Under the crackle of unending citywide sniper fire, roughly a dozen gunmen dressed in black scramble for cover near a pockmarked highway. Seconds later, a firefight breaks out and the gunmen turn to attack a troop of military soldiers busy setting up a checkpoint. Day laborers hauling produce into pickup trucks a half-block away go about their business, and bystanders outside a nearby supermarket barely flinch—everyone here is inured to the actions of war. An hour south, the capital Beirut is slumbering through another peaceful weekend.
Welcome to Tripoli, a destitute, crumbling port city in northern Lebanon, about 30 miles from the Syrian border.
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Beachfront ballistics north of Beirut.
For two years, steady fighting between neighboring Sunni Muslims and Alawites has plagued the city. A quick jaunt down the coast, in Beirut, people are still working on their tans, but on Syria Street—one of Tripoli’s main thoroughfares—the fighting continues, an apt symbol of the origins of the carnage: The Syrian civil war. Lebanese Sunni fighters, many from Tripoli, have streamed across the border to fight alongside rebels in Syria and return home to continue the fight against their pro-regime neighbors.
The warring parties here are emulating the largely Alawite-Sunni conflict next door in Syria. The Sunnis, who mainly live in the neighborhood of Bab al-Tabbaneh, support the rebels. The Alawites in Jabal Mohsen, a nearby hillside enclave, mostly side with the regime. There is so much tension that gunfire can erupt over something as minor as errant fireworks during Ramadan. Young jobless kids sitting atop a deadly arsenal of weapons—from small arms to mortars and rockets—create a volatile situation often set off by mere boredom.
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A guy in new shoes shoots a gun as some tires burn.
Jabal Mohsen has a commanding view over Bab al-Tabbaneh, its sniper positions clearly visible from down below on Syria Street. Jabel Mohsen was sealed off to outsiders during this latest round of violence, but on previous visits the neighborhood looked and felt like Damascus, with Syrian flags and portraits of President Bashar al-Assad hanging everywhere from light posts to shop windows.
“The [Lebanese] army is doing Assad’s dirty work here,” says one fighter. “Whenever Sunnis gather in groups, [the Lebanese army] opens fire on us. The army is against Islam. They stand with Hezbollah and Assad.”
As seemingly pointless as the conflict is to many Lebanese, the death toll continues to mount. In the nearly three years since anti-government protests in southern Syria spiraled, more than 200 people have reportedly been killed in Tripoli and more than 2,000 have been injured. Last week, several children were killed by gunfire and grenades from both sides and unidentified snipers even targeted a school bus.
The political scene in Tripoli is as absurd as the ceaseless violence. Lebanon’s already weak government was dissolved last summer, and analysts say that most of the elected officials simply act as a local face for foreign backers in Syria and the Gulf states. Even Najib Mikati, the country’s caretaker prime minister, is fighting allegations that he’s supporting armed militias in Tripoli, his hometown. Lebanon’s former top cop is accused of doing the same.
A resident of Jabel Mohsen reached by phone expressed the frustrations of his neighbors, and what they see as a conspiracy against Alawites by the Lebanese state. “We consider the Information Branch [special police task force] illegitimate, just as we consider the Lebanese government illegitimate. If they are men, and think they can come arrest our leaders, then by all means they can try,” said Ali, 39, a member of the main Jabel Mohsen militia.
This dilapidated port town on the country’s northern Mediterranean coast is its second largest, with around 500,000 residents. Extreme poverty runs deep: the United Nations estimates that some 51 percent of Tripoli’s residents live on less than $4 a day. The city’s grinding poverty ensures a plentiful supply of foot soldiers.
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Beirut is more mellow than Tripoli.
The contrast between Tripoli and Beirut, the country’s capital an hour to the south, is stark. Beirut’s commercial hub is bustling, and the city’s skyline is dotted with cranes erecting even more luxury high-rises. Along Tripoli’s battle-scarred Syria Street, shops that have dared stay open are riddled with bullet holes and blackened by fires. A disheveled, middle-aged militia commander known as “Captain,” whose fiefdom encompasses a three-block area on Syria Street, asked for money in exchange for a tour around his new defenses. “I hardly have enough have money to feed my family now,” he says.
Times are hard for the neighborhood’s fighters, as the crucial flow of funds and weapons from militia bosses and politicians has reportedly slowed.
Recently daily life has ground to a halt because of flaring violence. Primary schools and universities have been shut for nearly two weeks. To get around the front lines in Bab al-Tabbaneh, you have to pass through a dark maze of holes blasted through walls between adjoining buildings. The passageways reek of urine and dead rodents. Anti-Alawite graffiti (“Assad’s dogs” reads one screed) adorns the interior walls of what used to be people’s homes.
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Syria Street, in Tripoli, Lebanon.
Over the past couple of years the bunkers along Syria Street have become permanent fortifications built from sandbags, truck tires and dirt-filled oil drums. The best guides through the zig-zagging passageways are young boys from the area who are still too young to fight, but are on a fast track to employment in one of the many militias fighting in the area.
Many of Bab al-Tabbaneh’s most hardened fighters have spent significant time fighting alongside the Syrian opposition. When they return home, their neighbors and the Lebanese army, again become the enemy.
One such fighter is a man known as Hajj Mohammed, the Captain’s boss. The basement of his apartment block has been converted in a bunker-like war room with thick concrete walls and a rusty steel door. Exhausted fighters take turns sleeping on cots while in the next room a young boy, Hajj’s son, who is no more than 8 years old, nervously fiddles with a belt-fed machine gun. The grown-ups laugh. They recruit them early here.
For the older men like Hajj Mohammed, the history of fighting in Tripoli extends beyond the start of the recent Syrian conflict. At the height of Lebanon’s own civil war, in the 1980s, Tripoli was a bloody battleground between Sunni residents of Bab al-Tabbaneh and the Syrian army, which occupied much of the country. Alawite fighters from Jabel Mohsen allegedly helped the Syrian military carry out what some locals claim were massacres. The decades-long blood feud continues.
With an arrest warrant out for the Alawite leader in Jabel Mohsen, in connection with a deadly double car bombing that targeted two Sunni mosques in Tripoli back in August, “the city is about to explode,” Ali said. “We will fight this conspiracy to the last man.”
Last weekend a minibus full of Alawite workers from Jabel Mohsen was stopped while driving through Bab al-Tabbaneh, its occupants dragged out at gunpoint. Nearly a dozen men were beaten, and several were shot in the legs in yet another senseless act of sectarian violence. The attack reminded some of the start of Lebanon’s civil war, when Christian militiamen dragged Palestinian civilians from a bus near Beirut and shot them. But this was just another day in Tripoli. A world away from the rest of Lebanon.
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