Category Archives: Civil War

Bombing in Beirut Caps Day of Violence in Lebanon

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BEIRUT — Lebanon was rocked by vio­lence today with dozens killed in fight­ing in the country’s north and a car bomb in a pre­dom­i­nantly Chris­t­ian neigh­bor­hood of Beirut that killed one per­son and wounded up to a dozen.
“The day started with clashes in the north­ern city of Tripoli”:http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070520/ap_on_re_mi_ea/lebanon_violence;_ylt=Aksp6EN.OKSYmUdJcZiKdcULewgF between the Lebanese Army and the Pales­tin­ian mil­i­tant group, “Fatah al-Islam”:http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2007/05/20/africa/ME-GEN-Lebanon-Violence-Militants.php, which the Lebanese gov­ern­ment says is backed by Syria and shares an ide­ol­ogy with al Qaida. At least 22 sol­diers and 17 mil­i­tants were killed in fight­ing that lasted through much of the day.
But by the time calm had been imposed up north, a car bomb shat­tered win­dows and col­lapsed a build­ing in the east Beirut neigh­bor­hood of Acrafiyeh. Reports say a woman was killed and about a dozen wounded.
The bomb was placed in a car lot next to the pop­u­lar ABC Achrafiyeh mall, and the tim­ing of the blast — at 11:40 p.m. — suggested that its intent was to cause panic and fear among the crowd exit­ing the movie the­aters at the mall.
“It was just to scare peo­ple,” said a man in the car lot who declined to be iden­ti­fied. “If they really wanted to cause dam­age, they would have put it in the park­ing garage.“
As the AP reports:

The bomb left a crater about 4 feet deep and 9 feet wide, and police said the explo­sives were esti­mated to weigh 22 pounds. The blast — heard across the city — gut­ted cars, set vehi­cles ablaze and shat­tered store and apart­ment windows.

Hamid and Clau­dine Sal­iba, both 39, live across the street from the park­ing lot where the car exploded.
“In Lebanon, you expect any­thing,” said Clau­dine, and after today’s vio­lence up north, she and her hus­band were on guard. “But not in Achrafiyeh!“
They spoke from Hamid’s mother’s home, which is two doors down from their own, and the dev­as­ta­tion in the house was near total. Grace­ful Ottoman win­dows jambs were ripped from the walls and heavy doors torn from their hinges. Luck­ily for Hamid, his mother had left the house on vaca­tion two days pre­vi­ously, so there were no injuries.
This is the lat­est in a string of car bombs that many in Lebanon sus­pect is aimed at desta­bi­liz­ing the coun­try so that Syria can re-impose its hege­mony it enjoyed for 29 years.
Ini­tially wel­comed as pro­tec­tors dur­ing Lebanon’s 15-year-long civil war, Syr­ian main­tained an iron con­trol over Lebanon after the war ended, effec­tively occu­py­ing it from 1990 – 2005, when it with­drew its troops. The with­drawal was forced upon Dam­as­cus fol­low­ing mas­sive pop­u­lar protests, which the Lebanese call the “inde­pen­dence upris­ing,” in the wake of the assas­si­na­tion of for­mer Prime Min­is­ter Rafik Hariri. Many in Lebanon blame Syria for that killing and the waves of vio­lence that have fol­lowed.
Lebanon has been on a knife’s edge since Decem­ber of last year when Hezbol­lah and its allies, who sup­port Syria, pulled out of the gov­ern­ment in protest over leg­is­la­tion form­ing an inter­na­tional tri­bunal that would han­dle the Hariri case. Syria and its sup­port­ers vehe­mently oppose the tri­bunal, forc­ing the Lebanese gov­ern­ment to peti­tion the United Nations to impose the tri­bunal under Chap­ter 7 of the UN Char­ter, mean­ing it does not require Lebanese par­lia­men­tary approval. The tri­bunal is widely expected to indict high-level mem­bers of the Syr­ian regime, includ­ing the brother-in-law of Syr­ian Pres­i­dent Bashar al-Assad.
Tonight’s bomb­ing — which may or may not be tied to the fight­ing in the north — could be seen as a mes­sage that Syria’s agents in Lebanon are pre­pared to unleash more vio­lence if the tri­bunal is imposed on Lebanon.

