Aftermath

by Nir Rosen

  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.

  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.

  In Bedawi Palestinian officials told me that the Palestinian leadership in Beirut took a united stand and decided not to take sides. The pro-Syrian and pro-Fatah groups worked together, coordinating and refusing to get involved. Hizballah also met with Palestinian leaders and urged them not to participate. The Bedawi officials told me that Salafi clerics and leaflets had recently appeared in the camp, using the language of Iraq (such as referring to Shiites as rafidha), and Lebanese Salafi groups were active in the camps again. Representatives of Khaled Dhaher and Mufti Rifai were encouraging people to fight the Alawites of Jabal Mohsen. Shahal was openly calling for this, too, asking for Palestinians to fight Hizballah. There were rumors that Fatah al-Islam men were fighting the Alawites at his behest. Shahal and his fighters had allied with Dhaher and the Future Movement.

  The officials believed Absi was alive and living in the Beqaa. One of the Palestinian intelligence officials had known him. Absi had come to Lebanon without Syrian backing, he told me. He had not wanted to fight Shiites, only the UN peacekeepers and Israel. But Abu Hureira, the Lebanese Fatah al-Islam member from Akkar, had wanted to take up the fight. The intelligence official had been in Nahr al-Barid when Abu Hureira attacked the Lebanese soldiers. Absi hadn’t known about it in advance and had emerged from his house astonished. Before the attack Abu Hureira had called Sheikh Bilal Barudi in Tripoli and told him that if his men from the bank robbery were not released, then they would attack. Fatah al-Islam had been more than one group. During the Nahr al-Barid fighting Mufti Osama Rifai issued a fatwa allowing for Palestinians to be killed and for their belongings to be looted. There was a backlash following the fighting with Fatah al-Islam. Many of the older sheikhs in the camp were resented and replaced by young ones. The Lebanese army still manned checkpoints around Nahr al-Barid and was still humiliating people.

  Entry into Ayn al-Hilweh was harder than ever, but I managed to get the army’s permission to meet Abu Ahmad Fadhil, the Hamas leader in the camp. The various Palestinian factions had formed an emergency committee headed by Kamal Midhat of Fatah. “There was a Palestinian consensus against interference,” he told me. “Even Usbat al-Ansar is in it. We as Palestinians won’t get involved in internal Lebanese affairs, we told the opposition and the government.”

  Fadhil worried that Al Qaeda in Iraq was sending fig
hters to Lebanon. “These guys, their situation in Iraq is difficult, and they can’t live in Syria either.” As a result, some of them were coming to the camp and to the Beqaa, especially Majd al-Anjar. Both sides had an interest in getting the Palestinians involved in the fighting, Fadhil said, and attempts to draw them in had been especially forceful in Beirut’s Shatila camp. But Palestinians had rejected Fatah al-Islam, and even the most extreme groups like Jund al-Sham and Usbat al-Ansar did not have an anti-Shiite reaction following the May 8 clashes. Ayn al-Hilweh was different from Nahr al-Barid. Nahr al-Barid was far from Tripoli, while Ayn al-Hilweh was part of Saida. In Nahr al-Barid, the Palestinian factions were weak and could not stand up to Fatah al-Islam, but in Ayn al-Hilweh, Palestinians “are very strong and have the ability to prevent groups like Fatah al-Islam from appearing.”

  I went to see Abu Ghassan in the camp, with whom I had spent so much time in 2007. The last camp member to go fight in Iraq had left four or five months earlier. Now the border between Lebanon and Syria was hard to cross, and the Syrian Iraqi border was even harder. “We had nothing to do with the Beirut battles,” he told me. “Neither side likes us; they would all have blamed us. Hizballah sent people here and said, ‘These guys killed you last year in Nahr al-Barid, fight with us.’ Future said, ‘These guys killed you in the war of the camps, join us.’”