Syrian Unrest Sparks Gun Battles in Lebanon
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR
Published: May 21, 2012
BEIRUT, Lebanon – Gun battles between Lebanese factions supporting and opposing the government of President Bashar al-Assad spread to Beirut on Monday in the most serious outbreak of violence in Lebanon since the Syrian uprising began, leaving several people dead and the country more tense than ever in its effort to avoid the fray next door.
The fighting overnight in Beirut resulted in the expulsion of a small pro-Syrian faction, the Arab Movement Party, from a largely Sunni Muslim neighborhood in the southern part of the city. The quarter’s streets were littered with burned cars and trash containers, but mostly calm after the military intervened.
The potential for Syria’s violence infecting Lebanon has always been considered dangerous
given that the factional and sectarian differences are similar in both countries.
Hezbollah, the heavily-armed Shiite Muslim group, along with a smattering of smaller factions, staunchly support Syria. Most Sunni Muslim organizations would like to see President Assad overthrown. The overnight street fighting was between factions within the Sunni Muslim community, however, and did not directly involve Hezbollah.
After the uprising started in March 2011, Prime Minister Najib Mikati pronounced a policy of “disassociation” from either side in Syria, hoping to keep the fires from leaping the border. Despite small periodic flare ups in the northern city of Tripoli, the policy has largely worked, with politicians mostly keeping their rhetoric in check.
But there are widespread suspicions that Syria, whose army deployed here for nearly 30 years until 2005 and which retained strongties with the security services, was manipulating its allies here to feed the fighting.
The immediate cause of the clashes was killing of two pro-Syrian, Sunni Muslim clerics by the army at a checkpoint near the northern city of Tripoli, already a tinderbox this month with about nine people killed and dozens wounded in clashes pitting a minority Alawite neighborhood, the same sect as President Assad, against an adjacent Syrian Muslim neighborhood.
The circumstances under which the two clerics died remain somewhat murky. After an altercation with a soldier at the checkpoint, they attempted to speed away in their Range Rover and the soldier opened fire, according to local accounts. Mr. Mikati acknowledged that the army was involved and called for an immediate investigation. He said “appropriate action” would be taken and urged calm between the army and the people of the northern city of Akkar, the hometown of the clerics
“Just as the military sometimes make fatal errors, inevitably politicians can make fatal errors as well,” said Najib Mikati, the Lebanese prime minister, after meeting with top security officials. “We all have to cooperate to avoid falling into such errors.”
The Lebanese army issued a statement express regret after the incident.
But demonstrations erupted after the episode in mainly Sunni Muslim neighborhoods in both the north and in Beirut, with youths rolling burning tires onto the roads and igniting trash containers to block major arteries.
A battle with machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades erupted in the southern Beirut neighborhood of Tareek al-Jadeedeh when supporters of the Future Movement, the party of the former Prime Minister Saad al-Hariri, attacked the offices of the Arab Movement Party, a small faction which backs Mr. Assad.
Three people died and about 20 people were injured, Lebanese press reports said. Shaker al-Bijawi, the head of the Arab Movement Party, said two of the dead were members of his organization. He said he had received many death threats in the past but felt that on Sunday his attackers were under orders to assassinate him.
“They have their opinions, we have ours,” he said in a telephone interview. ‘The problem is that they don’t want another opinion — why should we respect their opinion when they don’t respect ours — they keep insulting Syria and Bashar.”
Mr. Bijawi said he was planning to organize a pro-Syria demonstration on Friday.
Beirut was calm after the fighting subsided but with markedly less traffic than is usual on a Monday morning. The tensions have prompted four Arab countries — Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates — to warn their citizens not to travel to Lebanon, dealing a blow to the pending summer travel season, a main engine of Lebanon’s economy.
In Syria itself, activist organizations called on the United Nations monitors to visit the village of Souran, near Hama, where they said the security forces killed many residents in a raid on Sunday. The organizations put the toll at between 20 and 39 people, but such incidents are difficult to confirm independently.
