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
Checkpoint One, where I had been stopped before the fighting, was now closed—nobody 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 Serail, 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 wrong 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
