by Nir Rosen
Many of the families living in Barbir had packed up and left for the mountains or their villages, expecting things to get worse. That afternoon, a few hundred Shiite shabab (youth) were organized in rows. Many Amal men wore combat boots and combat pants. They squatted and peered across the road at Tariq al-Jadida, squinting and pointing, looking for snipers in the buildings. Most of them were the same young men I had seen the day before. I saw a few men wearing the gray Internal Security Forces uniforms working together with the Amal men, who set up checkpoints and demanded identity papers in plain sight of the Lebanese soldiers. I sat on the street next to a few shabab who were resting, waiting for something to happen. One of them was from Dahiyeh. “Hamra Street is for them,” he said of Sunnis, and told me that there were Sunni volunteers from Akkar there. We discussed buying arms. The shabab told me that AK-47s were coming in from Iraq. I asked them why they were there. “We are here to defend the weapons of the resistance,” one of them said. “We as the Shiite sect are targeted. They are removing high-ranking Shiite officers from their positions.” We discussed which identity mattered most to them. Three agreed that they were Shiites only, not Arab or Lebanese, much to my surprise. “We are here to fight Qabbani,” one said, referring to the mufti of Lebanon. In the afternoon sandwiches were brought for all the shabab. I noticed men appearing with AK-47s and other rifles, sitting on corners, talking among themselves, getting ready for something.
That day the order came down from the Future leadership for the presenter on Future TV to begin the news segment on Nasrallah’s speech with the inflammatory “How the resistance became the occupier.” In Barbir we sat around listening to Nasrallah’s speech from car radios. Everybody cheered. Nasrallah said that the cause of the crisis was the attack on Hizballah’s military apparatus, which was “a declaration of war . . . against the resistance and its weapons for the benefit of America and Israel. The communications network is the significant part of the weapons of the resistance. I said that we will cut off the hand that targets the weapons of the resistance. . . . Today is the day to carry out this decision.” The opposition-led activities would not cease until the government revoked its decisions, Nasrallah concluded. Saad al-Hariri then responded in a speech calling the opposition actions a “crime” and warning, “We will not accept that Beirut kneel before anyone.” By Beirut, he meant Sunnis.
As the speeches ended, shots could be heard. The Lebanese army retreated as if on command, their vehicles rumbling away. The boys shouted in triumph and jumped. More and more armed men emerged from a building—some with ammunition vests, some in designer clothes with carefully gelled hair. They stood behind corners emptying their magazines into the buildings across the street without discrimination, firing from RPGs. The troops of boys who had been calling for blood until then fled, some started crying. The local commander, a dark-skinned man in his forties called Haj Firas, was a former Amal fighter who was now with Hizballah. He was frustrated with his men for not aiming properly. He took one fighter’s AK-47 and demonstrated, shouting, “Aim and shoot!” Shots were being returned from buildings and street corners on the other side, but nobody was aiming at anything. “It’s open now,” one Amal fighter told me. “It will get worse. I hope so, so we can win.” Reinforcements were brought in from Dahiyeh. A commander arrived and reported that Amal leader Nabih Beri had ordered them not to shoot too much. One of the men cursed Beri. “He wants us not to shoot too much, but they are shooting a lot at us,” he complained. Suddenly I recognized one of the Amal fighters. A fit young man, with gelled hair like the rest of them, he worked at the juice bar in my health club in the evenings and was a geography teacher during the day. We paused for a moment in surprised mutual recognition; then I sprinted across the street, ducking to avoid sniper fire. As fire from automatic weapons, sniper rifles, and the occasional RPG went back and forth, I was trapped on one block. I wound up spending the night in the lobby of an apartment building nearby with local journalists from Al Jazeera and other media.