BEIRUT, Lebanon – Gun battles between Lebanese factions supporting and opposing the government of President Bashar al-Assad spread to Beirut on Monday in the most serious outbreak of violence in Lebanon since the Syrian uprising began, leaving several people dead and the country more tense than ever in its effort to avoid the fray next door.
The fighting overnight in Beirut resulted in the expulsion of a small pro-Syrian faction, the Arab Movement Party, from a largely Sunni Muslim neighborhood in the southern part of the city. The quarter’s streets were littered with burned cars and trash containers, but mostly calm after the military intervened.
The potential for Syria’s violence infecting Lebanon has always been considered dangerous
given that the factional and sectarian differences are similar in both countries.
Hezbollah, the heavily-armed Shiite Muslim group, along with a smattering of smaller factions, staunchly support Syria. Most Sunni Muslim organizations would like to see President Assad overthrown. The overnight street fighting was between factions within the Sunni Muslim community, however, and did not directly involve Hezbollah.
After the uprising started in March 2011, Prime Minister Najib Mikati pronounced a policy of “disassociation” from either side in Syria, hoping to keep the fires from leaping the border. Despite small periodic flare ups in the northern city of Tripoli, the policy has largely worked, with politicians mostly keeping their rhetoric in check.
But there are widespread suspicions that Syria, whose army deployed here for nearly 30 years until 2005 and which retained strongties with the security services, was manipulating its allies here to feed the fighting.
The immediate cause of the clashes was killing of two pro-Syrian, Sunni Muslim clerics by the army at a checkpoint near the northern city of Tripoli, already a tinderbox this month with about nine people killed and dozens wounded in clashes pitting a minority Alawite neighborhood, the same sect as President Assad, against an adjacent Syrian Muslim neighborhood.
The circumstances under which the two clerics died remain somewhat murky. After an altercation with a soldier at the checkpoint, they attempted to speed away in their Range Rover and the soldier opened fire, according to local accounts. Mr. Mikati acknowledged that the army was involved and called for an immediate investigation. He said “appropriate action” would be taken and urged calm between the army and the people of the northern city of Akkar, the hometown of the clerics
“Just as the military sometimes make fatal errors, inevitably politicians can make fatal errors as well,” said Najib Mikati, the Lebanese prime minister, after meeting with top security officials. “We all have to cooperate to avoid falling into such errors.”
The Lebanese army issued a statement express regret after the incident.
But demonstrations erupted after the episode in mainly Sunni Muslim neighborhoods in both the north and in Beirut, with youths rolling burning tires onto the roads and igniting trash containers to block major arteries.
A battle with machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades erupted in the southern Beirut neighborhood of Tareek al-Jadeedeh when supporters of the Future Movement, the party of the former Prime Minister Saad al-Hariri, attacked the offices of the Arab Movement Party, a small faction which backs Mr. Assad.
Three people died and about 20 people were injured, Lebanese press reports said. Shaker al-Bijawi, the head of the Arab Movement Party, said two of the dead were members of his organization. He said he had received many death threats in the past but felt that on Sunday his attackers were under orders to assassinate him.
“They have their opinions, we have ours,” he said in a telephone interview. ‘The problem is that they don’t want another opinion — why should we respect their opinion when they don’t respect ours — they keep insulting Syria and Bashar.”
Mr. Bijawi said he was planning to organize a pro-Syria demonstration on Friday.
Beirut was calm after the fighting subsided but with markedly less traffic than is usual on a Monday morning. The tensions have prompted four Arab countries — Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates — to warn their citizens not to travel to Lebanon, dealing a blow to the pending summer travel season, a main engine of Lebanon’s economy.
In Syria itself, activist organizations called on the United Nations monitors to visit the village of Souran, near Hama, where they said the security forces killed many residents in a raid on Sunday. The organizations put the toll at between 20 and 39 people, but such incidents are difficult to confirm independently.
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