by Nir Rosen
The Syrians had occupied Ajami’s house for ten years, and he had taken part in anti-Syrian military operations. “The Syrians tried to remove Sunnis from their role in the country and raise the status of Shiites,” he said. After the Hariri assassination, Sunnis had grown more extreme. “They made us feel this way. Shiites hate us and want their revenge after a thousand years. They killed Hariri and they don’t want a trial for the killers. Before Hariri died, Sunnis were not so extreme. They made us like this. Everybody supports Saad al-Hariri because of the sectarian conflict. It began when Iran entered Lebanon through Hizballah. Shiites consider themselves oppressed historically, and now it’s the chance for them to achieve what they want. Only Bashar al-Assad is stopping it, because if it starts here it will spread there between Alawites and Sunnis, and Alawites are the minority. Shiites made themselves different, special, always. Go back in history; they are obsessed with Hussein and want revenge. Hizballah is an Iranian party, that’s it—it serves Iranian interests.”
Ajami had encouraged young men to go fight in Iraq in the past, but no longer. “The situation is confusing, and you don’t know who the resistance is,” he said. “Al Qaeda is fighting people, people are fighting each other.” Ajami acknowledged that the March 14 movement, which he supported, was cooperating with the Americans. “The Americans are working for their own interests,” he said. “In Lebanon they are with the Sunnis. Their interests in Iraq are with the Shiites. The Future Movement is looking for protection from Syria, so it is allying with Americans and French.” He insisted that Fatah al-Islam had been a ploy to make Sunnis look like terrorists. “They made Fatah al-Islam terrorists and Shiites resistance. Making Nasrallah the hero is serving the Shiite agenda. Give me half the money they got, and I will form a much better resistance.”
Ajami took me to meet the mufti of the Bekaa Valley, Khalil al-Meis. Meis had been mufti since 1985. He had been famous for his strident sectarian speeches, which many identified as pro-Al Qaeda, until he was co-opted by the Future Movement in the 2005 elections. He too agreed that Sunnis felt targeted following the killing of Hariri. “They killed Hariri and now they are surrounding [Prime Minister] Siniora,” he said. “Siniora represents the Sunni presence in the state, so they are trying to weaken him.” In his view, common among Sunnis, Hizballah was part of Iran, and the group had used its victory over Israel to dominate Lebanon and try “to make Shiites feel less like Arab patriots and make them feel Iranian.” Such accusations had grown increasingly prevalent; even Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak had called Shiites fifth columnists for Iran. “Sunnis are not allied with America, but the Americans are fighting Iran in Lebanon,” Meis said. “In Iraq America is allied with Shiites. In Afghanistan the Shiites benefited from the Americans. Americans are Americans—but they always look for their interests, with Sunnis here, with Shiites in Iraq.” Saddam had become a symbol for Sunnis because of the way he was executed and the timing, which coincided with the day on which Sunnis celebrated an important holiday. “Saddam is not the Iraqi Saddam anymore,” he said, but a Sunni symbol.
IN JANUARY 2008 the mufti of Mount Lebanon, Sheikh Muhamad Ali Juzu, attacked clerics who wore “black turbans,” meaning Shiite clerics. In April he warned that Hizballah was implementing an “armed invasion” of his majority-Sunni area and called on the government to allow Sunnis to carry weapons so that they could defend themselves.
I drove down to Juzu’s ornate home, on a hill overlooking the Mediterranean. It was guarded by a German shepherd and men wearing sandals and the uniform of the Internal Security Forces. Juzu was notorious for his anti-Shiite vitriol. Born in 1927, he had been mufti since 1962. Problems between Sunnis and Shiites were new, he said. He blamed them on Ayatollah Khomeini’s Iranian Revolution and the rise in the 1970s of the Lebanese cleric Imam Musa Sadr and his Amal Movement. “He divided people,” he said of Sadr. “Before, Shiites were in all parties and didn’t have this extreme assabiya [esprit de corps]. After the Iranian Revolution the Iranians began purchasing the loyalty of Sunnis throughout the Muslim world, he insisted. “Here in my area some Sunnis go with Hizballah because they get paid,” he said. “They want Sunnis against Sunnis, like what happened in Nahr al-Barid. It served Shiite interests.”
