Assir's media return buoys supporters, frightens others

[Originally posted at NOW]

ABRA, Lebanon – A first-time visitor to the Bilal bin Rabah mosque complex today in Abra, east of Sidon, might never guess there were several days of intense rocket and machine gun clashes here just over seven months ago, killing 18 Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) soldiers and around 40 gunmen loyal to the mosque’s imam, Sheikh Ahmad al-Assir.

The once-devastated apartment block housing the mosque, which had entire wall panels blown out when NOW saw it after the June 2013 fighting, has now been immaculately repaired and restored, a “For Rent” banner hanging from one balcony indicating that it is inhabitable once again. Long gone, of course, are the young men standing guard outside with AK-47s hanging by their sides. (Those who weren’t killed or arrested have, like Assir himself, gone into hiding.) Gone too are the heavy-duty barriers installed by the sheikh on the side-streets leading up to the mosque complex, as well as a protective metal roof constructed above the mosque’s entrance. Some new shops have opened up in the adjacent small square; others have closed down. The whole block has the eerie air of the scene of an historic and infamous crime, mopped up and painted over but still evidently raw in the memories of those who witnessed it.

Thus when NOW asked local residents Friday about their thoughts on Assir’s recent reappearance in the media, many who still supported him would only say so in lowered voices. “Inshallah (God willing) he’ll return,” murmured one adolescent worker in a bakery before returning to the oven. Others would reveal their sympathies only in roundabout or implicit ways. A few, however, remained as outspoken as ever – seeing perhaps that NOW were journalists, the driver of one passing car raised his fist out the window and shouted, “Sheikh al-Assir, God protect you!”

For such people, the reemergence of the sheikh on social media networks has evidently been a great boon. Having not used his Twitter account since August 2013, Assir surprised followers with a new message on 14 January, and has since posted over 25 times. The messages generally address current events in Lebanon and Syria, peppered with Qur’anic citations and the derogatory references to “Safavids” (Shiites and/or Persians) and “Hizb al-Lat” (a pun on “Hezbollah” implying idolatry) that are the hallmark of hardline Sunni Islamism. On Syria, he sarcastically says the siege of the Yarmouk camp is the “true picture of the support of Iran and [Hezbollah] and Assad for the Palestinians and their cause,” and laments that “the world” cares more about “the mujahideen” in Syria than the regime’s “planes dropping barrel bombs, and chemical weapons, and slaughter with knives.” He also calls for the release of kidnapped Christian priests and nuns, “[even though] many Christian clergymen and politicians stood with Assad and justified his criminality against our people.” On Lebanon, he says the “main reason” for the recent wave of explosions is “[Hezbollah’s] criminality in Syria,” defending March 14, the Future Movement, and President Michel Suleiman from accusations of responsibility. At the same time, he accuses Future leader MP Saad Hariri of providing “cover” for the continuing presence of the army (labeled a “tool” of Hezbollah) in Abra, and mocks March 14’s recently-launched “civil resistance” campaign, the “first result” of which was “the approval of a unity cabinet with [Hezbollah] covering their criminality in Lebanon and Syria.”

As before, it is this posture as an uncompromising defender of “the Sunni people” (Ahl al-Sunna) that appeals to Assir’s supporters. “[Some] still say they don’t feel secure anymore [after his disappearance],” a butcher near the mosque told NOW. “They say he used to protect this area.”

Yet the violent legacy of his movement has also left many in the neighborhood fearful of his reemergence, particularly in the wake of rumors tying him to extremist groups. A Twitter account said to belong to one of his wives wrote on 16 January that efforts were underway to make Assir the head of the Lebanese branch of Jabhat al-Nusra, the Al-Qaeda offshoot that has claimed two deadly suicide bombings in Lebanon* since the announcement of its formation in December 2013 and is believed to have around 170 fighters based in Sidon’s Ain al-Hilweh refugee camp. Also in December, one LAF soldier was killed and three wounded in dual attacks on army checkpoints in Sidon, including one close to Assir’s mosque. And on Friday, concerns of possible further attacks in Sidon, including car bombings, prompted authorities to implement new security measures in the city.