The next morning, May 9, I walked home past armed Amal men on patrol, some of whom waved their party’s flag as they passed indifferent Lebanese soldiers and headed into Sunni areas. Clashes continued in much of Beirut, and the occasional RPG explosion could be heard. The Future newspaper office was attacked and burned. Hizballah surrounded the Future News television building, and the Lebanese army advised the station to halt all broadcasts, which it did. Ash Sharq radio, also belonging to the Future Movement, was taken off the air. Future TV offices containing archives were burned down after militiamen from the Syrian Social Nationalist Party (SSNP) clashed with at least thirty-five armed Future supporters there. The SSNP looted the Future media office and hung pictures of the Syrian president. Shutting down the main news outlet may have been wise from Hizballah’s point of view—it prevented Future’s ability to mobilize supporters and probably helped prevent more violence—but it looked ugly, even if people were reminded that former Prime Minister Rafiq al-Hariri had shut down many opposition media outlets himself. Beirut residents were stunned to see Hizballah soldiers patrolling the streets and manning positions. They were in control of Hamra and Verdun, and there were a few last gun battles in the Sadat area as the Hizballah soldiers surrounded Hariri’s headquarters in Qoraitem.
In the morning March 14 officials were summoned for an urgent meeting in Maarab at the home of Samir Geagea, the leader of the extreme right-wing Christian Lebanese Forces. They decided to escalate the conflict in the north, where Hizballah and its allies were weaker. The mountain road from Beirut to the Beqaa Valley was closed, as was the main highway in Tripoli and the road to Halba in Akkar. The road leading to the Masnaa border crossing with Syria was blocked by angry Sunnis from the Beqaa, especially the town of Majd al-Anjar.
I walked on west Beirut’s Hamra Street and approached a group of soldiers wearing beards and irregular uniforms. I realized it was a mix of Hizballah soldiers and the Lebanese army. Some Hizballah soldiers had sacks of RPGs on their backs. A commander sat on a chair in front of the Crowne Plaza hotel. The streets were empty and shops were closed. A platoon of Hizballah soldiers patrolled in formation down Hamra, scanning the rooftops in all directions and covering one another. They wore knee pads and had gear like American soldiers. Their professionalism reminded me of the times I had patrolled the streets of Baghdad with Americans, except that some of these young men wore sneakers. They shooed away journalists and politely but firmly detained a friend and me; they removed his camera chips but for some reason allowed me to walk alongside their patrol all the way down Hamra Street. Once Hizballah secured locations throughout the city, it handed them over to the Lebanese army. It was clear the army—historically always a weak force—had taken sides and was collaborating with stronger side, the resistance, under the guise of appearing neutral.
In Tariq al-Jadida, I went looking for the Sunni reaction and ran into three men I had seen earlier. One had long hair, one was skinny, and one was fat. “You’re talking about Amal and Hizballah, man,” one told me when I asked him why they had given up so quickly. “There is no creed here. Sunnis fight for money. We were doing it for a hundred dollars. We’re only good for waving flags and singing songs. We were betrayed by our own leaders, even by Saad al-Hariri himself. We thought we had guns and ammunition, but when we went to ask for bullets and ammunition, our organizers and leaders abandoned us.” The Secure Plus headquarters had been burned down. One man denied they had surrendered to Hizballah. “We handed Tariq al-Jadida to the army ourselves,” he said. “If they come back, our shabab are ready.” Hizballah had twenty-five years of experience, one man told me, while local fighters in Tariq al-Jadida were getting high on pills. Close to the smoldering Secure Plus headquarters, a suspicious boy working security for Future checked our IDs. Angry youths surrounded us, but he assured them I was American and not working for Al Manar, Hizballah’s television station.
Checkpoint One, where I had been stopped before the fighting, was now closed—no
body was there. “Here it’s frustration,” one Future militiaman man told me. “They laughed at us. All the leaders are liars. Saad is a liar. The army is with them.” The volunteers from Akkar all ran away, they said. The fighters on the other side had all been Amal, they said. “If it was Hizballah, they would destroy us in a minute.” I asked one man if he wanted a national unity government. “I didn’t say yes and I didn’t say no—nobody asked me,” he said. “Ask them, the men with the guns.”
The feelings of shame and betrayal were palpable on people’s faces. “Beirut fell to AKs and RPGs,” one man said. “We won’t attack Shiite civilians, but they attacked Sunni civilians,” said another. “Our allies inside and outside didn’t help.” “They’re going to provoke us now; they want to make a Persian state.” “We are calling the people of the world: we are under siege. We were five hundred fighters facing fifty thousand fighters.”
