accused of fighting the army. Five eighteen-year-old boys from the town had gone to fight in Iraq in 2003, he told me. He and his brother were excited to learn that I was going to Iraq. They asked me to inquire about the fate of the young mujahideen from their town.

All Sunnis felt threatened and were uniting, he said, whether with the Muslim Brotherhood or the Future Movement. The Brotherhood was gaining in popularity in town because Sunnis felt marginalized. When they asked the Future Movement for weapons, they were turned down, he complained. “The Islamists will protect the Sunnis,” he said, and the Salafi movement would emerge stronger after these events. Dabaja’s brother agreed. “People are moving to extremism,” he said. “Before they were supporting Future, which is moderate, but now we cry for Nahr al-Barid. We could have used those people.” Dabaja agreed: “Last year we supported the army in Nahr al-Barid, but now we regret killing the extremists. People are thinking of weapons. We are threatened now. Are we going to sit with our hands tied?” Hizballah was afraid of the Salafis, they said. Dabaja liked Dai al-Islam al-Shahal, who was a “big thinker.” He asked me for Shahal’s phone number. As mayor Dabaja used to be invited to Shiite villages, but now that sectarian feelings were hardening he was not visiting them anymore. Roads between Qaraun and nearby Shiite towns were blocked.

Heading out we picked up an old Bedouin man called Hassan Fayad, who lived in the town of Shaabiyat al-Faur. Fifty men from the town had gone to fight in Beirut, but they had only been given sticks. There was a strong sense of Sunni solidarity now, he said, and they wanted weapons. “Shiites exposed that they are against Sunnis,” he said. He cursed Hariri for betraying Sunnis’ trust and humiliating them. “If Hariri wants to gain Sunnis back, he has to arm us. Without dignity there is nothing. We won’t accept to be humiliated.”

I continued visiting Tariq al-Jadida in late May and early June. The Muslim Brotherhood had put up new posters, one of which said, “The people of Beirut will only turn their weapons on the Zionist enemy. Peace in Beirut is the red line.” All local shops owned by Shiites were now closed, even those that had been in the neighborhood a long time. Sunni shop owners who had been friendly with their Shiite colleagues did not help them. The brother of one man from Tariq al-Jadida who had been killed in the fighting had come back after the funeral and shouted, “We don’t want Shiites here!”

“The shabab are upset,” said Fadi, the local militiaman I had befriended. “Future brought us down to the street but could do nothing. Future is popular because there is no Sunni alternative.” Fadi and his men had asked Secure Plus for weapons but were told they didn’t have any. It seemed as though the leadership had sold the weapons for profit. Provocations were occurring on a nightly basis. One night a car drove down Fadi’s street blasting Hizballah songs. Before that motorcycles drove through the area with flags for Amal and Hizballah. They caught one man, beat him up, and burned his motorcycle.

“We know who was on the street and who was at home,” he said. Those who fought were told they would receive a hundred-dollar bonus. “This battle changed our thoughts. We returned to our religion, to our sect. I won’t die for the [Future Movement]. I will die for my home, my sect. I am a Sunni. Now there is no Sunni living who likes Shiites.” But Fadi still drank and didn’t pray five times a day. Like many other Sunnis, he was proud of the Halba massacre. “It’s our right to do what we did in Halba,” he said. “They shouldn’t have been involved in the game.”

I found it ironic that the neglected and often impoverished Sunnis of Lebanon identified so closely with the state and with the Sunni elite. I returned to visit Hossam Ilmir, the principal at Bab al-Tabbaneh Elementary School. I found Mustafa Zaabi sitting in Ilmir’s office. Ilmir had 1,082 children in his school this year. The yard was dirty and smelled of urine. He complained that his students had to drink dirty water. He had not changed his mind about supporting the resistance following the clashes, he told me, because the weapons of the resistance had been targeted and the government had tried to make it a sectarian issue.

Ilmir blamed poverty for the fighting between Tabbaneh and Jabal Mohsen. The youth of both neighborhoods were unemployed. The elite, he thought, wanted to keep them poor. Ilmir and Mustafa agreed that the origins of the conflict were not sectarian but economic—rich against poor, with the elite making it seem sectarian. The people of Tabbaneh were ignored by politicians because most of the neighborhood’s thirty-five thousand people were originally from Akkar and so did not vote in Tabbaneh. Only five thousand of them voted in Tabbaneh, so politicians had little to gain from helping them.

The people of Lebanon were still divided while their leaders drank coffee together, he said. “The more the leaders agitate the street, the more power they get. Some young kids don’t want calm. They hope it escalates. They can go to the leaders and get money from them. The leaders hire men from Tabbaneh to be their armed bodyguards.” The ideologies of both sides were bankrupt, he told me. Politicians escalated sectarian tensions in order to reach their goals. Leadership was based on creating fear and tension. Without fear and tension, they wouldn’t be leaders.

Mustafa agreed that the communities were being led by elites. He remembered throwing rocks at Jabal Mohsen when he was seven years old. “The rivalry goes back before the massacre,” he said. “We Sunnis oppressed the Alawites,” Ilmir admitted. “They were garbage collectors, then they got educated, and we couldn’t believe they changed.” When he tried to arrange a reconciliation involving youth soccer, he was discouraged. “The police said it would end in stabbings.”

For once the Palestinians had emerged unscathed, having wisely chosen to abstain from involvement. A local Hamas official told me that there had been a joint Palestinian decision to stay out of the fighting. Some Fatah men had been involved in the Tariq al-Jadida fighting, and others had shut the road from Saida to Beirut. Dai al-Islam al-Shahal asked Palestinians in the north to join him, but nobody responded. “Dai al-Islam is another kind of Salafi. We don’t trust him, and we don’t share his point of view,” the official told me. “There is a general feeling that Sunnis in Lebanon were insulted in this battle,” he said. Hizballah knew that if the conflict lasted any longer, it would spread in the region.

Some Sunnis were beginning to question their support for Saad al-Hariri. The Muslim Brotherhood had mediated between Hizballah and the Future Movement, so the Hamas official expected the Muslim Brotherhood would benefit from an increasingly influential role. Hizballah didn’t want bloodshed, the Hamas official told me, because every Sunni killed was a danger to the group. “Hizballah was very smart to end it in a short time.”

Fatah al-Islam had spread outside the camps and might seek a role as the defender of Sunnis, he told me, even though Shaker al-Absi, who was still alive, had not sought a fight with Shiites. “The atmosphere is very welcoming for these groups,” he said. “Sunnis felt that they were caught without their underwear on.” Now some Sunnis asked why they had supported the war on Fatah al-Islam, because they could have used them in the recent battles.