“He could be affiliated with any extremist group, in my opinion, because the people who don’t know God tend to bond together. […] May God take his soul,” said a baker near the mosque (at which point his younger apprentice indignantly retorted, “May God protect him!”).

“Most of us were relieved when Assir left, as though a rock were lifted off our chests,” said the manager of a nearby money transfer outlet. “I can’t tell what his possible affiliations are, but I fear he’s affiliated to a group that is worse than Jabhat al-Nusra or the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham, like Al-Qaeda itself.”

“His return to the media spotlight definitely caused tension, because we here still have a feeling that things aren’t okay and something is being prepared,” the manager told NOW. “His supporters still show up at the mosque, which is why I have a feeling something might happen, especially after his latest statements.”

All interviewees requested anonymity due to the sensitivity of the subject.

* Since the time of publication, Jabhat al-Nusra has claimed a third suicide bombing, killing 4 in Hermel.

Jabhat al-Nusra: Now in Lebanon?

[Originally posted at NOW]

The Syrian al-Qaeda franchise leader’s claim to have established a formal presence in Lebanon might not be entirely true, say analysts, but is still ominous nonetheless.

The recent assertion by the leader of Jabhat al-Nusra, the official Syrian franchise of al-Qaeda, that the militant group has now formally established a presence in Lebanon appears to have confirmed fears – already fuelled by over a dozen deadly attacks and explosions, including suicide bombings – that the violent extremism engulfing Syria poses a growing danger to its small western neighbor.

Just days before Abu Muhammad al-Jawlani made his claim during his first-ever interview, videos circulated online showing a group calling itself “Jabhat al-Nusra in Lebanon” firing Grad rockets at the northeastern Beqaa town of Hermel, resulting in three injuries. And on Monday, unconfirmed reports emerged of Hezbollah ambushing and killing dozens of Jabhat al-Nusra gunmen in a border region east of Baalbek.

Despite these incidents, however, security analysts told NOW Jabhat al-Nusra’s presence in Lebanon likely took the form of only a few, geographically scattered individuals, rather than a physical base or a unified battalion.

“I doubt that Jabhat al-Nusra, or any terrorist organization, really has an official representation in Lebanon,” said Nizar Abd al-Qader, a former Lebanese army general. “Though I feel that in some places there are probably some individuals who sympathize with it or have been fighting along with them in certain battles, either in Iraq or Syria.”

“This needs to be verified. Jawlani’s statement is not enough,” concurred Riad Kahwaji, founder and CEO of the Institute for Near East & Gulf Military Analysis (INEGMA), who nevertheless added that it would be unsurprising if it turned out to be true.

“Lebanon to start with is a country with a very weak central government. It also borders Syria, and we have today over a million Syrian refugees in Lebanon. So I would not be surprised if a few of them were with Jabhat al-Nusra or sympathized with them.”

One likely source of Jabhat al-Nusra support is the Palestinian refugee camp of Ain al-Hilweh in the southern city of Sidon, according to Abd al-Qader. Sidon was the scene of deadly twin attacks on army checkpoints earlier this month by Lebanese and Palestinian militants. It also saw a two-day-long gun and rocket battle in June between the army and partisans of the Islamist cleric Sheikh Ahmad al-Assir, who is himself now rumored to be in Ain al-Hilweh. The camp has been known in the past to host fugitive militants from a variety of Islamist factions, including al-Qaeda affiliates.

Indeed, one prominent Islamist in the camp confirmed to NOW that there exist supporters not just of Jabhat al-Nusra, but of Syrian opposition groups of all stripes, though he too stressed that these were individuals rather than organizations.

