Aftermath

One was called the Panthers. Every night the streets of Tariq al-Jadida were patrolled by men who did not carry arms in public. They were recruited and paid by the Future Movement. Typically they were young men sitting on street corners, smoking water pipes, eating pistachios, and demanding that passersby present their identification papers. Sometimes they had lists of wanted men. They were supervised by older men, veterans of the Lebanese army, security forces, or militias from the civil war. Just in case, Interior Security Forces sat in armored personnel carriers in the center of the neighborhood. On my first visit, in 2007, I asked some of the young men who they were protecting the neighborhood from. “Zaaran,” said one muscular youth, referring to hoodlums, or thugs. I asked which zaaran. “From Dahiyeh,” he said. “We will chop them up.” During this visit, I was stopped by chubby young men on scooters who zipped over and took me to what they called on their radios Checkpoint One. Fortunately I had befriended a local militiaman named Fadi, a small man who owned a barbershop close to the edge of the neighborhood, who vouched for me. Fadi had a ponytail, wore tight black clothes, and had a huge shiny watch on his wrist. He patrolled his street on behalf of the local Future militia and was paid four hundred dollars a month by the Secure Plus company, which he said was the same as the Future Movement. Fadi had not done his military service, but he had received one month of training in Akkar.

Tariq al-Jadida, a mostly middle-class Sunni area, was the heart of Sunni power in Beirut. In contrast, Bab al-Tabbaneh, a district in Tripoli, in northern Lebanon, was poor and marginalized; many of its unemployed youth were used by the Sunnis of Beirut as shock troops to intimidate rivals. Unlike poor Shiites, impoverished Sunnis in Tariq al-Jadida—and elsewhere in Lebanon—do not have a powerful movement to provide for them or protect them. Instead, rival politicians compete for popularity by occasionally dispensing favors, usually before elections. Crumbling buildings torn apart by shells and bullet holes, with laundry drying outside the windows and balconies, look down over rows of garages and small workshops for wooden furniture. Black flags with Islamic slogans wave in the sun. Salafis helped clean up Bab al-Tabbaneh from gangs and drugs, improving its reputation. Many former gang members and drug addicts had become Salafis and even jihadists; the only evidence of their past delinquency was their remaining tattoos. In the 1980s, the Syrian army had been stationed in the Jabal Mohsen neighborhood, which towered above Tabbaneh. Thirty thousand Alawites lived there. From there the Syrians punished the recalcitrant Sunnis of Tabbaneh, and the scars had never healed.

I found a group of men drinking tea outside a shop. Mustafa Zaabi sat with his brothers and friends. “Everything is a lie,” he said. “There is no electricity, so everybody is on the street. If we talk, who will listen to us? What are we, Palestinian refugees? I wish we were Palestinians so we had care from the UN or the government.” They blamed the Palestinians for the fighting in Nahr al-Barid. “The people fighting in the camp are mostly Palestinian, just pretending to be Fatah al-Islam,” said Mustafa’s brother Muhamad. “It’s impossible that they will rebuild the camp,” said Mustafa.

Mustafa had been an active member of the Future Movement and had voted for the party in the past, but he had stopped giving his support. “They did nothing,” he said. “Many people feel betrayed. Those who said we are sons of Tabbaneh, where are you now? We don’t want the hundred dollars that you paid on election day. If we knew what was waiting for us, we wouldn’t have voted for the entire Hariri list. For three years I didn’t see anything from the house of Hariri.” Mustafa still had high hopes for Saad al-Hariri. “First because he is the son of Rafiq al- Hariri,” he said. “We saw how Hariri made Beirut. We hoped he would build Tripoli and create work opportunities for youth.”

Mustafa and his two brothers had all been accused of acts of sabotage against the Syrian military and had been jailed and tortured by the Syrians. Mustafa had belonged to the Murabitun militia in the 1980s. He spent six months training in Libya but had left in disgust because Lebanese weren’t trusted with weapons. Mustafa had been injured in the civil war when a shell landed nearby. His entire body had been burned, and his hand was still maimed. His brother Hussein was paralyzed and in a wheelchair, a result of being beaten on the back of the head with a gun while imprisoned.

Seated with Mustafa and his friends was a thin nineteen-year-old named Ayman. Like many young men, he was marked with crude tattoos and had scars up his entire arm that he had inflicted on himself. “He learned it in prison,” explained Mustafa. Ayman had spent seven months in prison “for a simple problem,” he said.

