October 30, 2013
The good soldier By Ana Maria Luca Traduzione di Luna Safwan
La povertà e il senso di isolamento politico contribuiscono agli scontri dei sunniti di Bab al Tabbaneh con gli alawiti di Jabal Mohsen
Sometime between 2012 and 2013, Mohammad Khalaf changed, sort of.
In May 2012, Khalaf wore a bucket hat, a military green jacket, and a long black beard. He placed his hand on his chest and bowed slightly to greet us. He didn’t shake hands with women. He was a religious man, a devout Muslim, but not a radical. He felt slightly bothered that he had to speak about internal matters to strangers. But he soon gained confidence.
The people in his Tripoli neighborhood, the predominantly-Sunni Bab al-Tabbaneh, were between rounds of fighting with neighboring Alawite Jabal Mohsen. The elusive snipers from Jabal Mohsen and the boys with AK-47s and RPGs from Bab al-Tabbaneh had fought in rounds for years. Someone shoots, the others retaliate. The fighting goes on for days, sometimes for as long as three weeks. Soldiers die, civilians die. Ministers, heads of security agencies, and Tripoli politicians meet, negotiate, and discuss security plans. Then the cycle starts again.
Something was happening in May 2012, Khalaf explained: People were angry and poor and needed security. A few small families accepted money from Hezbollah, creating small statelets within the Sunni anti-Syrian neighborhood and provoking feuds among the residents aside from the usual cyclic clashes with Jabal Mohsen. Many others were becoming salafis, as sheikhs’ sermons had become more predictable than politicians’ speeches.
In October 2013, Khalaf talks with the same passion as in 2012. But he looks very different: The 40-year-old man shaved his head, trimmed his moustache, and left his beard ungroomed, a sign that he has become a hardline Sunni Muslim. Occasionally, he wears the black flag of jihad around his head, as many do. He might dress and look like a jihadi fighter, but Khalaf does not speak like a takfiri, an extremist who doesn’t tolerate other beliefs. Lebanon is just not the place for extremists, he reasons. And he insists that none of his neighbors, as fearsome as they might look, have adopted radical views.
Bab al-Tabbaneh itself is a crowded, mixed area: Hariri supporters, Miqati supporters, salafis, Christians, Muslims, NGO workers, Syrian revolution supporters, refugees, clerics, and others. Sometimes a sheikh would be holding his sermon after prayer while around the corner a vendor would be playing Arabic dance music. Some people drink alcohol and some don’t. Their fight is not with other sects, it’s with the Syrian regime and its pawns, Khalaf clarifies. “This is Tabbaneh. The Syrian regime is trying to depict us as extremists and salafis to present an idea: ‘If you get rid of me, these men will take over,’” he said. “Some young men might like to show off, to pose with weapons. But it’s just childish.”
Khalaf was born in Bab al-Tabbaneh and lived there his entire life. He studied law for a year, but couldn’t afford tuition and he had to work, so he opened a grocery store. “After Hariri’s assassination back in 2005, things took a different turn in Lebanon. I started to work for the Social Aid [department in Future Movement]. I had a good relationship with the people around here.”
But the party could not help in terms of security. The Alawite Arab Democratic Party (ADP) in Jabal Mohsen had plenty of weapons supplied by Damascus. In 2008, when clashes erupted in Beirut between Future Movement supporters and Hezbollah over the latter’s illegal telecommunications system, people in Bab al-Tabbaneh were afraid of an attack by Hezbollah’s political allies in the city. An open attack did not occur, but clashes between Sunnis and Alawites became regular. In 2009, after the elections, the Future Movement stopped sending money to Bab al-Tabbaneh.
“Yet, politically, we still supported [Saad] Hariri,” Khalaf says. “We understand him. He is a politician and does not want to get involved [in] armed fights. But what disappoints us the most is how all other Lebanese politicians work for what’s best for their sects, yet we [Sunnis] seem to always be forgotten by our representative.”
