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By Alistair Lyon, Special Correspondent
TRIPOLI, Lebanon, Oct 10 (Reuters) – Grenade blasts echo nightly across a sectarian frontline in Lebanon’s northern city of Tripoli despite a month-old reconciliation pact.
Two bomb attacks that killed 17 soldiers and five civilians in August and September have also fuelled tensions in Lebanon’s second biggest city, a Sunni Muslim stronghold where Islamist groups are active — and perhaps some hardcore militants.
“There is old blood between us. There’s no solution. It’s us or them,” growled Abu Bilal, an imposing man in a black T-shirt, who sat smoking with half a dozen young men and watching the dilapidated backstreets of Bab Tebbaneh, a Sunni bastion.
He boasted of the weaponry — assault rifles, machineguns mortars and rocket-propelled grenades — that he said his group had bought from arms dealers with locally raised funds.
Just up the hill in the rival Alawite district of Jebel Mohsen, Fuad Mutwari, a trader, said the reconciliation sealed on Sept. 8 after four months of sporadic street fighting would not bring lasting peace unless both sides were disarmed.
“They got weapons from Egypt, hidden under mangos. And we got arms from Syria too,” he said. “You know how it is.”
Buildings in both areas are scarred by bullet holes and rocket impacts. Some Alawite-owned shops in Bab Tebbaneh are blackened with fire after their Sunni neighbours torched them.
People on both sides link their troubles to Lebanon’s broader struggle pitting an alliance led by Hezbollah, a Shi’ite group backed by Iran and Syria, against Sunni, Druze and Christian factions supported by the West and its Arab allies.
Muslim clerics say Tripoli’s conflicts are political, not religious, but sectarian hatreds simmer at street level, despite sporadic efforts by Lebanon’s politicians to calm them.
“Hezbollah’s weapons are supposed to be against Israel, but they turned them on us in Beirut,” said Walid Faraj, 40, alluding to Hezbollah’s brief seizure of Beirut in May. “Of course Hezbollah is trying to crush the Sunnis.”
Lebanese army troops separate the combatants along a main road dividing the two communities, which fought fierce battles in the 1980s during Lebanon’s 15-year civil war.
BLOODSTAINED MEMORIES
People in Bab Tebbaneh readily recall the bloodshed of 1985 when Syrian troops and their Lebanese allies assaulted Sunni Islamist militants who had created a mini-state in Tripoli.
Their Alawite neighbours, whose sect is an offshoot of Shi’ism, say they feel threatened by an Islamist revival in this city of 600,000, where they form a minority of some 40,000.
“We don’t want war, so it would be best if the Syrians came back because no one controlled Lebanon like they did,” said Suleiman Khanat, a cafe owner sitting with Mutwari and a group of sharply dressed young men with gelled hair and tattooed arms.
Jebel Mohsen is the fiefdom of a party with close links to Syria, whose president, Bashar al-Assad, is himself an Alawite.
Assad said last month he was worried by “extremist forces” in Tripoli and raised fears of Syrian intervention by sending extra troops to the border with north Lebanon.
Syria also accused Islamists from a nearby Arab country of being behind a suicide bombing that killed 17 people in Damascus on Sept. 27, but did not say whether they had come from Lebanon.
Syrian officials say the army deployment on the border — which prompted a U.S. warning against any Syrian move into Lebanon — is to combat smuggling, especially of diesel.
The Syrians controlled Lebanon for 29 years until forced out after the 2005 assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik al-Hariri, but insist they have no desire to return.
Diplomats in the region say Syria has deployed only a few hundred lightly armed troops near the Lebanese border.
A senior political source in Beirut said Assad’s action targeted Lebanese Sunnis who depend on the contraband trade — and are loyal to Saad al-Hariri, son of the slain premier and leader of Lebanon’s anti-Syrian majority alliance.
With parliamentary elections due in Lebanon next May, many people in Tripoli fear more violence as local and national factions — and their foreign backers — jockey for advantage.
“We’ve had enough,” said Haitham Dandashi, 62, a shopkeeper in Bab Tebbaneh. “I have 12 children and I’m fed up with wondering whether they’ll come home safe from school.”
At an Alawite-owned pharmacy nearby, Ali Shamsin, 37, said he was desperate to leave Bab Tebbaneh, where he said gangs levied protection money and hoodlums demanded drugs.
“The situation is still scary. I close at 3 p.m. instead of at 10 or 11 at night like before,” he said.
On the edge of Jebel Mohsen, the Mahfouz family lives in a small, exposed hillside house. Its top floor was destroyed in the civil war and the one below was damaged two months ago.
“Someone threw a grenade near here last night,” said Fida Mahfouz, a 50-year-old woman with curly black hair, whose brother was killed on an upper floor by a sniper in 1982.
“We have no weapons in the house — only the knife I chop parsley with,” she smiled. “But where else can we go?”
(Editing by Samia Nakhoul)
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