they should solve their problems peacefully. He was replaced, however, by a more aggressive man, said to hate Shiites and love weapons, who armed the young men.
Although the Shiites of Tariq al-Jadida were not overtly political, it was becoming clear that they were not trusted or wanted. Militiamen assigned to intelligence duties stood watch on street corners all day long. Young men worked on various shifts, usually at night, getting paid a few hundred dollars a month, with the promise of a bonus if they took part in fighting. Some were posted in other areas, where more bodies were needed to confront the Shiite Amal movement, a less ideological and more sectarian group than Hizballah. Sunni militiamen coordinated with members of the security forces and army. The Future Movement also mobilized Sunnis from Akkar, who were considered more aggressive than Beiruti Sunnis. Other “real Sunnis” were imported from Dinniyeh and the town of Arsal in the Bekaa Valley to defend the Sunnis of Beirut. Numerous apartment and hotel rooms around the city were rented for them. The Future militias were also recruiting retired army and intelligence operatives. There was even a Future security company in Tariq al-Jadida, its office festooned with posters of Rafiq and Saad al-Hariri. Senior March 14 leader Walid Jumblatt confided to me that Sunnis were joining militias and training in Jordan. He disapproved of this and said they should join the security forces.
Shaqer al-Berjawi was one of the new militia leaders in Tariq al-Jadida. His movement was called the Arab Current. Berjawi had once belonged to the Murabitun militia and fought in west Beirut during the civil war. After Hariri was assassinated, he began forming his new movement (with support from the Future Movement) because Sunnis felt leaderless and weak. He recruited Fatah supporters from the Palestinian camps to fight alongside Sunnis, a growing phenomenon. Hamas members in Beirut blame his people for clashes that occurred between rival Palestinian factions. Berjawi participated in the January 2007 clashes and is rumored to be among the Sunni snipers who were targeting Shiites. He was arrested afterward and accused of weapons smuggling but soon was released.
I met a nineteen-year-old black-market weapons dealer in Tariq al-Jadida who had been selling guns illegally for nearly three years. “Its very profitable,” he told me. “You can double your investment, especially in these times, when all gun prices are getting more expensive lately and everybody is worried about themselves and getting ready for the ‘zero hour.’ People will defend their sect.” He explained that he sold to Sunnis, and occasionally to Christians or Druze, but never to Shiites because “these are the people we want to fight and they have a lot of weapons.” He admitted that until 2005 he had never heard sectarian language. “Now everybody is speaking about sectarian conflict,” he said. “Now even a four-year-old or a six-year-old kid speaks of Sunnis or Shiites.”
Business started getting good for him after the so-called “Tuesday incident,” which is how many Lebanese refer to the January 2007 clashes, and it improved again after the “Thursday incident,” when Amal and Future supporters clashed in 2008. “After those incidents, people demanded guns in a big way,” he told me. The Kalashnikov was in highest demand, with people often opting for a package deal including an ammunition vest and ammunition for eight hundred dollars.
Most of his customers were in Tariq al-Jadida, where he said three-quarters of the people were now armed. The majority of his clients were men between the ages of twenty and thirty, though women were also purchasing small pistols. Almost all of his clients were with the Future Movement.
The young gun dealer, thin and tattooed, also belonged to the local Future militia and worked as a guard. He explained that he had received paramilitary training on a base in Akkar for twenty days along with about sixty- five other young Sunni men. Retired army sergeants had done most of the training, though foreigners, including an Australian of Lebanese descent, had trained them in close protection. The training was conducted under the cover of the Secure Plus security company, one of several owned by Saad al-Hariri. The Interior Ministry was stacked with Sunnis loyal to Hariri, and its Internal Security Forces were viewed by Hizballah as a Sunni militia. Pro-Hariri control of the ministry has eased the way for legalizing these companies-cum-militias.