Politics failed Khalaf. Future Movement leader Saad Hariri’s government fell in 2011. It was replaced by a Hezbollah-dominated government led by Tripoli businessman and politician Najib Miqati, who also has a base of supporters in Bab al-Tabbaneh. Miqati’s men fight shoulder-to-shoulder with Khalaf against the pro-Syrian Alawites, he says. The Syrian uprising had started and Syrian refugees were pouring into Lebanon and Tripoli by the thousands. Regardless of religion and political affiliation, people in Bab al-Tabbaneh supported the Syrian revolution and hosted the refugees. They still felt threatened, unorganized, and very poor.
It was in the summer of 2012 when the former social aid worker picked up his gun and fought alongside other young men in the neighborhood. In 2013, Khalaf leads his neighbors in what they call a battle to defend their homes. It is the seventeenth round of clashes between Bab al-Tabbaneh and Jabhal Mohsen. The shooting started on October 21, following Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s television interview. It lasted for a week, leaving scores dead and wounded.
Khalaf doesn’t have a militia, he says. Nor does he have a foreign master, like his enemies say. “We don’t have any budgets or monthly payments… The silly part is that some people accuse us of working for [Saudi] Prince Bandar Bin Sultan,” Khalaf laughs. “I wish we even knew the secretary in the Saudi Arabian embassy. All these are just rumors.”
In response to a similar question, Mosbah al-Ahdab, former Tajaddod MP from Tripoli, recalls an anecdote in which an FSA commander was asked about his group's change in tone. "Why did you grow a beard?" the FSA commander was asked. "Have you become a salafi?" "No," he responded, "but that's how we get money."
Ahdab, who is very familiar with portrayals of Bab al-Tabbaneh, says it works the same way in Tripoli. “They are not jihadis. Jihadis have organizations; these men only have guns and ammunition.”
Nobody ever got rich from being a fighter in Bab al-Tabbaneh. Only the top commanders get financing from different patrons; the fighters get almost nothing. They can’t afford to take their children to the hospital. Even though they dress like jihadis or salafis, they are, in fact, moderate Muslims with tolerant ideas about community. “[Right now] money is coming [to Tripoli] to finance these types of groups. If you have a graphic salafi group, you get money,” said Ahdab.
While the gunmen fight, the Lebanese army deploys all over Tripoli, and the politicians hold meetings and discuss security plans. The office of Tripoli MP Mohammad Kabbara, a Future Movement politician, is crowded with young men waiting for an audience. The MP is freshly shaved and wears a black tailored suit. A veteran of Tripoli’s politics, Qabbara keeps very close to what happens in the city’s streets. If it happened in Tripoli, he can provide details before anybody else. “Tripoli is being used like a mailbox. Whenever [Syria] has a message to send to the international and regional players, they cause problems here,” he explains. The whole security situation was provoked on purpose in order to brand the city as a radical community. “Tripoli is paying the price of the war in Syria,” Qabbara insists.
The Sunnis and Alawites in Tripoli have been rivals since the Syrian occupation. In 1988, the Syrian army, together with the Alawite ADP militiamen, slew scores of Tawhid’s Sunni fighters in Tripoli. They have held grudges ever since grenades began exploding on Syria Street, the borderline between the two neighborhoods. The Syrian uprising and the influx of Syrian refugees poured gas on the fire. The clashes happened much more often. The situation was aggravated in August 2013 when two car bombs exploded at separate Sunni mosques in Tripoli, killing 47 people and wounding over 100. On October 15, the Lebanese authorities indicted seven suspects, allegedly linked to the Jabal Mohsen-based ADP. When the Alawites started to shoot in celebration of Assad’s interview last Monday, the Sunnis in Bab al-Tabbaneh felt offended and wanted revenge for the bombings.
Qabbara says that as poor as they might be, people in Bab al-Tabbaneh would rather make sacrifices and buy weapons to protect themselves and prevent other bombings. There is no political force arming the Sunnis, he stresses.
In Bab al-Tabbaneh, Khalaf vows that fighting in Tripoli would not stop until ADP leader Rifaat Eid is arrested in connection with the August twin bombings. However, that would not solve Bab al-Tabbaneh’s main problem: poverty. As long as they are poor and jobless, he says, the men will fight.
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