Jumblatt shoots his mouth off

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BEIRUT — Well, this is just great. Druze leader Walid Jum­blatt said that rec­on­cil­i­a­tion with Hezbol­lah was “impos­si­ble” because the Shi’ite mil­i­tant group wants to replace the cur­rent plu­ral­ist state and soci­ety of Lebanon.
This is bunk. I have my crit­i­cisms of Hezbol­lah, but they don’t want to take over the whole coun­try. For one, they don’t want the respon­si­bil­ity. They want to be a resis­tance move­ment fight­ing the Israelis; they don’t want to be in charge of fill­ing pot­holes in Tariq el-Jdeide. They want enough power within the cur­rent sys­tem to guar­an­tee the south remains theirs, so they can move freely in and out of it and keep their weapons, which is the real base of their power. Does any­one think Iran and Syria would con­tinue to finance them if they weren’t such an effec­tive tool against Israel? If Hezbol­lah had no weapons, then they have no money. If they have no money, they have no abil­ity to sup­port their social ser­vices, which are a strong draw to Lebanon’s poorer Shi’ite pop­u­la­tion. With­out that loy­alty, they’re noth­ing — and Hezbol­lah knows it. As Hezbol­lah sees it, they _have_ to pro­tect their weapons if they want to remain polit­i­cally viable.
But back to Jum­blatt (or “Jumbo” as he’s affec­tion­ately know to local jour­nal­ists). He’s long had a rep­u­ta­tion as a dial-a-quote politician/warlord, but he rep­re­sents one of the small­est com­mu­ni­ties in Lebanon. (Druze make up maybe 5 per­cent of the pop­u­la­tion.)
What’s dan­ger­ous about his com­ments, how­ever, is that he’s lis­tened to by the rank and file of March 14, and his com­ments can harden atti­tudes to any kind of com­pro­mise — which is sorely needed these days. Hezbol­lah ain’t going away, and it has to be inte­grated into the Lebanese polit­i­cal sys­tem some­how — fully and non­vi­o­lently. Jumblatt’s com­ments make that more dif­fi­cult.
At any rate, his com­ments came in the wake of the dis­turb­ing dis­cov­ery of two caches of explo­sives and det­o­na­tion fuses scat­tered around Beirut and the rest of the coun­try. Per­haps some­one was just try­ing to dump them, but it’s set the place on edge. Care­less com­ments from polit­i­cal lead­ers are not the best way to calm the situation.