The army had taken their weapons, the men complained. “We don’t trust the army. The army was against us in the battle.” They were worried that Shiite militias and their allies would come in now. “Secure Plus turned us down when we asked for weapons,” many people said, explaining that they were also worried that their names were in files inside. So local Sunnis burned it down.
“We are frustrated and everybody is cursing Saad,” one man said. “All militias in Lebanon, they pay money for their guys to prove themselves on the field,” said one. “Our militia didn’t support us. Now anybody who gives money or arms, everybody will support him.” They complained that the Future militia leaders had turned off their phones the previous night, not answering when they called for help.
HIZBALLAH MEN were patrolling the streets of Beirut, calling into question their commitment never to use weapons inside Lebanon, though they justified this by claiming they were defending the resistance’s weapons and that they sought no political advantage in the standoff. As Nasrallah explained at a press conference, Hizballah had used its weapons to defend its weapons. By the morning of May 9 all of west Beirut was in the hands of Hizballah or its armed allies. The government headquarters, called the Sérail, was surrounded, as were the homes of key March 14 leaders like Hariri and Jumblatt. It was the coup that never happened, but it galvanized the more militant Sunnis of the Beqaa and northern Lebanon. Even if Hizballah’s motives were not sectarian, the group could not evade the fact that one side was Shiite and the other was Sunni.
That evening Sahar al-Khatib, a relatively unknown presenter on Future News, appeared on the right-wing LBC TV. She broke down and spoke emotionally, condemning the army for taking Hizballah’s side. “We were driven out of the Future TV building,” she said. “We did not want to surrender.” Then she addressed the leaders of the opposition and the people of Dahiyeh and Baalbeq, meaning Shiites. She had given them a voice, she claimed. Now who would be the voice of the people of Beirut (meaning Sunnis)? Sunnis, she implied, were the people who said, “There is no god but God,” meaning they were the real Muslims. She directly addressed Shiites, who she said wore ski masks on the streets of Beirut. “People who are proud of their actions do not wear ski masks,” she said. Sunnis had opened their homes to Shiites in the July war. “They took you into their hearts,” she lectured Shiites. “We prepared food for you with love during the July 2006 aggression, but you threw it on the ground.” Shiites, she said, “have made me regret my objectivity” for reading the names of Shiite martyrs from the 2006 war. She had defended Shiites, she said. Who would now defend Sunnis when Future TV was shut down? Shiites had broken the hearts of Sunnis, she said, who loved them. It was rare to hear such openly sectarian language, but she grew more explicit. “Why do you hate us?” she asked. “You have awakened sectarianism in me. . . . You kill the people who build this country.”
The Bush administration promised to provide the Siniora government with whatever support it needed against what it described as a Hizballah “offensive.” March 14 officials described it as a coup.
The Sunni Response
On the night of May 9 the mufti of Akkar, Osama Rifai, went on television and radio and called indirectly for the Syrian Social Nationalist Party to be attacked, as revenge against the SSNP activists who had burned down the Future TV office in Beirut. Attacking Hizballah’s weak ally in the north was a safe way to send Hizballah a message. “We’ll teach them a lesson,” he said. SSNP leaders and their allies believe that the Future Movement leadership, including Saad al-Hariri, gave an order for a response. Khaled Dhaher, a former member of Parliament and leading Islamist politician allied with the Future Movement, and Musbah al-Ahdab, an independent Tripolitan member of Parliament, helped to organize the response in the north. The decision was made to send a warning to the March 8 coalition in Halba. The SSNP had a weak presence in the north, and Halba was a small, majority-Sunni town whose people supported the Future Movement. The two parties had clashed three years earlier. On the night of May 9 armed supporters of the Future Movement took positions around Halba.
