base and less immediate consequences. But the SSNP had a long memory and a history of seeking revenge, party members in Beirut warned me. They believed that the mayor of the Akkar town of Fnaydek and his brother were among the leaders of the mob and that the attacks had been ordered by senior Future Party men and Sunni politician and Parliament member Musbah al-Ahdab.
In Tripoli that day I saw a banner that said, “No to Wilayat al-Faqih,” a reference to the Iranian system of government. That evening I interviewed Ahdab in his ostentatious Tripoli apartment. He had a small militia of dozens of fit armed men protecting him. One of his security guards belonged to Afwaj Trablus, the Tripoli Brigades. He was paid by Secure Plus. There were six or seven thousand men like him, he told me, who had been trained but not in the use of RPGs. A few had received advanced training in Jordan. “It would be better if the Syrians were here,” he said ruefully. “At least there was security.” Ahdab’s eyes were bloodshot and wide in near hysteria. His breath smelled strongly of alcohol. An Iranian militia had taken over an Arab capital, he told me. As we spoke, we got word of clashes in the slums of Bab al-Tabbaneh.
I raced over with a Lebanese friend. There was no power, but the buildings were illuminated by the occasional thunderous flashes of RPGs. At a nearby traffic circle, we saw dozens of men running toward Bab al- Tabbaneh carrying launchers and RPGs. They had long beards and were obviously Salafis. We stopped to talk to several men who stayed behind. They were fighting the Nusayris, they told me, using the pejorative term for Alawites, in the hilltop neighborhood of Jabal Mohsen, which overlooked Bab al-Tabbaneh. “They’ve hated us for 1,400 years,” one man told me, referring to Shiites. “The rich are in Beirut,” a garage owner who was watching the fighting said. “We are the poorest area of Lebanon.” “They are afraid of Tabbaneh. They are afraid of Sunnis,” another man told me. “We have
Hundreds of fighters rushed into the blackness. “This fight is revenge for Beirut,” one man said. I asked them why they didn’t go and fight in Beirut. “We are waiting for permission from Sheikh Saad,” someone told me. “Saad realized he didn’t want to fight Shiites, he doesn’t want a military conflict. Future is a moderate current. If Future disappears, then Sunnis will die. If you cut our wrists, the blood will come out and spell Saad, and spell Sunnis.”
My friend was a Sunni from the Ras Beirut area of the capital, which is identified as Sunni. He was stopped by several irate armed Salafis who demanded to see his ID card to confirm his address. “If you are not from Ras Beirut, I will slaughter you now,” the leader of the group barked at my friend.” One of the men disparaged the Sunnis of Baghdad, who had failed to stand up to Hizballah. “The Sunnis of Beirut want to have nice jackets, nice cars, and nice apartments,” he told my friend. “They like to go out on a Saturday night and stay out. Here we are day laborers, and we save money to buy guns because we know we will need them. That’s why we blame you.” As I left I realized Saad al-Hariri was actually a moderating force, preventing Sunnis from pursuing further violence.
The next morning I returned. One woman had been killed in the clashes, but no fighters had been hurt. I visited the home of nineteen-year-old Ibrahim Jumaa, who had gotten married a month and a half earlier and had just moved in. An RPG had gone through his wall, through his living room, and into his toilet. The Lebanese army was on the streets of Bab al-Tabbaneh. They had also been there before the previous evening’s clashes started. Like in Beirut, the fighting was preceded by youth throwing stones at one another. When the army withdrew, the shooting started. “We all fight,” one man told me. “It’s our neighborhood, our land. We are on fire after the battle of Beirut.” Some of the people tried to console my friend, who was a Sunni from Beirut. Others asked him why Tariq al-Jadida had fallen so quickly. Their radios crackled. “Hide your weapons, the army is coming,” somebody said. The men told me they hid their weapons when the army showed up for the sake of the army’s feelings. “The problem with the army is as soon as they hear a shot, they leave,” said one man.
Most of the bearded men in Afghan attire were gone in the morning, save a few of their leaders, who sat in a cafe and coordinated with their men by radio. Locals were hostile to the media, and warned that they would not accept Al Jazeera or the local Lebanese channel, New TV, which were perceived as pro-Hizballah. The Saudi-owned Arabiya network was welcome, though. They demanded that Future TV be allowed to operate again and that the siege on the airport be removed. “Hariri airport is not Nasrallah airport,” one man said. “We are mad because Sunnis were broken,” another said, but they were not angry at Saad. One man who had fought in Iraq in 2003 told me it was part of the same conflict.
