Uncertainty in Beirut : Indybay

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Uncertainty in Beirut

by via the Electronic Intifada
Friday May 9th, 2008 6:28 PM

8 May 2008 7:00pm Beirut is exploding all around me. After Hizballah leader Hassan Nasrallah made his speech this evening, during which he accused the governing coalition of declaring war on the resistance, opposition and March 14 supporters started fighting each other and making their armed presence felt all over West Beirut, including my neighborhood of Hamra.

The news reports stated that this morning Beirut woke up to new demarcation lines, referring to the points of battle during Lebanon's long and bloody civil war, though there were no clear lines from my perspective.

Everyone saw this crisis coming, but there is no way to really prepare for war or whatever we should call the conflict currently playing out in the streets. After the airport road was closed by opposition forces yesterday, and the roads in and out of and connecting the different areas of Beirut were shut by demonstrators, things quickly deteriorated and constantly trotted out in news reports was the old cliché that this was the worst internal crisis since the end of the civil war.

There is a large explosion as I write this.

I was in a much lighter mood this morning even though I knew there was a crisis that would only get worse. At the grocery store in my neighborhood where things were still calm, everyone was stocking up. There was no Arabic bread left by the time I got there. The line was long but people were still smiling at each other and were not panicking. When I returned just now, it was pretty much empty of people. It was funny to see what people were stocking up on -- one woman had six bottles of toilet bowl cleaner in her cart. I saw a few people with smoked salmon, others loaded up on booze. Of course, the media reported that in other neighborhoods things were more dire, and people were desperate to find even basic necessities.

§Opposition forces take control of Beirut

by via the Electronic Intifada Friday May 9th, 2008 6:28 PM

BEIRUT, 9 May (IPS) - Men clad in black have roamed the streets of Beirut since Wednesday, their faces covered with ski masks or dark kaffiyeh (checkered scarf), as they wreaked havoc in the large avenues leading to the airport or dividing Sunni and Shia areas. As darkness loomed over Lebanon, the winds of discord seem to set the Lebanese capital ablaze.

Since the assassination of former Sunni prime minister Rafiq Hariri 14 Feb 2005, allegedly through a Syrian conspiracy, the ruling anti-Syrian majority comprised of the Druze Progressive Socialist Party (PSP), Christian Lebanese Forces and Kataeb as well as the Future movement headed by Saad Hariri, son of slain prime minister Hariri, has been in conflict with the Syrian and Iranian backed opposition, dominated by Shia Amal and Hizballah movements.

Tension between the two groups has been aggressively building up since Saturday 26 April, when French Socialist MP Karim Pakzad was detained by Hizballah. In the country to attend a two-day Socialist International conference in Beirut, Pakzad was detained and interrogated for four hours before being released while touring and taking pictures in an area considered the party's stronghold. Pakzad's host, Walid Jumblat, head of the PSP and a powerful figure in the governing majority, was clearly unhappy with the turn of events.

A week after the kidnapping of Pakzad, Jumblat made earth-shattering accusations against Hizballah during a conference. Jumblat claimed that the Islamic party had placed cameras around the airport that could be used for the killing and kidnapping of Lebanese and foreign leaders. He supported his arguments by showing reporters an exchange of emails between Lebanese Defense Minister Elias Murr and army intelligence services discussing the discovery of surveillance cameras in the airport's vicinity.

§Battle for Beirut

by via the Electronic Intifada Friday May 9th, 2008 6:30 PM

BEIRUT, 9 May (IRIN) - Everyone kept insisting it was not a civil war, but jumping for cover as a rocket-propelled grenade slammed into the apartment block beside us, and masked gunmen fired deafening salvos across the road dividing Sunni and Shia neighborhoods of Beirut, it certainly felt like it.

"It is impossible for Shia to shoot on Sunnis," insisted a military commander of Shia opposition group Amal, allied with Shia resistance group Hizballah, whose near two-year political battle against the Sunni-led government descended on 8 May into the worst fighting in Beirut since the ruinous 1975-1990 civil war that killed up to 150,000 people.

"My wife is Sunni: should I kill my nephews?" asked the commander, who gave his name only as Abu Ali.

But his words were cut short by machine-gun fire from the Sunni neighborhood across the road in the central Beirut neighborhood of Mazraa, sending sparks and soot flying up from the ground.

Young men outside the Amal office, some of them tattooed, many of them wearing ski masks, dashed for the nearest wall, loading clips into their machine-guns and high caliber automatic rifles.

From the boot of a black SUV, older men removed brand new rockets from their plastic covers, loading them into launchers to fire into the Sunni neighborhood just meters across the road.

"I brought my two daughters out here earlier," said 50-year-old Abu Ali, gesturing towards the corner of the building from where his fighters were preparing to jump out and fire. "I brought them out so they could see who their enemy was."

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