Two buses blown up in Christian area

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BEIRUT — Bombs destroyed two com­muter buses today in the small Chris­t­ian com­mu­nity of Ain Alaq, in the moun­tains north of Beirut.
Reports of fatal­i­ties var­ied, but ranged from three (Red Cross, secu­rity forces) to 12 (LBC and other media sources.) Ten to 20 were wounded. The first bomb was appar­ently attached to the under­car­riage of the first bus while the sec­ond was in a back seat on the sec­ond, accord­ing to my fixer, who is try­ing to find more info. I’ll update if this changes.
The wounded were civil­ians pos­si­bly trav­el­ing to work, mark­ing a change in the “two-year cam­paign of bomb­ings and assassinations”:http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/L13582123.htm that has wracked Lebanon since the killing of Rafik Hariri on Feb. 14, 2005. Before, the attacks were either tar­geted assas­si­na­tions of well-known anti-Syrian politi­cians and jour­nal­ists or small bombs exploded in build­ings late at night so as to min­i­mize casu­al­ties. This seems aimed at Iraq– or Israel-style ter­ror. Ran­dom, any­where, piti­less.
Details are still emerg­ing, but spec­u­la­tion is ram­pant. Was this Syria? Hezbol­lah? CIA? (A Hezbol­lah spokesman said it was the lat­ter.) Was it a warn­ing to the March 14 coali­tion not to attend the big rally planned for down­town tomor­row to mark the two-year anniver­sary of Hariri’s death?
One intrigu­ing con­nec­tion is to Elias Murr, Lebanon’s defense min­is­ter. The buses orig­i­nated in Bteghrin, the home of the Murr fam­ily — they’re the major clan there — and some have won­dered if this could be a response to Murr’s “refusal last week to return a truck full of Hezbol­lah weapons”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/6345761.stm inter­cepted by the Lebanese Army?
Elias Murr was the tar­get of a failed assas­si­na­tion in July 2005.
I’m not con­vinced of that, as it would be a com­plete turn-around for Hezbol­lah, who have not (yet) turned their weapons on their fel­low Lebanese — a point of pride for the group.
Also, the attack hap­pened near Bik­faya, the ances­tral home of the Gemayel clan. Sev­eral of the dead were Gemayels. Lebanon’s indus­try min­is­ter, Pierre Gemayel “was assassinated”:http://www.back-to-iraq.com/archives/2006/11/pierre_gemayel_has_been_assass.php in Novem­ber.
Michel Murr, the defense minister’s father, was at the site of the bomb­ing and said it was a mes­sage for all Lebanese to come together and tran­scend pol­i­tics. That’s a nice sen­ti­ment, but it’s almost assuredly _not_ the mes­sage the bombers were try­ing to send.
More likely, it was a warn­ing to March 14.
“They are try­ing to sab­o­tage tomorrow’s meet­ing,” said Ahmad Fat­fat, the for­mer inte­rior min­is­ter. “They are try­ing to divide the Chris­tians. … The peo­ple who are doing this don’t want the peo­ple to come together and it’s another link in the chain” of assas­si­na­tions.
“I can­not believe any Lebanese is capa­ble of doing such a ter­ri­ble thing,” he added.
Fat­fat also said the bombs were placed on the buses yes­ter­day, although he declined to say how he knew that.
Obvi­ously, Fat­fat is not-so-subtlely point­ing the fin­ger at Syria. A Hezbol­lah spokesman said the same thing, but blamed the CIA instead of Syria.
I wit­nessed this in Iraq, too, by the way, early in the insur­gency. In 2004, when the vio­lence was much more spo­radic and rare than it is now, Iraqis would often tell me, “These bombs could not come from Iraqis. No Iraqi would hurt another Iraqi. This must be the Israelis or CIA.“
There’s always a nat­ural ten­dency to believe that out­siders are the ones doing the killing. Wit­ness the imme­di­ate reac­tion to the Mur­rah Build­ing in 1995. Every­one imme­di­ately sus­pected Arab ter­ror­ism, not home-grown white suprema­cists.
But right now, espe­cially on the eve of the anniver­sary of the killing of Hariri, every­one in Lebanon — Hezbol­lah, March 14, etc. — is bank­ing on national unity for their own pur­poses. “Hariri was for all of us,” as many say. Other par­ties — Syria, espe­cially, but pos­si­bly Israel — would love to see Lebanese at each oth­ers’ throats. Syria could use any vio­lence as an “I told you so” excuse to inter­vene again, and Israel prob­a­bly wouldn’t mind see­ing Hezbol­lah on the defen­sive in its own coun­try.
(Mind you, I’m not accus­ing Israel of today’s bomb­ing; I’m just ana­lyz­ing who might stand to gain from Lebanese dis­cord.)
*UNRELATED (?) NEWS:* The Grand Mufti of Lebanon, Sheikh Moham­mad Rashid Qab­bani, the high­est rank­ing Sunni cleric in coun­try, claims in a press release to LBC that he was heck­led and threat­ened by the pro-Syrian, Hezbollah-led March 8 pro­test­ers as he led prayers at Hariri’s grave in Martyr’s Square down­town today. He says he was told to leave or they would burn his car.
(March 8 is a coali­tion of mostly Shi’ite par­ties and some Chris­tians, and includes Hezbol­lah, Amal, the Syr­ian Social Nation­al­ist Party and the Chris­t­ian par­ties of Michel Aoun and Suleiman Fran­jieh. With the excep­tion of Aoun, they are all solidly pro-Syrian. Aoun just wants to be pres­i­dent and will hitch his horse to whichever wagon he thinks will win.)
Also, in this morning’s _San Fran­cisco Chronicle_, I have a story about the “rearm­ing of the Lebanese factions.”:http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/02/13/MNG62O3F5U1.DTL&hw=allbritton&sn=001&sc=1000 It might become very rel­e­vant after today.