Halba is the capital of Lebanon’s northern region of Akkar. Many of the towns sitting on the mountainous region afford views looking down all the way to the Mediterranean Sea. Green fields surrounded the town, with houses scattered on the green hills above it. Like most of Lebanon outside Beirut, it is a lawless region, at least in the sense that the state’s presence is not strongly felt or seen. Shortly after 9 a.m. on the morning of May 10, young men set tires on fire and parked trucks to block the roads leading into Halba. Bright red flames rose from the tires and black smoke billowed up, concealing the low apartment buildings. The wind carried the stinging rubbery stench. Members of the Internal Security Forces, in their gray uniforms with red berets, strolled around next to the crowds of young men who stood around the burning tires. Others in the army’s green uniforms took a look as well. They were not armed. More and more young men gathered, many carrying clubs and metal bars. Some zipped back and forth on scooters. They disappeared into the smoke. The rain that started to fall did nothing to slow the activities or the flames. Some dragged sandbags to fortify their roadblocks. Tractors came with tires piled on them and young men sitting on top. In Lebanon there always seem to be tires available to burn at roadblocks. Cars approaching turned around to look for a different route. At first traffic continued as normal—these armed acts of civil disobedience are normal in Lebanon, and the culprits are rarely punished.
Sunni leaders in the north used the loudspeakers on local mosques to call people together, and thousands of men gathered in the center of town for a demonstration. By now the sun was out again, shining on the sky-blue flags of the Future Movement as well as the green-and-black flags with Islamic slogans that men waved. Others carried posters of Rafiq and Saad al-Hariri. Many men clapped; others just watched. An Arab nationalist song from the 1960s blared from loudspeakers, sending the message that God would defeat the aggressors. Perhaps the organizers were trying to claim the mantle of Arab nationalism and deny it to their opponents. A speaker proclaimed that theirs was not a project of militias; it was the project of Rafiq al-Hariri, the project of education. Hariri did not graduate gangs or militias, he said. On one poster a man had written that Sayyid Hassan Nasrallah, whom he called Ariel Sharon, was fully responsible and should take his thugs and tyrants out of Beirut. Another sign said, “Saad is a red line.”
Men shouted to God. Others chanted, “Oh, Nasrallah, you pimp! Take your dogs out of Beirut!” (which rhymes in Arabic). “Oh, Aoun, you pig! You should be executed with a chain!” “Tonight is a feast! Fuck Nasrallah!” “Nasrallah under the shoe!” “Who do you love? Saad!”
Suddenly in the distance shooting started. Some men ran away, while others ran toward it. One man in a loudspeaker shouted, “Fight! The order is yours!” Another man called for caution. “The Internal Security Forces should take the proper position so there won’t be any attack here, and we ask the army to control the situation,” he shouted. “The mufti is coming. Brothers, we need to control ourselves. We are delivering the wron
g message to the others. We did not come to fight.”
Armed men stood on the top floors of apartment buildings, looking down from balconies. Others on the street with M-16s and AK-47s used buildings for cover. Exchanges of fire echoed through town. Men gathered in corners and peered over to see where the shots were coming from. Crowds remained in the center of town, and religious leaders from Akkar’s Sunni Endowment hurried to the scene to take part in the demonstration. Some were guarded by armed men in civilian clothes. Some members of the Internal Security Forces and Lebanese army also stood watching.
That morning fourteen members of the SSNP were manning the local party headquarters, which was in an apartment building off the main road, surrounded by trees. Founded in 1932 by Antoine Saadeh, the SSNP is an Arab nationalist party that calls for the establishment of a Greater Syria uniting all the countries of the Levant. It is one of the smaller parties in Lebanon, but it had allied itself with the powerful Hizballah and Amal-led March 8 bloc, and its militiamen were known for being more thuggish than most. It is not clear exactly what happened in the first moments of the battle, but one version suggests that around ten o’clock that morning hundreds of armed Future Movement members and supporters attacked the SSNP office with automatic weapons and rocket-propelled grenades. The SSNP members had some light arms in their office, and when they returned fire, two of the attackers were killed. Another version, equally plausible, is that a mob armed with sticks and clubs began to attack the SSNP office, and it was then that two of the Future Movement supporters were killed by the SSNP men inside. Armed attacks against the fourteen men inside the office followed. Trucks brought more men from the area into town. Many of the vehicles belonged to Future Movement officials or allies such as Khaled Dhaher.