By the spring of 2008, it seemed as though there were two Lebanons: a Sunni one and a Shiite one, with less important groups just bystanders. The youth, not remembering the violence of the 1980s, seemed eager for another civil war. It was a good time to join Sunni militias, the gun dealer said, because there were several groups recruiting, and this was driving up prices for new recruits. The Murabitun, a civil war-era Sunni militia that had been reactivated, allegedly paid its men nearly three hundred dollars a month. Some Secure Plus recruits guarded installations such as the Saudi embassy. Others wore civilian clothing and monitored Sunni neighborhoods or stood on standby, well armed and uniformed, in case fighting erupted. If recruits proved especially capable, my young interlocutor explained, they were sent to front-line areas such as Ras al-Nabaa, where there were many Shiites. Some were selected for more advanced training in Jordan, which lasted longer. His brother had gone for this training, but graduates were secretive about what they were taught.
I asked him if he wanted to fight Shiites. “Definitely,” he said. “I want to defend my sect. Shiite areas are different. There are no police there, they train kids from an early age and put hatred in their hearts from an early age and teach them that Sunnis killed their leaders. I feel threatened leaving Sunni areas. Iran and Syria have a plan to control Lebanon but so far have not succeeded.” He drank alcohol and was not religious, so I asked him why he was fighting for Sunni Islam. “My identity card says I am a Sunni Muslim,” he said, “and I have to defend my sect. Before I didn’t know the difference between Sunnis and Shiites. Shiites made us hate them by their acts.” He expected that there would be a war with Shiites, and he hoped so, not just because it would be good for business. “Sunnis can win only if they are united,” he told me with obvious approval, but he explained that they were not relying merely on the Sunnis of Lebanon but on the help of Saudi Arabia and other Sunni countries. “The Saudis will help. The Saudis are funding all this, not Hariri. Tariq al-Jadida is the castle of Sunnis. If it falls, Lebanon falls.”
The May Events
On May 1 Walid Jumblatt, the most prominent Druze politician in Lebanon and the leader of the Progressive Socialist Party, called a press conference and announced the discovery of cameras that were monitoring Beirut International Airport. He implied that Hizballah was planning an operation and that it might fire shoulder-launched rockets at planes on the runway. He also warned that Hizballah had its own communications network. Two days later Jumblatt called for the Iranian ambassador’s expulsion and asked that flights from Iran to Beirut be banned to curtail the delivery of financial and military aid to Hizballah. Jumblatt then attacked the airport’s security chief, Gen. Wafiq Shuqair, accusing him of conspiring with Hizballah to install the secret cameras. Two days later, on May 5, Lebanese judicial authorities announced that they had ordered an investigation into the affair. Coincidentally or not, statements from American military officials were published in the Western media that day accusing Hizballah of training Iraqi Shiite militias.
On May 6 the government reassigned Shuqair. Given Hizballah’s angry reaction to his removal, it appears the charges against him were true. Then the Council of Ministers questioned the legality of Hizballah’s parallel communications network, which was a key element of the group’s military command and control ability. The government called the communications network “an attack on state sovereignty.” It was the first time Hizballah’s military was challenged internally; until then the weapons of the resistance had been off-limits. The government’s moves were conducted in coordination with the Americans and the UN envoy, who warned that Hizballah “maintains a massive paramilitary infrastructure separate from the state,” which “constitutes a threat to regional peace and security.” Nasrallah’s deputy Sheikh Naim Qasim said the network was an integral part of the resistance. It seemed like a culmination of a process beginning in September 2004, when the UN Security Council passed Resolution 1559, which supported Hizballah’s rivals’ call to disarm the resistance.
The General Federation of Labor Unions called for a strike and demonstration on May 7 to demand that the government raise the monthly minimum wage, which had not been changed since 1996. Hizballah and its supporters planned their mobilization for the same day. Early that morning Shiite demonstrators blocked bridges and roads throughout the city, including the important airport road, with burning tires, vehicles, garbage containers, cement blocks, and earthen mounds. The airport suspended flights. Many of the demonstrators were masked; some were armed.
A grenade exploded in the Corniche al-Mazraa neighborhood, wounding several people. As it became clear that the situation was getting out of control, the General Federation of Labor Unions called off the demonstration and strike it had planned for that day. As Sunni and Shiite