Juzu repeated the common observation among Sunnis that the Americans had changed the regional balance, empowering Iran and Shiites. “The destruction of Saddam and Iraq helped Iran,” he said, “Now Iran controls Iraq.” Juzu himself was a friend of Sheikh Harith al-Dhari, head of Iraq’s Association of Muslim Scholars. Dhari was among Iraq’s most sectarian Sunni leaders. The resistance organizations he backed had cooperated with Al Qaeda in attacks against Shiites. “Sheikh Harith fights and defends his country and his identity, and is fighting Iran and the Americans,” Juzu explained.
Juzu defended the need for Sunnis in Lebanon to arm themselves. “It’s natural when a man feels he is in danger to protect himself,” he said. “It’s easy to make war in Lebanon. The army would split in two if a civil war happened. If there are two equal poles, it’s good, it will prevent war; if one side has more power, there can be war.” Despite all this, he said, “If there is a war against Israel I am with Hizballah. Anybody who fights Israel—an Iranian, a communist—the Arab people will support him.”
The Sunnis of Lebanon are, of course, very diverse and not at all monolithic in their values or motivations, and the struggle within their community, as well as within Lebanon, is not between radicals and moderates. It can more accurately be described as a competition between haves and have nots. In Lebanon, as elsewhere, the poor have only two choices: to accept their fate or rebel. While rebellion in the 1960s or ’70s might have come under a leftist, secular, Marxist, or nationalist guise, today the language of rebellion is often that of Al Qaeda.
Although Lebanese Maronites—Syriac Eastern Catholics—have a mythology of being victimized by the Syrians, the Sunnis of Tripoli suffered much more when their city was bombarded. The Syrian presence was more pronounced in the north as well. In the 1980s there was a major face-off between Salafis and Syrians in the north. In 2000 Najib Mikati, a Sunni politician competing with Rafiq al-Hariri, began to rehabilitate Sunni Islamists from Tawhid and elsewhere. He even tried to free the prisoners from Dinniyeh, though he failed to do so—this maneuver was left to Saad al-Hariri in 2005. Mikati began his campaign to court Salafis when he feared the Muslim Brotherhood would not support him. It was only in 2004 that the Future Movement approached northern Salafis, and their relationship remains ambiguous to this day. The Future Movement had turned the formerly anti-Syrian elements of Tawhid into their street gangs in Tripoli, while other Tawhid veterans sided with pro-Syrian politicians such as Mikati. Lebanon’s Salafis were divided, and Hariri did what he and other rich Sunni politicians usually do: he bought people’s loyalty and calm.
Clerics close to the Future Movement such as Bilal Barudi tried to buy Fatah al-Islam off, but the group was neither a March 14 creation nor a Syrian one. State sponsors were no longer needed for these sinuous, nonstate entities. This pattern of buying support was not unique to Tripoli; in Sidon, in southern Lebanon, the Future Movement co-opted the Communists. “They were indiscriminate in accepting support as long as they received votes or loyalty, whether from Al Qaeda or former Communists,” says As’ad Abu Khalil, a Lebanese-American professor of political science at California State, Stanislaus. “Mikati capitalized on longstanding fanatical Sunni sentiment. Mikati and Rafiq al-Hariri had the same problem: yes, they did have the support of Syrian intelligence, but they wanted to institutionalize their bases of support. They needed permanent sources of support so they . . . went to areas where they fielded candidates and tried to co-opt existing forces on the ground.”
Salafis typically rejected the very notion of elections, viewing democracy as an alternative to religion and hence apostasy. But in Lebanon, especially beginning in 2005, Salafis campaigned and voted despite the fact that the system required a Christian president. Their motivat
ion was to protect Sunnis, and clerics advised their followers to vote for the March 14 coalition. Traditional Salafis perceived the Hariri assassination as an attack on Sunni power. They received money from Saudis as well as the Hariri network and justified their interpretation of Islam in terms of defending Sunnis against an alleged Shiite threat. The Saudis had been battling a domestic Al Qaeda franchise since 2003, and as a result they had cut off support for jihadist Salafis. This allowed Future to come in and provide funds in exchange for moderation and cooperation, regarded by some of the rank and file as a betrayal.
ACCORDING TO A FORMER military commander of the Tawhid movement who had spent eleven years in a Syrian prison, “Tripoli is a reservoir for Sunni jihadists in Lebanon.” Hundreds of men had left Tripoli to fight in Iraq, and veterans of the Dinniyeh incident from Tripoli who had been released had also joined Fatah al-Islam. A veteran of Islamist movements, he believed that Fatah al-Islam was not allied with Syria or the March 14 coalition. There was a confluence between the interests of Syria and some of the Salafis, he said, but March 14 supported the “official Salafis” such as those in the Independent Islamic Gathering. He attributed some of the motivation to statements by Ayman al-Zawahiri, who had declared Lebanon a land for jihad and described the UN peacekeeping mission in the south as a crusader occupation. The Mujahideen Shura Council in Iraq had decided to fight the Americans in Lebanon, he said, and dispatched fighters there as well.