“I am certain that we don’t have an official presence of Jabhat al-Nusra in the camp,” said Sheikh Jamal Khattab, leader of the Islamic Mujahid Movement. “No group has pledged allegiance (bay’aa) to Jabhat al-Nusra. But yes, people are sympathetic to them because of their achievements against the regime in Syria. There are even non-Islamists in the camp who support them for this reason.”

Another key reason for this comparative popularity, and the resultant decision by Jabhat al-Nusra to move into Lebanon, is Hezbollah’s military intervention in Syria, analysts and Khattab agreed.

“Hezbollah decided to intervene and be a major player in Syria, and therefore Jabhat al-Nusra has expanded and is now spreading into Lebanon. It’s natural to find combatants from Syria getting involved in the Lebanese scene as well. You can’t expect to go to a troubled place and not bring the trouble back home with you,” said Kahwaji.

And perhaps the great concern, said analysts and Khattab, was that this “trouble” would not be easily contained or banished.

“The Tripoli and Dahiyeh and Iranian embassy bombings prove that the battle already started in Lebanon,” said Khattab.

“It is extremely difficult to deal with individuals acting like guided smart missiles. Suicide attackers are elusive, they live among the people, and when their sympathizers are growing, they become even harder to combat or preempt,” said Kahwaji.

“This is what we have right now. This is one of the major negative consequences of Hezbollah’s intervention in Syria.”

Luna Safwan contributed reporting.

Hezbollah shooting stokes Palestinian ire

[Originally posted at NOW]

Relations between Hezbollah and Palestinians set to fray further after checkpoint shootout leaves refugee dead.

Mourners carry Muhammad Samrawi's coffin through the narrow alleys of Burj al-Barajneh camp on Monday (NOW/Alex Rowell)

BURJ AL-BARAJNEH, Lebanon – As hundreds of mourners crammed the narrow, airless street outside the Furqan mosque to attend Muhammad Samrawi’s funeral Monday evening, a mood of anxiety hung palpably in the air. A distressed middle-aged woman, wearing a black abaya and black headscarf, broke the heavy silence, wailing of her hope that the mother of Samrawi’s killer one day feels the grief she is now feeling.

Within seconds, a pair of men pounced on the woman, hissing at her to be quiet. “We don’t want fitna [sectarian strife]!” shouted one to the crowd. Evidently fearing a repeat of the previous night’s demonstrations against Hezbollah – whose gunmen were responsible for Samrawi’s death – the man frantically repeated, “No chants!” When he went on to declare, “We are all with you, Sayyid Hassan,” a young man behind NOW cursed in disgust.

A coffin emerged from the mosque, draped in a Palestinian flag, and the procession began through the winding alleyways of Beirut’s most densely-populated refugee camp, the deafening claps of AK-47 fire reverberating off the graffiti-colored walls. At the cemetery fifteen minutes later, as the men buried the body, the same black-clad woman was still refusing to be hushed by bystanders. “I’m not going to be quiet. Tell me! Are we takfiris too, now?”

Such open expression of resentment against Hezbollah is a rare spectacle from Palestinian refugees, who generally support the party’s muscular anti-Israel stance and, in the case of Burj al-Barajneh residents, live in the heart of the southern suburbs, where the party’s control is at its tightest.

Yet Hezbollah’s killing of 40-year-old Samrawi at a party checkpoint at the camp’s entrance Sunday night has aggravated Palestinians’ feelings of being targeted by Hezbollah’s new security measures, which came into effect after the 15 August car bomb that killed 30 in the nearby Al-Roueiss neighborhood.

“There’s a feeling that the camp is being singled out,” said Ali, a camp resident in his mid-twenties who witnessed the clash. “They stopped the car of the wedding couple, which was at the front of the wedding convoy. There was an exchange of words, a provocation, and then eventually gunfire. If this was the only time this happened, it would be okay, but it’s happened before and it will keep happening. People are angry,” he told NOW.

Ali complained of routine petty harassment of Palestinians at Hezbollah’s new checkpoints. “As soon as you say you’re Palestinian, they pull you over, they search you, just like they do to Syrians. I’ve been pulled over myself at least four times. People as young as fifteen are made to hand over their phones. I thought we were done with racism.”

