Aftermath

the origins of the conflict were not sectarian but economic—rich against poor, with the elite making it seem sectarian. The people of Tabbaneh were ignored by politicians because most of the neighborhood’s thirty-five thousand people were originally from Akkar and so did not vote in Tabbaneh. Only five thousand of them voted in Tabbaneh, so politicians had little to gain from helping them.

The people of Lebanon were still divided while their leaders drank coffee together, he said. “The more the leaders agitate the street, the more power they get. Some young kids don’t want calm. They hope it escalates. They can go to the leaders and get money from them. The leaders hire men from Tabbaneh to be their armed bodyguards.” The ideologies of both sides were bankrupt, he told me. Politicians escalated sectarian tensions in order to reach their goals. Leadership was based on creating fear and tension. Without fear and tension, they wouldn’t be leaders.

Mustafa agreed that the communities were being led by elites. He remembered throwing rocks at Jabal Mohsen when he was seven years old. “The rivalry goes back before the massacre,” he said. “We Sunnis oppressed the Alawites,” Ilmir admitted. “They were garbage collectors, then they got educated, and we couldn’t believe they changed.” When he tried to arrange a reconciliation involving youth soccer, he was discouraged. “The police said it would end in stabbings.”

For once the Palestinians had emerged unscathed, having wisely chosen to abstain from involvement. A local Hamas official told me that there had been a joint Palestinian decision to stay out of the fighting. Some Fatah men had been involved in the Tariq al-Jadida fighting, and others had shut the road from Saida to Beirut. Dai al- Islam al-Shahal asked Palestinians in the north to join him, but nobody responded. “Dai al-Islam is another kind of Salafi. We don’t trust him, and we don’t share his point of view,” the official told me. “There is a general feeling that Sunnis in Lebanon were insulted in this battle,” he said. Hizballah knew that if the conflict lasted any longer, it would spread in the region.

Some Sunnis were beginning to question their support for Saad al-Hariri. The Muslim Brotherhood had mediated between Hizballah and the Future Movement, so the Hamas official expected the Muslim Brotherhood would benefit from an increasingly influential role. Hizballah didn’t want bloodshed, the Hamas official told me, because every Sunni killed was a danger to the group. “Hizballah was very smart to end it in a short time.”

Fatah al-Islam had spread outside the camps and might seek a role as the defender of Sunnis, he told me, even though Shaker al-Absi, who was still alive, had not sought a fight with Shiites. “The atmosphere is very welcoming for these groups,” he said. “Sunnis felt that they were caught without their underwear on.” Now some Sunnis asked why they had supported the war on Fatah al-Islam, because they could have used them in the recent battles.

In Bedawi Palestinian officials told me that the Palestinian leadership in Beirut took a united stand and decided not to take sides. The pro-Syrian and pro-Fatah groups worked together, coordinating and refusing to get involved. Hizballah also met with Palestinian leaders and urged them not to participate. The Bedawi officials told me that Salafi clerics and leaflets had recently appeared in the camp, using the language of Iraq (such as referring to Shiites as rafidha), and Lebanese Salafi groups were active in the camps again. Representatives of Khaled Dhaher and Mufti Rifai were encouraging people to fight the Alawites of Jabal Mohsen. Shahal was openly calling for this, too, asking for Palestinians to fight Hizballah. There were rumors that Fatah al- Islam men were fighting the Alawites at his behest. Shahal and his fighters had allied with Dhaher and the Future Movement.

The officials believed Absi was alive and living in the Beqaa. One of the Palestinian intelligence officials had known him. Absi had come to Lebanon without Syrian backing, he told me. He had not wanted to fight Shiites, only the UN peacekeepers and Israel. But Abu Hureira, the Lebanese Fatah al-Islam member from Akkar, had wanted to take up the fight. The intelligence official had been in Nahr al-Barid when Abu Hureira attacked the Lebanese soldiers. Absi hadn’t known about it in advance and had emerged from his house astonished. Before the attack Abu Hureira had called Sheikh Bilal Barudi in Tripoli and told him that if his men from the bank robbery were not released, then they would attack. Fatah al-Islam had been more than one group. During the Nahr al-Barid fighting Mufti Osama Rifai issued a fatwa allowing for Palestinians to be killed and for their belongings to be looted. There was a backlash following the fighting with Fatah al-Islam. Many of the older sheikhs in the camp were resented and replaced by young ones. The Lebanese army still manned checkpoints around Nahr al-Barid and was still humiliating people.

