Ahmad (right), a 19-year-old student of engineering and one of Bab Al-Tabbaneh’s fortunate young people, chatting with a friend. He has been able to go to university, thanks to a grant from the Ruwwad Al Tanmeya NGO. Credit: Oriol Andrés Gallart/IPS

By Oriol Andrés Gallart
TRIPOLI, Lebanon, Jan 10 2015 (IPS)

“People get used to war. During the last battle, children were still coming to play. Can you imagine, a seven-year-old boy running through the bullets just to play video games,” says Mohammad Darwish, a calm man with a curled beard framing his face.

Sitting behind the counter of his cybercafé, located in one of the main streets of the Bab Al-Tabbaneh neighbourhood in this northern Lebanese city, Darwish says that his young customers have resigned themselves to the persistence of armed conflicts.“People get used to war. During the last battle, children were still coming to play. Can you imagine, a seven-year-old boy running through the bullets just to play video games” – Mohammad Darwish, owner of a cybercafé in the Bab Al-Tabbaneh neighbourhood of Tripoli

Despite their age, they are pretty sure that clashes – which have become routine here over the past six years – will erupt again sooner or later. Even when calm reigns, the shelled and bullet-riddled buildings in Tabbaneh stand as a reminder of previous clashes.

The last eruption of violence was in late October 2014. Clashes between the army and local Sunni gunmen paralysed Tripoli for three days and destroyed part of the historic old city, leaving at least eight civilians, 11 soldiers and 22 militants dead. The army now controls Tabbaneh, with soldiers and tanks deployed on every street corner.

Curiously, flags and posters of the Islamic State (IS) can be seen displayed in houses and shops.

“I support IS [Islamic State] and the [Al-Qaeda-affiliated] Jabhat Al-Nusra (JN)”, says 19-year-old unemployed Hassan with a smile, explaining that he thinks IS will give him rights “to have a job, to live peacefully according to Islamic precepts, to move freely.”

Tabbaneh is probably the hardest neighbourhood to grow up in the whole of Tripoli. Despite being the second largest city in Lebanon, barely 80 kilometres north of Beirut, policy neglect by various central governments has left this Sunni-majority city suffering from alarming poverty, unemployment and social exclusion, and Tabbaneh is one of its poorest and most marginalised areas.

Seventy-six percent of Tabbaneh inhabitants live below the poverty line, according to a study on ‘Urban Poverty in Tripoli’, published in 2012 by the U.N. Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA).

These circumstances, aggravated by the political exploitation of sectarianism within a very conservative society, have fuelled the frequent rounds of violence, mainly between Tabbaneh and the neighbourhood of Jabal Mohsen.

A giant poster on a balcony in Bab Al-Tabbaneh in memory of a young boy killed during clashes in the neighbourhood. Credit: Oriol Andrés Gallart/IPS

Both neighbourhoods are separated just by one street, but while Bab Al-Tabbaneh inhabitants are mostly Sunni (like the main Syrian rebel groups), most of Jabal Mohsen’s inhabitants are Alawites (the same sect as Syrian President Bashar al-Assad).

This sectarianism has determined a rivalry that dates back to the Syrian occupation of Lebanon which began in 1976 and ended in 2005, but which has turned violent again since 2008, and especially since the beginning of Syrian civil war in 2011. During the last three years, more than 20 rounds of fights have broken out in Tripoli, most of them between Tabbaneh and Mohsen militias.

“We fight to defend our people, to achieve peace,” says 19-year-old Khaled, who usually works in a bakery but also belongs to a local militia. But Ahmad, who is of the same age, is sceptical: “People fight because they don’t have money or work.”

Ahmad is studying engineering, thanks to a grant provided by Ruwwad Al Tanmeya, a regional NGO that works in the area through youth activism, civic engagement and education. Because his father served in the army, the state paid the major part of his school fees when he was younger and he was able to study in private schools outside Tabbaneh.

Hoda Al-Rifai, a Ruwwad youth officer, agrees with Ahmad: “Many families don’t have incomes. Whenever the conflict starts, the fighters get paid. And these fighters also give money to children to fulfil specific tasks. They can have three dollars a day and this is better than going to school. Their parents also think this way.”

Stereotypes also contribute to make things hard for Tabbaneh’s youth – including finding a job outside the neighbourhood – and shape their personality, explains Hoda. “When we started, the youth had no self-confidence. The media do not produce an image of these neighbourhoods as areas where you can find brilliant young men, willing to study. They just underline the clashes and all kinds of negatives things.”

“There are no members of JN or IS here,” Darwish tells IPS, adding that many in Tabbaneh see the IS flags as a way of showing dissatisfaction over the government’s alleged abandonment of the Sunni community and specifically of Tabbaneh.

“This is not a religious conflict but political. When politicians want to send a message to each other, they pay for clashes here,” adds Darwish’s 49-year-old aunt, veiled and dressed completely in black. “In this city, you can give 20 dollars to a boy so he starts a war,” explains Darwish.