NOW also met with Hosni Abu Taqa, head of the camp’s Popular Committee, who has been working nonstop since Sunday to limit the fallout from the shooting and mediate an agreement to cool residents’ tempers.

“We understand why there are checkpoints – after all, this is Dahiyeh. And after people started blaming that Palestinian man for the rocket attacks, we obviously couldn’t refuse the security measures,” Abu Taqa told NOW, referring to Ahmad Taha, the Palestinian suspected of attacking Dahiyeh in May with rockets purchased, according to some reports, from Burj al-Barajneh itself.

As such, said Abu Taqa, a deal was struck with Hezbollah on Monday to move the checkpoint further away from the camp’s Haret Hreik entrance. Moreover, the checkpoint at the camp’s airport road entrance is now manned by the Internal Security Forces, not Hezbollah.

However, the Dahiyeh rocket attack is not the only recent source of friction between Hezbollah and Palestinian refugees. In May, residents of the Ain al-Hilweh camp in Sidon burned aid packages received from the party in anger at their intervention in Syria, reportedly saying, “We don’t want assistance soaked in the blood of the Syrian people.” Indeed, Ain al-Hilweh has for years been a hotbed of anti-Hezbollah sentiment, with some of the camp’s Islamist militants believed to have fought against both Hezbollah in Sidon and the regime in Syria. Elsewhere, residents of the Shatila camp in Beirut have been recruited into anti-Hezbollah militias in adjacent Sunni neighborhoods. And, as NOW has previously reported, Hezbollah’s relations with Hamas have reached unprecedented lows, with the latter accused of assisting Syrian rebels in the battle for Qusayr as well as harboring a key suspect in the Dahiyeh rocket attack.

Underlying this rift is a general proliferation of sectarian Islamist ideology among Palestinians in Lebanon, which Hezbollah’s intervention in Syria has accelerated, according to Yezid Sayigh, senior associate at the Carnegie Middle East Center and a former adviser to the Palestinian delegation to peace talks in the 1990s.

“Sectarian feelings have been building up in the Palestinian camps for a while, originally over the Iraq war and now the Syrian one, and this has been fomented by Arab governments like Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Mubarak’s Egypt. As in Egypt and elsewhere in the Arab world, socioeconomically and politically marginalized communities like Palestinian refugees have moved toward Salafism. This in turn has alienated them from Hezbollah, which was otherwise a party they were close to on several levels. The bonds between them have eroded immensely over a number of years and the Syrian crisis has crystallized that,” Sayigh told NOW.

Moreover, the Syrian conflict has increasingly placed Palestinians in direct opposition to the Assad regime.

“Obviously, lots of Palestinians have joined the fight against the regime in Syria. Just yesterday, families from Damascus’ Yarmouk refugee camp which had taken shelter in Ain al-Hilweh were mourning five dead. So Palestinians here increasingly have close bonds that tie them to the opposition in Syria against the regime, which most Palestinians distrust anyway and have done for a long time.”

Maya Gebeily contributed reporting.

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).

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.”

A repeat of history at Nahr al-Bared?

[Originally posted at NOW Lebanon. Co-written with Nadine Elali and Matt Nash]

In another of what is becoming a series of outbreaks of instability to afflict Lebanon in recent months, three Palestinians were killed and several others wounded between Friday and Monday in clashes with the Lebanese army in refugee camps across the country. While Interior Minister Marwan Charbel was quick to describe the events as a “coincidence […] not planned,” suspicions to the contrary have been fuelled by the particular location of the first killing – the northern Nahr al-Bared camp, site of the months-long battle between the army and the Islamist Fatah al-Islam outfit in 2007 – as well as the timing, less than two weeks since deadly gunfights in nearby Tripoli.