Beirut in flames

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hard_days_work.jpg
An oppo­si­tion mem­ber cra­dles the head of an exhausted com­rade as they take a break from block­ing roads in Beirut on Tues­day © 2007 Christo­pher Allbrit­ton
BEIRUT — If there was any ques­tion whether Hezbol­lah was in con­trol of the sit­u­a­tion here fol­low­ing the vio­lence of Tues­day, the fight­ing today should con­vince those that it is not, and the sit­u­a­tion is about to be seri­ously out of con­trol.
To back up a lit­tle, Tuesday’s vio­lence seemed to shock even the lead­ers of Hezbol­lah, both because its Aounists and Amal allies behaved like hooli­gans, but also because the fol­low­ers of Saad Hariri and Samir Geagea refused to back down and matched slo­gan with slo­gan, stick with stick, stone with stone.
At one neigh­bor­hood in Beirut, where the fight­ing was fiercest, the largely Sunni sup­port­ers of al-Mustaqbal chanted their sup­port for Amer­ica (in response to the chants of “Iran! Iran!” and “Bashar! Syria!” by Amal sup­port­ers across the street.) They also, bizarrely, hoisted a poster of Sad­dam Hus­sein, indi­cat­ing that the Sunni-Shi’a con­flict from Iraq has poi­soned the atmos­phere in Lebanon now, too.
This is about to be a full-on sec­tar­ian clash between Sun­nis and Shi’a and within the Chris­t­ian com­mu­nity.
That’s why Hezbol­lah and its allies called off their strike after a day, despite many promises by the men on the street I saw who said they would con­tinue the strike “for days,” if nec­es­sary.
“Do you not think Hezbol­lah loves Lebanon?” asked Bilal, a Hezbol­lah sup­porter I spoke with as his com­pa­tri­ots burned a car to block the road lead­ing the air­port. “Of course we do, which is why we are pre­pared to stay out here for days, weeks.“
More omi­nously, today’s vio­lence shows that Hezbol­lah no longer con­trols the oppo­si­tion move­ment it cre­ated. Months of ani­mos­ity over the war, the par­lia­men­tary paral­y­sis and calls for chang­ing the gov­ern­ment has hard­ened posi­tions among the Sunni, who increas­ingly see the Shi’a as respon­si­ble for last summer’s war and more loyal to Iran than to Lebanon. In short, the Shi’ite mil­i­tant group has pushed its polit­i­cal oppo­nents too far.
Already this has spread beyond the cap­i­tal. The Lebanese Army has been deployed to Chtoura and Baal­bak in the Bekaa and there are as yet uncon­firmed reports that the road to old road to Sidon has been closed. By whom, we don’t know.
Four peo­ple are dead and at least 25 injured and while this flare-up might be con­tained, the next one appears inevitable. And next time it won’t be fought with sticks and stones.

“The blood of the Shi’ites is boiling”

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Here’s the lat­est I filed from Lebanon. “A much shorter version”:http://www.nj.com/news/ledger/index.ssf?/base/news-10/116556152129650.xml&coll=1 appeared in the _Newark Star-Ledger_, but here’s the full account:

