Speaking on Monocle 24 about Sidon clashes

I spoke on Monocle 24 radio on Monday night about Sidon's clashes between Sheikh Ahmad al-Assir's militants and the Lebanese army. Episode available here (I come on at 51:30).

Sidon residents brace for further violence

[Originally posted at NOW]

Damage to the outer walls of Sheikh Ahmad al-Assir's mosque complex in Abra, which one of his gunmen said was caused by RPG fire from Haaret Saida (NOW/Alex Rowell)

Rina Hassan has only just returned to her apartment in Sidon’s Abra neighborhood, four days after fleeing heavy gun battles that raged on her street between partisans of Salafist cleric Sheikh Ahmad al-Assir and those of the Hezbollah-affiliated Resistance Brigades, leaving one dead.

“When it started, [Assir’s] fighters were under my house. They blocked the street with burning oil so no cars could get in or out, and then began firing RPGs and machine guns non-stop. For two hours, I sat in the corner of my bedroom because it was the only room with no windows.”

Terrified and alone in the house, Hassan then received a call from her son imploring her to come to the comparative safety of his restaurant nearby, which has an underground kitchen.

“He came to my front door and said, ‘Close your eyes, don’t look around, it will just take two minutes.’ Getting there was a real risk. We stayed for two more hours in that kitchen with two fighters outside firing M16s at any car that approached.”

When negotiations between Assir and the city’s Mufti, Sheikh Salim Sousan, brought the fighting to a close, Hassan decided to leave Sidon for her native southern village.

“I called a friend who had a friend involved with Assir’s movement, and he told us of a safe exit route. We had to tell them exactly what cars we would be in so they would know it was us. Many people in Abra were doing the same thing.”

“Today, I returned to Sidon, because I heard that Assir had agreed to postpone any military action for now. But I’ve prepared a bag in the house. The moment I feel tensions are rising again, I’ll get out of here.”

Hassan’s attitude is a widespread one in the city today, which residents fear could become the site of increasingly frequent and bloody clashes in future. Sheikh Maher Hammoud, a pro-Hezbollah cleric who survived an alleged assassination attempt in Sidon earlier this month, accused Assir on Thursday of wanting to turn Sidon into a “new Tripoli,” referring to the northern city that for years has witnessed repeated bouts of deadly sectarian violence.

Certainly, Abra locals NOW spoke to on Friday felt worse was yet to come. “There will be clashes again, of course,” said a roast chicken vendor directly across the street from Assir’s Bilal bin Rabah mosque. “Sheikh Assir agreed to postpone them until after school examinations [concluding on 6 July]. Next time, the fighting will be more intense, yes.”

Assir himself also appears to be taking precautions. The side-street leading up to his mosque now sports a new metal barrier, flanked by heavy concrete blocks and sandbags. A friendly young man, possibly in his teens, raises the barrier to allow a car to enter the complex. Like the two men standing on the corner behind him, he carries an AK-47, evidently undeterred by the heavy deployment of Lebanese Army troops on the adjacent street below. No, he says, we can’t take photos of him. But if we like, we can snap the large new holes on the building’s exterior – the results, he claims, of RPGs fired by the Resistance Brigades from Haaret Saida, the predominantly Shiite quarter two kilometers to the southwest.

In Haaret Saida, where Hezbollah and Amal flags line the streets, another restaurateur initially shrugs off the prospect of further clashes before launching an animated speech about how dangerous they could become.

“The problem of sectarian hatred here is huge. In Sidon, we have every sect: Sunnis, Shiites, Druze, Christians, Palestinians. These Islamists are playing with fire. Since when did they care about school exams? Are children’s exams more important than children dying?”

NOW also spoke to the mayor of Haaret Saida, Samih al-Zein, who was the target of a public death threat from the celebrity Assir partisan, former pop singer Fadel Shaker.

“I made a formal complaint to the judiciary,” he said with regards to the threat. “The attorney general and the security apparatus will deal with this. We don’t have a personal reaction – we won’t sink to that level.”

Al-Zein played down the possibility of further clashes, implying that Hezbollah and Amal would seek to avoid confronting Assir.

“We won’t respond [to further provocations] because we won’t give them the chance to have sectarian fitna [strife].” He added that Assir’s movement was “too small to attack us.”

That is, in effect, the view shared by analyst Hazem al-Amin, author of The Lonely Salafi, who told NOW the chances of Sidon’s violence reaching the levels seen in Tripoli are slim at the moment.

“Assir is weaker than his opponents in Sidon, and the deciding party is Hezbollah, not Assir. If Hezbollah wants to create tension, it will. However, Sidon is an important road to the South, so it is not now in their interests to create clashes there.”

Al-Amin added the situation in Sidon would be largely determined by events in Syria.