Accounts of what exactly triggered the violence on Monday vary. Arkan Bader, a Nahr al-Bared resident and leader of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP) in the camp, told NOW Lebanon that some youths were attempting to bury Ahmad Qassim, the young man killed on Friday, on a plot of land belonging to the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) but under the control of the Lebanese army. The army’s refusal to allow them to enter the land led to a confrontation, which ultimately ended with two dead and some 20 wounded. While an army statement claimed that soldiers initially used tear gas and rubber bullets against refugees armed with Molotov cocktails, Bader and other camp residents claim the army immediately fired live bullets and that the youths were merely throwing stones.

“This could have been dealt with by other means,” said Hassan Shishniyeh, press spokesman for the Palestinian Embassy in Lebanon. “There are other forms of weapons than live bullets which can be used in civil disobedience cases. Everybody knows that Nahr al-Bared is devoid of arms. We ask the Lebanese army not to use excessive force against Palestinian civilians.”

Several people interviewed by NOW expressed the view that the violence was in some way deliberately engineered, as many perceived the 2007 conflict to be. Riad Kahwaji, founder of the INEGMA think tank, placed the blame on pro-Syrian factions within the camp. “It’s most likely that those who confronted the army were elements loyal to the Syrian regime, such as Fatah al-Intifada and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC). According to my sources, the Lebanese army has been watching these groups closely, especially in light of what’s happening in Syria, and fears they may be used to stir up problems as a means of diverting attention from next door. I think this is more or less what we’re seeing right now in the camps,” he said.

“No one enters the camps without the knowledge of the Palestinian factions, including the pro-Syrian ones,” he added. “So if there are ‘infiltrators’—as the government claims—who let them in? Experience shows that Islamist elements in the camps are linked to the Syrian regime.”

For his part, Shishniyeh said that in Nahr al-Bared, “There are some who are trying to drag the camps into a position we don’t want to be in; who are trying to incite the army into a confrontation,” although he did not name any particular group. He did, however, make a point of observing that the army behaved more responsibly in Saida’s Ain al-Hilweh camp, where protests went on Monday in response to the Nahr al-Bared events, than it did in the north. “In Ain al-Hilweh, the army was wise in the way it dealt with protests. It retreated to lessen the anger of the people and only returned when things were calmer.”

Nadim Shehade, associate fellow of the Middle East and North Africa Programme at London’s Chatham House, argues that either way, the events have been politically exploited. “The event and timing are weird. If the incident is purposefully done, then it is to blow up the situation in the north. But it could also not be purposefully done; it could have happened and then some people took advantage of it to increase the agitation. It is not necessary that there be a conspiracy, but when it happens it might be to some groups’ interests to increase the tension.”

He adds, however, that such an incident was inevitable, given prevailing conditions in the camps. Nahr al-Bared is the only Palestinian camp in Lebanon where entrance and exit are controlled by the Lebanese army; a situation Shehade describes as “unsustainable.” “The whole issue of the Nahr al-Bared camp has been put on the back burner for a long time. There are certainly underlying factors and tensions behind this outburst. Things are extremely bad for the refugees, and there’s a feeling among them that the government is doing nothing about it. There’s no interaction with the refugees themselves; the only interaction is with the factions. And if you ask the people there, they say the factions don’t represent them, and indeed only add to their problems. There is no proper interlocutor between the people and the Lebanese government,” he said.

“Moreover, the state handles Palestinian refugees purely as a security matter [rather than a humanitarian one]. There was a time when they were treated in a more comprehensive manner.”

Shishniyeh agrees, describing the “humiliated” feeling of many residents of Nahr al-Bared. “There are four kinds of passes they have to show at checkpoints in and out of the camp, there are delays in reconstruction, and many of them are still prevented from returning to their homes. There’s a great deal of resentment among them toward the military cordon [enforced by the Lebanese army]. We ask the Lebanese army to end this military state that the civilians are subjected to on a daily basis. Easing these policies will ultimately lead to a more positive mood that will alleviate the current tensions.”