Mustafa Zaabi, the man who had guided me through the area in the past, told me that “Sunnis here won’t be quiet.” I walked by a cafe with a poster of Saddam at his trial, in which he was holding the Koran. It said, “Long live the Muslim community, Long live Palestine, Arab freedom.” Mustafa had led his own group of fighters during the clashes. He carried an RPG launcher. He and the older men knew how to fight, he said, but the younger guys didn’t. He seemed ecstatic. “It’s an experience, fighting,” he said. “We felt as if they took us back twenty-seven years. We went back to the same positions we were in before.”
Hundreds of Tabbaneh residents had been massacred by the Syrians and their allies in the 1980s. The civil war had never ended there. The bitterness remained and occasionally erupted into violence, but with the influx of Salafis and jihadists and the interpretation of local conflicts through the paradigm of a regional conflict between Sunnis and Shiites, it was becoming more explosive. The Salafis played a crucial role in the latest battle. “We depend on them,” Mustafa told me. “They have a creed.”
Local militiamen scrounged their money and relied on donations from wealthy Sunni patrons and politicians. All the Sunni leaders in Lebanon had provided them with assistance, including Najib Mikati, Omar Karameh, and Saad Hariri. And their various supporters all fought together against the Alawites. They bought many of their weapons from the Palestinian camps. “If we had part of Hizb Ashaytan’s [the devil’s party] weapons, I would be talking to you from the mountaintop,” Mustafa told me. Musbah al-Ahdab was particularly loved in the area for his public anger and financial support. “Musbah was 20 percent popular before he went on TV and said that people should organize themselves and get their weapons so what happened in Beirut won’t happen here,” one man told me. “Then his popularity became 100 percent.” Some people told me that Ahdab had also provided them with weapons and ammunition. Khaled Dhaher was a good guy, they all agreed. (“He didn’t abandon us,” Mustafa told me. “He took care of us.”) Many of them had footage of the Halba massacre on their mobile phones. Dhaher’s people had been involved, everybody said proudly; his people were well armed. Mustafa bragged that Dhaher had killed some of the victims himself. It was rumored that the families of the two Sunni supporters of the Future Movement who were killed in Halba during the clashes each received one hundred thousand dollars from the Hariri family. Locals told me that Dhaher’s people had distributed ammunition to the militias of Tabbaneh. “Jund Allah dazzled us with their weapons and the amount of ammunition that they had,” Mustafa said of Kanan Naji’s militia. Two Future officials, Muhamad al-Aswad and Khalid al-Masri, also had armed groups in Tabbaneh.
The way the clashes erupted sounded familiar. Nobody knew who started shooting first, Mustafa told me.
People had been told to expect a battle that day, so they had prepared for one. And indeed, a battle happened in Tabbaneh and other poor areas around it. Suddenly all the old armed groups that had once dominated Tripoli re-emerged, but their men were too old and the young men on the streets lacked proper training. As a result Sunnis often turned to current or former members of the security forces. An Alawite leader claimed that the first RPG had been fired by a pro-Syrian Sunni group.
The army had come the previous night during a truce, but when fighting resumed it withdrew again. Mustafa’s area was a front line. He broke a hole in the back of his building so his men could sneak out to the other side. One of his men showed me a wad of cash he had just received to buy more ammunition. The price for a hand grenade was now seventeen dollars. Before the fighting it had been four dollars. A rocket-propelled grenade was now seventy dollars. Mustafa would buy weapons from Palestinian dealers in the Minyeh area close to Bedawi.
One of his men had gone down to Tariq al-Jadida with several hundred others from the north for the Beirut fighting. They were only given clubs, he complained, not guns, and had barely been fed. He felt betrayed. “No,” said another, “Saad didn’t want bloodshed.”
“There is a strong Sunni awakening in Lebanon,” Mustafa’s younger brother Khudhr told me. “We all became terrorists,” another man said. “Hassan Nasrallah made us all terrorists. We don’t want to fight Israel.” Instead, they told me, they would fight the Shiites with all they had.
“We as the