Nevertheless, various studies have found that only a small percentage of the estimated up to 80,000 Tabbaneh inhabitants take part in combats, and Sarah Al-Charif, Lebanon director of Ruwwad, stresses the immediate improvements observed in Tabbaneh and Mohsen youths who participate in the NGO’s projects.

“They become aware of their shared interests, values and pain,” she says. “They became more open-minded, especially the girls.”

For Sarah, in addition to public investment and job opportunities, any solution must include awareness and education, to which Hoda adds: “First of all, citizens need to understand why the clashes take place.”

(Edited by Phil Harris)

Heavily damaged and destroyed buildings on the frontline in Tripoli's Jabal Mohsen area. Credit: Shelly Kittleson /IPS.

By Shelly Kittleson
TRIPOLI, Lebanon, Jan 22 2014 (IPS)

In northern Lebanon’s largest city, Tripoli, Syria Street cuts through neighbourhoods that back opposite sides of the war raging in Syria, 30 km away. Clashes between them resumed this weekend after a cross-border rocket attack.

The frontline of the Jabal Mohsen area, overlooking the rival Bab Al-Tabbaneh, has been heavily scarred by 18 rounds of clashes since 2008. The area bears brutal signs: burnt shops, buildings pockmarked by mortar shelling, sheets of canvas riddled with bullet holes that have been hung across streets for protection from snipers.

Past checkpoints manned by the military, which was given control of security for six months after late November clashes left several dead and scores wounded, numerous schoolboys can be seen roaming Jabal Mohsen’s streets.“But this is Lebanon. There are weapons and ammunition planted everywhere.”

While Bab Al-Tabbaneh is predominantly Sunni, the majority in Jabal Mohsen is Alawite.

Lebanese from the Alawite sect, the same minority group and offshoot of Shia Islam that Syria’s Assad regime belongs to, account for approximately 11 percent of the population.

“There are no elementary or high schools here and it isn’t safe for the boys to cross into Sunni areas,” said one shop owner.

Emad Salman, a 28-year-old house painter, told IPS he had been unable to leave the area for work since November and even those requiring medical care needed army escorts to get out.

“They’re all Al-Qaeda down there,” he said. “Fifteen men who left Jabal Mohsen to go to work were stopped and shot in the legs.”

The latest round of hostilities seems to have been sparked by attacks on two Sunni mosques, allegedly by members of the Jabal Mohsen community, in late August. Two car bombs exploded in front of the mosques, killing at least 47 people and injuring over 400.

Ali Eid, founder of the community’s Alawite Arab Democratic Party, did not comply with an Oct. 30 summons to answer to charges of smuggling a key suspect in the case across the border into Syria. His son and the party’s political leader, Rifaat Eid, then allegedly made inflammatory statements against the Lebanese security services.

A number of episodes targeting Alawites ensued, followed by clashes. The city was put under the control of the army for six months on Dec. 2.

On a visit to the area, IPS found the walls of Jabal Mohsen plastered with graffiti hailing the Syrian regime. A popular “trinity” poster showing the smiling faces of Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad, his father Hafez and Lebanese Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah were ubiquitous.

In impoverished Bab Al-Tabbaneh, a group of adolescents told IPS with an air of defiance that two Alawite men had been stabbed as part of a “family” feud with the Sunni community.

In the cold wintry air, boys in their early teens warmed themselves in a garage that would be invisible from the hilltop of Jabal Mohsen. They said they were “getting ready for the revolution.”

A Sunni woman wearing a headscarf showed her torched shop, in front of which soldiers stood. The woman placed much of the blame on caretaker Prime Minister Najib Miqati.

Lebanon’s Tripoli is the birthplace of Miqati, a Sunni in the Hezbollah-dominated March 8 political coalition and the richest man in Lebanon, who made much of his wealth through a telecommunications company that works in Syria and emerging markets. Lebanon has not had a government since late March when the one under Miqati resigned.

Mustafa Allouch, head of the Tripoli section of the Future Movement that is part of the March 14 political coalition, holds the Syrian regime and its decades-old interference in Lebanon responsible for the unrest.

Syria maintained a military presence in the country for around 30 years until 2005, when it was forced to pull out after massive protests and international pressure following the assassination of then prime minister Rafiq Hariri.

Hezbollah, allied with the Assad regime and heavily funded by Iran, has never been forced to lay down its weapons, and is generally deemed more powerful than the Lebanese Armed Forces.

Allouch, chief surgeon at a local hospital, noted that Hezbollah had long openly admitted to taking part in the Syrian Civil War.

Acknowledging that a number of figures from the March 14 Coalition had also been accused of sending weapons into Syria to back the rebels, Allouch said he, too, had been accused of it – by his own cousin.

“My mother is Alawite,” he said, “and I have an uncle who is a general in the Syrian regime. He told his son this, and he believed it. I just laughed and told him that if I had the means to do so, I would,” said Allouch, who as a teenager fought as a Marxist with the Palestinian forces early in the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990).

In any case, the amount of arms entering Syria from Lebanon is nowhere near that coming in from Syria’s other borders, he said. “But this is Lebanon. There are weapons and ammunition planted everywhere.”