Aftermath

stones at one another, Lebanese soldiers separated the two sides by firing into the air and using tear gas. Upon hearing that the Future Movement’s office in the Nuweiri district was destroyed, Sunni supporters of Hariri in the north and the Beqaa gathered to come to Beirut and face the opposition. Small armed clashes occurred throughout the city.

I hurried toward Ras al-Nabaa with some local journalists searching for where shots were coming from and spotted Amal fighters hiding behind street corners and Sunni fighters huddled in front of Future offices. As armed men materialized from behind corners on both sides, I suddenly realized things were potentially more lethal than I had thought. I wanted to leave immediately, but Nada Bakri, a fearless stringer for the New York Times, went charging ahead, so I followed her, not wanting to appear to be cowardly. In the end, an armed man with a revolver in front of a Future office told us to go away, which I did with relief. That evening Hizballah supporters fortified barricades to block the road to the airport. Tents were brought in preparation for a long stay.

On May 8 I returned to Corniche al-Mazraa, to the divide between Barbir and Tariq al-Jadida. Hundreds of disorganized Shiite youth, mostly teenagers from other areas, were gathered on the road. Lebanese soldiers prevented them from crossing to the other side. The call to prayer blared from the nearby Sunni Jamal Abdel Nasr Mosque. The Shiite zaaran stood up. “The blood of Shiites is boiling!” they shouted, adding religious slogans. Some were holding stones or chips of cinder blocks; others had knives, clubs, and plastic bottles full of gasoline. They threw their stones and cinder-block chips across the road at the soldiers and the Sunni neighborhood. The soldiers threw the stones back. One of them was filming the Shiite youth. Some soldiers pleaded with the youth to stop, while others loaded and aimed their M-16s. I was surprised by how provocative the Amal supporters were. For them it was just a show of force to intimidate Sunnis. Older men, with serious faces, well- groomed stubble, and shirts buttoned all the way up, herded the boys. Whenever it seemed as though the boys were about to cross to the Sunni side, they were reined in. I felt as though Hizballah had Amal pit bulls who were foaming at the mouth, eager to attack, and that Hizballah was letting them bark and bite a little to show the other side that it was holding the leash and could let go at any time.

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