“We’re operating on Syrian realities. The essential [factor in Tuesday’s clashes] was the results that Hezbollah has had in [Syria]. This has created a tense environment, which will continue and maybe increase – but the full-on explosion isn’t for now.”

Some of the above names have been changed at interviewees’ requests.

Yara Chehayed and Maya Gebeily contributed reporting.

Sidon's Salafists eager for battle

[Originally posted at NOW]

Fadel Shaker was in a talkative mood when NOW found him standing outside Sheikh Ahmad al-Assir’s Bilal Bin Rabah mosque on Wednesday afternoon. The former celebrity pop singer turned arch-partisan of the Sidon cleric was with half a dozen young men also sporting Salafist-style beards, and could scarcely have been less reticent when approached for questions.

Would he be joining the “Free Resistance Brigades,” the new Sidon-based militia established by Assir on Monday? “Of course!” was his reply, quickly echoed by the rest of the men. NOW then asked if he and his comrades would also be heading to fight in Syria, as per Assir’s call for “jihad” against President Bashar al-Assad’s forces and Hezbollah. The response was equally prompt: “Insha’Allah! [God willing]”

At this, Shaker grew animated. “All Shiites are brothers of whores!” he declared in a raised voice. “Write that down!” NOW asked if he indeed meant all Shiites, or was only referring to Hezbollah – a distinction typically made by Assir. “No: all of them! Shiites are the same as the bottom of my shoe!” he replied, to much laughter from his comrades. He continued cursing the sect for another thirty seconds or so, turning his ire on the late Iranian Grand Ayatollah Khomeini before NOW thanked him and parted ways.

In his apartment facing the mosque, Assir himself adopted a distinctly more restrained tone. “We’re not here to fight the Shia. The goal of the Free Resistance Brigades is self-defense – against Israel, if they choose to attack us, and against Hezbollah if they do,” the sheikh told NOW. “We have said many times that we refuse fighting and causing civil war in Lebanon.”

Assir has been talking of starting a militia since last November, and its formation is still in the planning stages, he told NOW. At present, he says, around 300 Lebanese and Palestinians from Sidon and its suburbs have signed on to join – a number he hopes will grow to several thousands (registration takes place outside his mosque after evening prayers) – but no formal training has taken place. He confirmed that he and his sons would personally be members of the Brigades.

These are not necessarily, however, the same people Assir intends to wage jihad across the border. “The people addressed in the fatwa[religious decree] for jihad are those living on the border, because it’s easier for them to access Syria.” He added, though, that “if there’s a need, we will back them up.”

Assir’s call to arms – seconded by prominent Tripoli cleric Sheikh Salem al-Rafei – comes at a time of intense fighting in and around Syria’s Qusayr, a rebel-held town roughly 10km from Lebanon’s northeastern border. The battle for Qusayr, which pits regime loyalists including an estimated 800-1,200 Hezbollah members against opposition militants, was reportedly described by Assad himself as the “main battle” in all of Syria at present.

“Hezbollah is fighting in Qusayr, and the Lebanese state isn’t saying a word against them,” Assir told NOW. “We’ve stayed away for two years, but now with Hezbollah attacking our Syrian brothers from one side and the regime attacking them from another, they’re under siege. We have to support them, this is a matter of shari’a [Islamic law].”

This was also the line taken by Rafei, who pledged Monday to “send men and weapons in support of our Sunni brothers in Qusayr.” Assir told NOW that due to Rafei’s substantial influence in Tripoli, he expects he will send over a thousand fighters across the border. Rafei could not be reached by NOW for comment.

With the line thus blurring between Syria’s and Lebanon’s fighters (“We say to our Syrian brothers, your war is our war,” as Rafei put it) and the prospect of organized sectarian war between Lebanese Sunnis and Shiites in Syria, analysts tell NOW the Assir-Rafei plan may bode ill for Lebanon’s security.

“This definitely drags Lebanon further into the Syrian conflict,” said Dr. Imad Salamey, professor of political science at the Lebanese American University. “We now have two sides in Lebanon – Hezbollah, which is already fully engaged in the fighting, and the pro-opposition Sunni groups promising similar military engagement. If things continue on this course, it may eventually bring the border villages and mixed Sunni-Shiite areas in the Beqaa Valley into similar conflict. This is really alarming and dangerous.”

Moreover, argues Salamey, “whether they know it or not, [Assir and Rafei] are playing into the Syrian regime’s hands, by turning the crisis into a region-wide one, which will lead the international community to prefer a political settlement in the regime’s favor.”

With that said, however, Salamey adds that the extent of the damage may be limited by Assir’s still-marginal following within the Sunni community. “Assir’s significance is not as it seems in the press. Sure, he can send some fighters to Syria, but this is also him trying to attract some attention and demonstrate his strategic relevance in swaying politics in Lebanon and Syria.”

“He and Rafei are trying to show that Hezbollah is not the only party that can play the ‘Syria’ card.”

