Monday, 27 October 2014

Tripoli neighborhood scarred by battles


TRIPOLI, Lebanon: A mural bearing the word “Allah” stood pierced with bullets in the heart of the restive neighborhood of Bab al-Tabbaneh. It was hours after the end of fierce battles between the Lebanese Army and militants inspired by ISIS and the Nusra Front that devastated swaths of the troubled streets and left residents in a daze as they picked up the pieces once more.


The military was deploying at the center of Bab al-Tabbaneh, its armored vehicles manned by soldiers who rarely held ground this deep in the heavily armed district. While the fighting had ceased, the occasional sound of a mine being exploded by the Army echoed nearby.


“The Army must enter because there is too much filth,” said one merchant who was clearing shards of broken glass from his shop, as Army soldiers snacked on sandwiches and smoked nearby, enjoying respite from the fighting. “Everybody wants their own state and think they know religion and God, and they know none of that.”


The merchant said the extremists had been recruiting young local men, preying on them amid high unemployment.


“Get any youth and give them a few thousand liras and they’ll do anything,” he said. “Let them clean up, we want to work and live.”


The neighborhood was devastated in the fighting, smoke rising from its center, debris lining the streets from burnt out apartments, vegetable stands in the district’s famed market toppled. Machine-gun casings and shells lined the street, and broken glass was everywhere as well as around the husks of cars with shattered windows and bullet holes.


The bullet holes were everywhere, some the mark of the weekend’s fighting while others had scarred the neighborhood in previous months when militia leaders fought fierce battles with the neighboring Jabal Mohsen, a predominantly Alawite area that supports the Syrian regime of Bashar Assad.


The corpse of a dog killed in the fighting lay in the sun on Syria Street, the traditional flashpoint of the previous clashes, rotting in the heat.


Shops had shuttered their doors, and there appeared to be little life in the ramshackle apartment blocks in the area, some of them collapsed and others blackened by shelling. A burning stench was omnipresent amid the estranged quiet that took hold.


The military’s fierce and unprecedented response, including the use of helicopter gunships to attack militant hideouts, was a clear message that the Army would no longer tolerate militancy.


But some residents decried the Army’s measures, saying many civilians had been wounded in the assault, pointing out trails of dried blood and locations where family members were wounded in the shelling as well as pathways through which they were evacuated.


They said the use of force was excessive, that the Army could have arrested the militants without a broad campaign, and pointed out in particular the use of aerial fire.


“We are Lebanese,” one resident said, implying the Army should not have used helicopters against citizens.


Some residents claimed that there were no gunmen in the area when the Army launched its campaign.


“Those houses all had women and children and they destroyed them,” said a resident of the neighborhood who appeared to be in his 20s, gesturing at a row of damaged houses in the center of Bab al-Tabbaneh.


Still, flags belonging to the Nusra Front, the Al-Qaeda offshoot fighting in Syria, fluttered in the neighborhood alongside posters glorifying Sheikh Houssam Sabbagh, a Salafist militia commander arrested back in July.


A poster of fugitive Salafist Preacher Ahmad Assir, whose fighters engaged in deadly clashes with the Army last year in Sidon, declared him the “lion of the Sunnis.”


“Only God is with us,” said a resident who expressed his anger at the campaign as well as the rampant poverty of the neighborhood. “Where are the human rights? Nobody hates the state but the state is walking over all the poor people.”


But some older residents praised the Army campaign, saying it was necessary to “cleanse” the neighborhood of extremists who were using the poverty and high unemployment in one of the most impoverished areas of Tripoli to recruit young men.


Some said night watches of gunmen with long beards and face covers had emerged and were recruiting youth and disbursing austere religious teachings to residents, giving them meager cash handouts to earn their loyalty and take up arms for various groups of unknown affiliation.


But many did not remain. Some families fled during a two-hour cease-fire on Sunday to the nearby public schools in the Zahriyya neighborhood. One widow who fled with her four children said she was woken up at 5 a.m. by the sound of gunfire, and shots landing inside her home.


She said the presence of gunmen, weaponry and lawlessness in the neighborhood had intensified in recent times, and that more teenagers were taking up arms. She heard the gunmen paid the youths in the neighborhood quite well.


Aid workers distributed food and household products to displaced residents. They held activities for children to comfort them after the violence they witnessed.


“Our hope is for things to be cleaned up,” the woman said. “We want to live in security.”



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