Entry into Ayn al-Hilweh was harder than ever, but I managed to get the army’s permission to meet Abu Ahmad Fadhil, the Hamas leader in the camp. The various Palestinian factions had formed an emergency committee headed by Kamal Midhat of Fatah. “There was a Palestinian consensus against interference,” he told me. “Even Usbat al-Ansar is in it. We as Palestinians won’t get involved in internal Lebanese affairs, we told the opposition and the government.”

Fadhil worried that Al Qaeda in Iraq was sending fighters to Lebanon. “These guys, their situation in Iraq is difficult, and they can’t live in Syria either.” As a result, some of them were coming to the camp and to the Beqaa, especially Majd al-Anjar. Both sides had an interest in getting the Palestinians involved in the fighting, Fadhil said, and attempts to draw them in had been especially forceful in Beirut’s Shatila camp. But Palestinians had rejected Fatah al-Islam, and even the most extreme groups like Jund al-Sham and Usbat al-Ansar did not have an anti-Shiite reaction following the May 8 clashes. Ayn al-Hilweh was different from Nahr al-Barid. Nahr al-Barid was far from Tripoli, while Ayn al-Hilweh was part of Saida. In Nahr al-Barid, the Palestinian factions were weak and could not stand up to Fatah al-Islam, but in Ayn al-Hilweh, Palestinians “are very strong and have the ability to prevent groups like Fatah al-Islam from appearing.”

I went to see Abu Ghassan in the camp, with whom I had spent so much time in 2007. The last camp member to go fight in Iraq had left four or five months earlier. Now the border between Lebanon and Syria was hard to cross, and the Syrian Iraqi border was even harder. “We had nothing to do with the Beirut battles,” he told me. “Neither side likes us; they would all have blamed us. Hizballah sent people here and said, ‘These guys killed you last year in Nahr al-Barid, fight with us.’ Future said, ‘These guys killed you in the war of the camps, join us.’”

Attacks on Sunni mosques were evidence of sectarian hatred on both sides, he told me, but he regretted this. “We have doctrinal differences with them, but we have an enemy, Israel. I am speaking as a Muslim: if sectarian war happens here, like in Iraq, then Palestinians would get involved. In the end, we are Sunnis.”

I asked him which jihadist ideologues were most influential in the camp. He named Abu Muhammad al- Maqdisi, a Saudi called Sheikh Khalid Rashid, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, but “Sheikh Osama” bin Laden was the most important, “because he renewed jihad in our century.” Although many “terrorism experts” in the West were excited that several prominent jihad ideologues had recanted, Abu Ghassan confirmed my view that most people knew they had been forced to change their mind.

He had sold his Glock pistol recently. Weapons prices in the camp were related to the prices in Syria and Iraq, he told me. He now had a CZ75 pistol, which cost $1,500. As we spoke, we heard shots fired outside. He told his son to come in the house.

Back in Tripoli, Musbah al-Ahdab publicly stated that if Hizballah had a right to fight, then so too did Salafis. If the army could not protect Lebanese citizens, then he could not ask Salafis to disarm. If Hizballah did not lay its arms down, the whole north would become Salafis, he warned. “The only solution is to put Hizballah’s arms on the table and find a solution; otherwise, the whole north will become Salafists, and I can only sympathize with them,” he concluded.

In early July 2008 I returned to the Salam Mosque in Tripoli to hear Bilal Barudi speak. People sat smoking a nargila at a nearby cafe. I sat at one of the tables as Barudi’s sermon blasted throughout the area. Sunnis were in danger, he warned; they wanted tawtin, the granting of citizenship to the Palestinians. “We are in a rage now and we should take advantage of that rage,” he said. “We have to keep our sect together. Why are they afraid of tawtin? Because Palestinians are Sunnis. . . . There is a conspiracy against us Sunnis.” Why, he asked, did Armenians in Lebanon have citizenship when their homeland was stable but the Palestinians, who had nothing, were denied it?

I interviewed Barudi in his office. He was born a sheikh, he told me, explaining that his family had provided sheikhs for seven hundred years. Barudi had met Shaker al-Absi when Absi first arrived. “He started attracting young men with a call to defend Sunnis,” he told me. “I told him you are all going to get killed.” Barudi claimed he had gone to Beirut to meet Hassan Nasrallah and other Shiite officials after the 2006 Samarra shrine attack, but he said that Nasrallah had been very aggressive with him. He also claimed that Iran and Hizballah operatives blew up the shrine, and stressed that two hundred Sunni mosques in Iraq were destroyed on the same day.