Yara Chehayed contributed reporting.

Assir unrest stokes minority fears

[Originally posted at NOW, with Yara Chehayed]

For a mosque reported by its imam to be “under siege” by the army, the Bilal bin Rabah mosque in Sidon’s Abra neighborhood looked remarkably calm when NOW arrived Thursday afternoon. Though there was a pair of armed personnel carriers (APCs) on a parallel street, no attempt was made to prevent our approach, and none of the half-dozen partisans of Sheikh Ahmad al-Assir standing outside his mosque appeared at all distressed. Indeed, on the surface, it seemed a more or less typical day in the city of Sidon as a whole.

Yet beneath this superficial calm lie widespread fears among the city’s residents, not least those belonging to the minority Christian and Shiite communities. Just a five minute drive uphill from Assir’s mosque, the long beards and face-veils give way to posters of (now former) Pope Benedict XVI, signaling one’s arrival at one of Sidon’s few remaining Christian neighborhoods.

It is here, in upper Abra, that NOW meets the village mayor, Elias Mchantaf – the kind of well-heeled, middle-aged Christian who habitually breaks into French while talking, and who looks uncannily like a green-eyed brother of the Michel Suleiman portrait hung on the wall behind him. Abra, Mchantaf tells us over coffee in his office overlooking an expansive olive grove, was entirely Christian before the outbreak of civil war in 1975. Migration (and emigration) over the course of the many battles that have since struck Sidon have brought the Christian presence down to about 15% today. For those who remain, Ahmad al-Assir is in many ways symbolic of their decline – his mosque, built with the mayor’s permission in 1997, was the first in the area.

Mchantaf insists that the Christians have no problems with their Muslim neighbors, and that his personal relations with Assir are cordial. But there are hints throughout the conversation of a more complicated picture. The sheikh certainly keeps him busy. “Ten days ago, [Assir] told me Hezbollah was using two apartments in Abra to stock weapons. The owners of the apartments came to me and said, ‘Here are the keys if you want to check yourself.’ Then Assir told me there was an attempt to kidnap him, so we sent the army to secure his mosque, and he started saying the army was targeting him. Now there’s this problem with his friend’s car,” referring to the dispute that led to the alleged “siege” on Tuesday and consequent blocking of roads by his supporters across the country.

Such frequent unrest in the area keeps local Christians ill-at-ease. One upper Abra resident, requesting anonymity, told NOW that, “Of course we are scared. Our problems here are worse than in Tripoli, because we have [the Palestinian refugee camp] Ain al-Hilweh.”

That sentiment was echoed by a Shiite schoolteacher NOW met in central Sidon. “The new danger is the camp. If Assir is allied with militants there, this is a game-changer.” Ain al-Hilweh witnessed lethal clashes earlier this week between secularists and Islamists amid reports that one faction threatened “war” against anyone targeting Sunnis in Sidon. Moreover, there has long been speculation that Fadel Shaker, a celebrity partisan of Assir’s, has cultivated ties with militants inside the camp via his brother, a leader of the jihadist Jund al-Sham outfit.

Back in Abra, NOW managed to secure a quick interview with Assir himself in his press office across the street from his mosque (newly covered, incidentally, with a thick metal roof – see above photos). Reclining in his usual armchair, with a pair of fuzzy slippers on his feet, the sheikh could not have looked more relaxed. “Nothing is happening today,” he admitted. “Tomorrow, we’re calling on our brothers from all over Lebanon to come to the mosque and end the siege peacefully. We told them to have no confrontations with the army, even though the army insults us when we come to pray, and arrested a teenage boy the other day.”

We ask about Ain al-Hilweh. “I’ve had several calls from the camp, from people saying we are ready to support you, but on a personal level I have no connection with the fighters or their groups.” Regarding the Fadel Shaker rumours: “Sheikh Abdul Rahman Shmandar has served his sentence in Roumieh [prison], and is now living with Fadel Shaker, and neither of them have any connection to Jund al-Sham.”

As for the fears of Sidon’s minorities, Assir becomes somewhat exasperated. “As I’ve said several times, our problem is not with the Shiite sect. You can go down to Sidon and see all the shops owned by Shiites are open and people are working normally.”

That much is true. In the predominantly-Shiite Haarat al-Saida neighborhood, NOW spoke to shopkeepers selling Hezbollah, Amal, and black Shiite religious flags, whose tones were more defiant than afraid. “Why should we care if Assir is holding a protest tomorrow? He does it every week,” one said.

Nor were they concerned about the economic impact of Assir’s protests on their businesses. “On the contrary, it’s their loss and our gain. When he closes the streets there, more customers come to us here.”

Yet not everyone in Haarat al-Saida was quite so sanguine. “We are scared,” admitted a Palestinian woman a few shops down the street.

“In fact, we are thinking of leaving this area, permanently.”