While Fatah al-Islam was not a creation of Saudi Arabia, or the Future Movement, or even Syria, as various parties in Lebanon allege, it did find a welcoming environment in northern Lebanon. Tripoli has a tradition of armed militancy and is full of armed groups and experienced veterans. When a Saudi militant named Juhayman al-Utaibi took over the Grand Mosque in Mecca in 1979, a key moment in jihadist Salafi history, three of his accomplices were from Tripoli. In addition to the Tawhid movement and Kanan Naji’s Jund Allah, there is also Suyuf Allah, or the Swords of God, founded by a judge in a religious court. As a result there was no need for Sunni leaders to turn to jihadists, since they had an available pool of veterans from the 1980s Tawhid experience. While conspiracy theorists have blamed Sunni leaders in Lebanon for arming their people, and there have been some independent initiatives of this nature, it is just as likely that the Sunnis were responding to pressure from below. Not responding would mean losing ground and popularity. The Muslim Brotherhood, embodied in the Jamaa Islamiya movement in Lebanon, was weakened in Tripoli because it failed to propose any solution for the events in Lebanon, according to Patrick Haenni of the International Crisis Group in Beirut. Haenni, who has also studied the Brotherhood in Egypt, explained that it normally operates under the slogan “Islam is the solution,” but in Lebanon, as the Shiite Hizballah movement had also conceded, this cannot be offered. As a result people have been pushed toward private initiatives, while the traditional Salafis have lost ground because they are too close to power and too moderate. In late 2006, in the Bab al-Tabbaneh slums of Tripoli, one banner that went up above the streets called for Saad al-Hariri to “arm us and leave the rest to us.”
Tripoli was once the main city in Lebanon; in the nineteenth century, Beirut was a backwater in comparison. The main publishing houses and intellectuals were all in Tripoli. When Lebanon was cut out from Syria, Tripolitans protested in opposition. Traditionally Lebanon’s Sunnis were hostile to the idea of Lebanon itself, which many viewed as a Christian project at odds with Arab nationalism. Tripoli’s economy suffered after it was separated from Syria. Rafiq al-Hariri helped spread Saudi money to buy votes in the north. Young people who might have gone to study in Jordan or Egypt instead went to study in Saudi Arabia. Saudi money also made its way to traditional Salafis as long as they avoided overt politics. When the jihadists appeared there was a sense among some in the March 14 coalition that the newcomers were their friends and could be political allies. The increasingly sectarian rhetoric used by Lebanese politicians and clerics provided the space for jihadist Salafis to feel at home. Tripoli, Lebanon’s second-largest city, is a majority-Sunni city with few other groups represented. During the civil war Sunni militias battled the Syrians there. The quality of life in some parts of Tripoli, and in the poor villages of Akkar nearby, resembled the Palestinian camps.
In June 2007, a Sunni member of Parliament called Walid Idu was blown up. He had been very pro-Syria until 2005, like many of the Future Movement’s members. When Idu’s body was brought to the hospital, sectarian chants could be heard. “Allah, Hariri, Tariq al-Jadida!” some shouted, modifying the Shiite pro-Hizballah chant “Allah, Nasrallah, and all of Dahiyeh!” Others chanted the names of early Sunni leaders like Omar and Uthman, and warned that the blood of Sunnis was boiling and that they wanted revenge on President Lahoud, Syrian President Assad, and Hizballah’s Nasrallah. At Idu’s funeral procession some mourners chanted for Hariri, Saddam, and Zarqawi, while others chanted for the United States. “Sunni! Sunni! Sunni!” they shouted. Some also shouted support for Libya, apparently because Libya was implicated in the death of the Amal Movement’s founder, Imam Musa Sadr. “My dick, Nasrallah, and all of Dahiyeh!” others shouted, and “We don’t want sectarianism, but God is with the Sunnis!”
