Shiite leader of supporting Palestinian terrorists against the army. Anger swept throughout the north and other Sunni areas in the country. At the same time Lebanese security forces cracked down on local Salafis in Tripoli, and rumors circulated that some were being tortured.
Clerics in Tripoli had to calm many of their followers who sympathized with Fatah al-Islam. Some began to feel betrayed and persecuted by the government. The Future Movement began to lose ground among Salafis. Its leaders had campaigned as protectors of Lebanon’s Sunnis but instead were perceived by some as having launched
Members of the Abu Nidal Organization also provided assistance, including weapons, to Fatah al-Islam in Nahr al-Barid, and some of the Abu Nidal men who were wanted by Lebanese security forces even stayed behind and fought alongside Fatah al-Islam. Over the next three months the Lebanese army regularly announced that it had vanquished Fatah al-Islam, but despite destroying the camp and making forty thousand Palestinians homeless, the fighting continued, and Lebanese soldiers continued to die. Absi had not been seeking a confrontation with the Lebanese army, but once the fighting started he might have hoped that other supporters and Salafis would rise up throughout Lebanon and its camps. Negotiations faltered over the demand to hand over wanted Lebanese men among his ranks. Abu Salim Taha, the Fatah al-Islam spokesperson, blamed the Future Movement for inciting hatred against them. He admitted that there were many foreign Muslims among them. Even though they had no organizational ties to Al Qaeda, they considered them their brethren.
In early June it was Jund al-Sham’s turn to clash with the army, in Ayn al-Hilweh. There had been fears that the fighting in Nahr al-Barid would spread south, and now it was happening. Usbat al-Ansar, which was already part of the camp’s executive committee, played a key role in securing the camp. The Lebanese government gave Usbat al-Ansar a new status by recognizing it as a power broker and partner it could deal with. This negotiated solution allowed the Palestinians to continue policing themselves. It was a stark contrast to the military solution offered in Nahr al-Barid.
In June Lebanese security forces arrested four people in the Beqaa Valley in eastern Lebanon. They also found a large amount of explosives and money. One of the suspects was a Saudi carrying fake Iraqi identity papers. Two Syrians and a Palestinian were found with him. By then another thirty-two Fatah al-Islam prisoners had been captured, most of whom were Lebanese. The Saudi authorities asked for their citizens to be repatriated so that they could learn more about similar groups in the Kingdom, and Lebanon consented. South of Tripoli Lebanese security forces killed five Islamist fighters, at least two of whom were Saudis. In July, after Fatah al-Islam began firing missiles outside the camp, Abu Salim Taha, the Fatah al-Islam spokesman, explained that the group was targeting the army and some missiles had reached Lebanese towns because of miscalculations. He asked the Sunnis to accept his apology. Lebanon’s many Salafist jihadist groups refused to back Fatah al-Islam, as did Al Qaeda. Their focus was fighting Israel, and none of them wanted to jeopardize their position in Lebanon by provoking the authorities.
By late June most of the Palestinian refugees from Nahr al-Barid had fled to the nearby Bedawi refugee camp. In a schoolyard there I was stopped by Abu Hadi, born in Haifa in 1946. “I am a person without an address,” he told me. “I wish I was a donkey or a horse so I would have doctors and lawyers for my rights.” He pulled out a notebook. “My office is my pocket,” he said. He showed me a plastic bag with a sponge and a towel. “My bathroom is in my hand.” A peaceful demonstration of hundreds of civilians, including women and children, marched from Bedawi toward their former homes, asking for the right to return there. Lebanese soldiers opened fire at close range, killing two demonstrators and wounding at least twenty. As the demonstrators fled they were attacked by Sunni civilians from the region, beaten and stabbed. Palestinian families seeking to recover the corpses of their relatives killed by the army’s indiscriminate shelling were told to sign statements affirming that the men had been with Fatah al-Islam or were killed by the group. At the Interior Ministry’s Qibba base near Nahr al-Barid, where many Palestinians were interrogated, at least one of the officers had graduated from an American military program in interrogation described as “debriefing, interviewing, and elicitation.” Numerous Palestinian men reported being detained and tortured for many days. Palestinians throughout Lebanon were beaten at checkpoints.