BEIRUT — Lebanon’s cap­i­tal is once again a tin­der­box, ready to blow because of polit­i­cal rival­ries exac­er­bated by sec­tar­ian ten­sions. Increas­ingly, the polit­i­cal dis­putes — which are osten­si­bly over inter­na­tional tri­bunals, pres­i­den­tial terms and the legit­i­macy of a gov­ern­ment — have grown into reli­gious dis­putes, mir­ror­ing the sec­tar­ian ten­sions between Sun­nis and Shi’ites across the region.
Which leader one sup­port­ers is often deter­mined by one’s faith. Shi’ites sup­port the Syrian-backed Hezbol­lah and its leader, Has­san Nas­ral­lah, who has called for the over­throw of the cur­rent gov­ern­ment as being too close to the United States and cut­ting Shi’ites out of power for too long. Sun­nis, how­ever, sup­port the cur­rent gov­ern­ment because it is lead by Prime Min­is­ter Fuad Sin­iora, who is a mem­ber of the Future Move­ment, a polit­i­cal party headed Saad Hariri, the son of the mur­dered ex-premier Rafik, who was killed in 2005.
“The polit­i­cal issues are sec­tar­ian,” explained Tariq Tar­qawi, 20, who is, in order, a Pales­tin­ian, a Sunni and a car elec­tri­cian. He lives in Ard Jal­loul, a mainly Sunni neigh­bor­hood that abuts the mainly Shi’ite sub­urbs of Beirut. “They love Nas­ral­lah, we love Hariri.“
It’s a polit­i­cal cri­sis that has come to a head in the past week, with hun­dreds of thou­sands of pro-Syrian sup­port­ers fill­ing down­town Beirut and street clashes between Sunni and Shi’ite youths from rival neigh­bor­hoods. Nas­ral­lah says his peo­ple will con­tinue to demon­strate and par­a­lyze cen­tral Beirut until the gov­ern­ment resigns. Sin­iora says he’s stay­ing. Where this ends up is anyone’s guess, but it’s already turned deadly.
Ali Ahmad Mah­moud, a 20-year-old Shi’ite from the neigh­bor­hood, was killed Sun­day night in fight­ing between Shi’ites and Sun­nis in Ard Jal­loul. Details are murky, but res­i­dents say Shi’ite pro­test­ers appar­ently entered the neigh­bor­hood spoil­ing for a fight.
“If we hadn’t fought them, they would have come in here and bro­ken every­thing,” said Khalid Hashem, 20, a Sunni from the neigh­bor­hood. He was, he added, a friend of Mah­moud. “The Shi’ites are known for this.“
Accord­ing to oth­ers, the intrud­ers chanted slo­gans and insulted Sunni reli­gious fig­ures.
“We could not bear it any­more,” said one woman in a phar­macy whose hus­band would not allow her name to be used. “I did not like Hariri and I had noth­ing against the Shi’ites, but now things are chang­ing. This is not a polit­i­cal demon­stra­tion any­more.“
Both Shi’ite and Sunni par­ti­sans blame the other side for the shoot­ing, but the ques­tion remains: Who killed Ali Ahmad Mah­moud?
The sit­u­a­tion is so knife-edge bal­anced that the head of Lebanese army warned that his forces were being strained to the break­ing point as they tried to cope with the secu­rity down­town and main­tain calm through the tenser neigh­bor­hoods of the city. If the protests con­tin­ued, or worse, turned more vio­lent, the army would be unable to cope, he said.
On Mon­day, Mahmoud’s body was taken down to the demon­stra­tion sur­round­ing the Grand Serail, the old Ottoman fortress that serves as the prime minister’s office and now, the sleep­ing quar­ters for a sig­nif­i­cant por­tion of Siniora’s cab­i­net.
The sight of Mahmoud’s cof­fin brought a fresh surge of fury at the gov­ern­ment and pro­tes­tors crowded around the ambu­lance car­ry­ing it. Many car­ried signs pro­claim­ing Mah­moud a mar­tyr. “Mar­tyred at the hands of the government’s mili­tias,” read one.
Almost gone were the ini­tial polit­i­cal con­sid­er­a­tions that had brought the hun­dreds of thou­sands into down­town Beirut: the inter­na­tional tri­bunal, pres­i­den­tial terms and Shi’ite rep­re­sen­ta­tion. Mon­day was a day of mourn­ing and pas­sion.
“The blood of the Shi’ites is boil­ing,” chanted the pro­tes­tors. “Death to Sin­iora.“
Down­town Beirut is a tent city, with the can­vas con­struc­tions lined up below the Grand Serail, like many a besieg­ing army has done over the cen­turies in this part of the world. At any hour, chant­ing pro­tes­tors crowd up against coils of con­certina wire while Lebanese Army and Hezbol­lah dis­ci­pline men keep them rel­a­tively at bay.
For Iman Fakhiya, 29, from the Shi’ite town of Taibe in the south, this protest is sim­ply a mat­ter of fair­ness for the Shi’ites, who have tra­di­tion­ally been the under­dogs in Lebanon.
Hezbol­lah gained sup­port in the south because the gov­ern­ment in Beirut rarely pro­vided ser­vices to the rural and impov­er­ished South and Bekaa Val­ley, the home­lands for the country’s Shi’ites. And over 23 years, since its for­ma­tion in 1982, it has soft­ened its Islamic rhetoric, and now pro­vides for Shi’ites when the gov­ern­ment doesn’t, such as schools and hos­pi­tals, and defends them when the elite of Lebanon won’t. Even today, on online forums revolv­ing around events in Beirut, sup­port­ers of the gov­ern­ment often talk of the Shi’ites down­town as “scum” and dirty out­siders.
“I think my par­ents’ gen­er­a­tion accepted this but we won’t,” she said. “They want to keep us down. We just want our rights. Why is the pres­i­dency for the Chris­tians and the prime min­is­ter­ship for the Sun­nis?“
For her, it is only a mat­ter of time, lit­er­ally. She would stay for as long as it takes, she said, no mat­ter how uncom­fort­able she was.
“It doesn’t mat­ter,” she said as she pulled the blan­ket tighter. “We’ve been hurt­ing for a long time. We are used to it.”

Also, I’ll be trav­el­ing for the next few weeks, so post­ings will be infre­quent. I hope things don’t get out of con­trol here.
IMPORTANT CHANGE: Com­ments have been changed to allow authen­ti­cated com­menters only. This means you will have to sign up for a “TypeKey”:https://www.typekey.com/t/typekey/register?lang=en-us account to com­ment. This will cut down on spam and drive-by com­menters. Sorry for the incon­ve­nience, but it’s a nec­es­sary evil these days.