According to Omar Nashabe, a Sunni journalist with the leading independent paper Al Akhbar, “March 14 created the environment by supporting Sunni assabiya.” He told me that when Lebanon’s mufti, the main Sunni cleric appointed by the state, spoke at the government headquarters in Beirut following the initiation of the Shiite sit-in the downtown area close to the Prime Minister’s office, he had called Siniora “our prime minister” (meaning the Sunnis) and stated that nobody (meaning the Shiites) would be allowed to remove him. Nashabe mocked the bogeyman of the Persian invasion. “Traditionally Maronites were said to be closest to the West,” he said. “After Hariri’s death it was the Sunni sect. The Saudi government pushed this to show that Sunnis are close to the American agenda, but most combatants of Fatah al-Islam were Saudis.” Nashabe explained that groups like Fatah al-Islam are not necessarily linked to any regime, nor do they have to be state-sponsored. Instead they benefit, like other criminal groups, from the tensions and organized crime in Lebanon. Like the Sunnis in Iraq, the Sunnis of Lebanon feel weak and on retreat compared with the Shiites, with no clear identity. As a result it often seems as if they support a hodgepodge of different and contradictory causes, like the disparate chants heard at Idu’s funeral.
According to As’ad Abu Khalil, “Hizballah’s arms existed from the 1990s until 2005, and back then it was praised by the same Sunni voices who were aligned with them. The Hariri Saudi alliance has been successful in alarming Sunnis in the wake of Hariri’s assassination. After the failure of Israel they tried to drive a bigger wedge between Sunnis and Hizballah. The Saudis surpassed the success of Al Qaeda in deepening the Sunni-Shiite rift—they are the heirs of Zarqawi in that regard, utilizing their media and defining every political issue in pure Sunni-Shiite term. The Saudis are the pillar of the American agenda in the Middle East and want to further American interests. The U.S. wants to weaken Hamas and Hizballah. So they make Hizballah seem not as a resistance movement (as it was perceived by Sunnis up until 2005) but portray it as a sectarian force that furthers Iranian interests in the region through their media, publishing houses, statements of their politicians. They control the culture industry in the region. Saudis control Arab newspapers in the Arab world and outside.”
To understand the point of view of Hizballah’s policy-makers, I met with the cerebral Nawaf al-Musawi, a key adviser to Nasrallah, as well as one of Hizballah’s most ubiquitous public faces and head of its foreign policy unit. Just recently Ahmad Fatfat, a key Future Movement figure who was the former interior minister and current minister of youth and sport, had described Nasrallah’s May 2007 statement on red lines (see Chapter Six) as the worst political mistake the Shiite leader had ever made. I asked Musawi about this. Nasrallah had been concerned about three issues, he told me. “First,
protecting the Lebanese army, because it is the guarantee that prevents civil war from happening. If it is weakened, the pro-American faction in Lebanon will ask for the deployment of multinational forces. Second, preventing a new ‘War of the Camps’ in Lebanon and preventing Palestinians from being targets of new massacres and tragedies. This would destroy Lebanon and deepen the suffering of Palestinians, and would disperse the Palestinians and negate their right of return. Third, preventing Lebanon from becoming a place of war for Al Qaeda. This would transform Lebanon into an oven, and the coals of this oven would be the bodies and property of Lebanese and Palestinians. The Bush administration transformed Iraq into a place of war with Al Qaeda, and now it is a place of massacres, and we don’t want our country to become a place of massacres. So let the Bush administration solve their problems away from Lebanon.”
He rejected the notion that Sunni ideology had changed. “The new thing that happened with Hariri was the increase of Saudi influence in the Sunni environment,” he said, “And this happened with Syrian approval and cognizance, because without Hafiz al-Assad’s approval, Hariri would never have been prime minister. The Lebanese Sunni position reflects the Saudi position. The sectarian tension in Lebanon is enhancing Saudi influence in Lebanon. And the other way around as well: Saudi influence is enhancing sectarian tensions in Lebanon.”
Musawi insisted that the Future Movement, which dominated the Interior Ministry, was supporting jihadist Salafis in Lebanon. “These were the Sunni reserves to fight the Shiites,” he said. “Until Nahr al-Barid, the Ministry of Interior characterized the Palestinians as part of the Sunni reserves that would fight with them against Shiites. This idea of building a Sunni militia to fight Shiites began after the killing of Hariri. Since 2005 I was warning European officials on a constant basis and let them know that we see what the house of Hariri is doing with Sunni extremists and Salafis, and this is a very dangerous game and it will be against he who plays with it, as it happened in Afghanistan. As for us, we are not looking for any war with anybody, internally or externally. Our only objective is to defend and protect our country and preserve its stability.” He blamed Bandar bin Sultan, the former Saudi ambassador to Washington, for the creation of groups like Fatah al-Islam. “It is Bandar’s project to take Saudi Salafis and bring them here to fight Hizballah.”