A SENSE OF FOREBODING united people in Lebanon and throughout the region in response to the destabilizing occupation of Iraq. It also made Sunnis feel vulnerable. North of Tripoli, by the village of Qubat Shamra, where a boy was selling watermelons off the side of the road the day I visited, there was a stretch of broken wall with two lines of graffiti. “We tell you, oh rulers, of treachery and tyranny, the blood of the martyr Hariri is not to be forgotten,” said one. The other listed the successors of the Prophet Muhammad whom Sunnis revere and warned that “the blood of Sunnis is boiling.” It was signed by an unknown group called the Mujahideen Battalions of Tel Hayat, in reference to a nearby village. Further up the road toward the Syrian border, past tall pine and eucalyptus trees, one side of an apartment building was covered with a large painting of Rafiq al-Hariri. “They feared you so they killed you,” it said. “Truly they are pigs.” It quoted from the Koran as well, an example of the strange juxtaposition of Islamism and the Hariri cult. I stopped at Kusha and met a twenty-three-year-old third-year law student called Muhamad, who had learned English from listening to rap music. Muhamad had joined the Interior Ministry’s new Information Branch earlier that year as a volunteer “because of the Shiite campaign against this government,” he said. “You have to do something.” His responsibility was to “keep an eye open for anything strange in town.”
According to Muhamad, Lebanon’s Sunnis had finally come to believe that Lebanon was their country. “After they killed Hariri we woke up,” he said. “Shiites hate us. After Hariri’s death I started feeling hatred of Shiites. I hate Shiites after they thanked Syria in the demonstration.” He also hated Shiites for reacting positively to Saddam Hussein’s execution. “At the end Saddam was a Sunni,” he said. “I love Saddam. He subjugated Shiites. He was a leader in every sense of the word.” Muhamad believed he was helping to defend Lebanon from the “Shiite crescent.” “They’re trying to extend their principles through all of Lebanon. The biggest danger is coming from Shiites, not Israel. The priority is Shiites, to confront their project. I would take a gun and face Shiites, not only me but many people here.”
In the village of Masha I drove by the main mosque, which had a large picture of Hariri on one wall. Above the mosque a large blue sign said, “Palestine and Iraq are calling you, boycott American products.” Elsewhere in town a small shop had the obligatory picture of Saddam with his two sons at his side. A local sheikh had praised Fatah al-Islam as mujahideen.
Throughout Sunni towns in the north and Sunni neighborhoods in Tripoli and Beirut one finds images of Saddam and graffiti praising the executed former Iraqi leader. “The nation that gave birth to Saddam Hussein will not bow,” said one in the Beqaa. In Beirut’s Sunni stronghold of Tariq al-Jadida I found posters of “the martyred leader” Saddam with the Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem behind him. On the road to Mishmish, a small mountain town in Akkar, I passed a wall where someone had written “Long live the hero Saddam Hussein.” Entering the town I drove under many banners honoring the army. “Only your pure blood draws the red line,” said one, in reference to Nasrallah’s recent speech. When I visited in late July 2007, the all-Sunni town had already lost three of its men to Fatah al-Islam; eight other soldiers from Mishmish were wounded. “People are very angry at the Palestinians,” mayor Hanzar Amr Din told me. He did not believe the anger would subside after the fighting. “If they think of coming back to the camp, people will destroy it,” he said. “People here were very upset at Nasrallah’s words about red lines,” he said. “Last summer people were happy with Nasrallah for fighting Israel, but saying that the camp is a red line means he is backing Palestinians against the army.”
That summer I found similar sentiments in the Sunni town of Bibnine. A laborer in a sandwich shop compared the situation to the 1970 Black September fighting, when the Jordanians had gotten rid of Palestinians. “I swear on the Koran,” he told me, “if I see a Palestinian I would slaughter him and drink his blood.” I asked him