One way sectarian leaders in Lebanon distribute favors is by covering legal fees or helping people get out of prison. Ayman had many friends who had been to prison. “Most guys go to jail because of street fights with blades,” said Mustafa, “not for robberies. There is nothing to steal here.” Another thin young man, also called Mustafa, had similar scars from self-mutilation on his arms, which he had created with razors. I asked him why he had done it. “Depression,” he said. “There is no work—we take it out on ourselves.” The older Mustafa explained that young men like him used drugs and sniffed paint thinner.

They led me around the neighborhood, down dirt-strewn alleys with electrical cables hanging low and blackened walls ridden with bullets. I saw posters of Saddam on the walls next to posters of Rafiq al-Hariri. “Saddam is considered to be oppressed,” Mustafa told me. “The Americans took him to kill him.” Everybody in the area had been saddened by the news of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s death as well, he told me: “He was somebody liberating Muslim land.” A group of young men stood beneath posters of Saddam and Hariri, alongside a picture of Khalil Akkawi, the slain founder of the anti-Syrian Tawhid movement, which was militarily active in the 1980s. After Akkawi’s assassination and the arrest or killing of most of Tawhid’s members, there was no powerful group remaining to fill the vacuum in Bab al-Tabbaneh. I asked the young men why they liked Saddam. “He was a Muslim,” they all agreed, “a hero, a real Arab.” They had all been sad and angry when he was executed.

I asked them what they thought of Saad al-Hariri. “He is a Sunni Muslim, clean,” they said. I asked about Hizballah. “No! No!” they shouted, waving their hands. “Kish! Kish!” one added, making the sound he would make to shoo a dog away. “Nobody likes the Palestinians,” they told me. “They are pimps. They are the cause of all these problems; they let Fatah al-Islam into the camp. They should go back to Palestine.”

Several hundred Palestinian refugees had been housed in the Bab al-Tabbaneh Elementary School, and others were in seven other schools in the area of Tripoli. Locals had demanded that one of the school gates facing their neighborhood be kept locked. Blue plastic sheeting had been used to divide halls and create private spaces for families. They stood around or sat on chairs that students would soon need, just waiting. Hosam Ilmir, the principal, worried that the school year might be canceled if alternative housing was not found.

“Bab al-Tabbaneh has the poorest people in the country,” Ilmir told me. “They are strangers in their country. The basic requirements of life are not here. Most students in school are not concentrating because at home their brother or father is on drugs, drunk, beating their mother. They can’t sleep at home, so they sleep in class. There is sexual abuse of children.” The Future Movement paid poor Sunnis when they were needed for voting, protests, or demonstrations in Beirut, he said. Many people came down from Bab al-Tabbaneh for the Beirut protests over the Danish cartoons in February 2006, he said. The state mufti called for people to come down, the Sunni Endowment provided buses to transport some of the protesters, people were paid for their presence in Beirut, and gasoline prices were also covered for the ride. “One guy is responsible for many other guys,” he said, “and he distributes the money.” This was the case in all the main March 14 and Future Movement demonstrations in Beirut, he said.

“We Sunnis of Lebanon never had a militia,” Ilmir said. “The Sunni army was the Palestinians. Sunnis were businessmen.” Now Sunnis wanted their own militias, he said. Unlike the Future Movement, which offered only money when it needed manpower, “Hizballah always looks after their people.” The Future Movement had influenced people in Tripoli “to think Hizballah started the war and destroyed the country,” he said. He blamed the Lebanese media outlets associated with the Future Movement and March 14, such as LBC and Future TV, for inciting people. “For Sunnis in Lebanon, Hariri was seen as a Sunni leader, and his killing enraged Sunnis,” he told me. “Going back to the postwar period, the Sunni street was divided in two. Some Sunnis supported anybody who fights Israel, and some Sunnis said Hizballah will turn their guns on Sunnis.” He insisted that Sunnis were being armed under the guise of private security companies set up as legalized militias by the Future Movement. People were also joining Salafi movements, he said, because “people need work. If there is money, people will follow you all the way to China.”

Ilmir agreed that since the fighting began the heat had been turned up on Salafis. “There is a lot of pressure by security forces,” he said. “People with beards are arrested for no reason, like in the Syrian days. They hold you for a week and give you two hundred thousand liras. Getting tortured by your people is worse than being tortured by strangers. As a Sunni, if anybody comes and throws a stone at Israel from Tanzania, I will kiss his hand. This is not just my view, this is the view of the silent majority of Lebanon.” After I left he ran after me and clasped my hand. “Don’t be surprised from what you heard from me,” he said. “This is the view of all educated Sunnis.”