Armed conflict Syria continues in Lebanon

[pieter]

Tripoli, Lebanon: Bab al-Tabbaneh–Jabal Mohsen clashes

The Bab al-Tibbaneh–Jabal Mohsen clashes are recurring conflicts between Sunni Muslim residents of the Bab-al-Tibbaneh and Alawite Muslim residents of the Jabal Mohsen neighbourhoods of Tripoli, Lebanon. Residents of the two neighbourhoods have been rivals since the Lebanese civil war (1975-1990), and have often engaged in violence. They are divided along sectarian lines, as well as by their opposition or support of the Alawite-lead Syrian government.


Sunni gunmen fire during clashes, in the northern port city of Tripoli, Lebanon, Sunday May 13, 2012. Gunfire broke out in the city Saturday and continued through the night primarily between a neighborhood populated by Sunni Muslims who hate Syrian President Bashar Assad and another area with many Assad backers from his Alawite sect. Lebanon's national news agency NNA said one soldier was shot dead by a sniper in the city early Sunday. Another man was found dead on the side of a road while a third died after a shell landed in a residential neighborhood. Photo: Hussein Malla / AP

Read more: www.mysanantonio.com/news/article/Group-Syria-troops-target-health-workers-wounded-3555929.php#ixzz1wji1Q68h

Background

Sunni Muslims and Alawites have been in conflict with each other for centuries. The Alawites of the Levant were oppressed by the Sunni Ottoman Empire, but gained power and influence when the French recruited Alawites as soldiers during the French mandate of Syria. After independence from France, their co-religionists the Assad family came to power in Syria in 1970. This angered the Sunni majority of Syria, which reacted with an Islamic uprising in Syria, an insurgency which was crushed by the Hama Massacre of 1982.



Tripoli is the second largest city in Lebanon after Beirut, and with an overwhelming density of Sunni Muslims, the city is considered as the traditional bastion of conservative Sunnis in Lebanon. There are 500,000 people in Tripoli, and the majority are Sunnis. Sunnis are 27% of the Lebanese population. Being a Sunni stronghold, all major currents of Lebanese Sunni Islamism have been centered in the city. Black banners with Quranic inscriptions crisscross the streets and dozens of free religious schools preach rigid Islamic doctrines and more women are spotted taking up the "niqab."



Tripoli is also the birthplace of Lebanon's Salafi Movement, a puritanical Sunni movement. The Sunnis of Bab al-Tabbaneh and the rest of Lebanon have close ties with Saudi Arabia, which supports them financially.
The Alawites of Lebanon are mainly located in the Jabal Mohsen neighbourhood of Tripoli, and nearby villages in Akkar, North Lebanon. 40-60,000 Alawites live in Tripoli, and their entire population in Lebanon is 120,000 at most. They have close ties with the Alawites in Syria, including the ruling Assad family.
The two neighbourhoods are divided by Syria Street, Jabal Mohsen stands on a hilltop, Bab al-Tabbaneh stands below it. Many residents in the two neighbourhoods are unemployed, which makes them easy to mobilize when clashes erupt. North Lebanon is one of the most empoverished parts of Lebanon, and is neglected by the government, leaving room for extremism to grow.

During the Lebanese Civil War

During the Lebanese Civil War that lasted from 1975 to 1990, Lebanese Alawites in the Jabal-Mohsen-based Arab Democratic Party aligned with Syria, fought alongside Syrian Army against the Sunni Islamist Tawhid Movement in Tripoli, which was based mainly in Bab-Tabbaneh. Before the war, the populations of the two neighbourhoods were interwoven.
In August 1984, violent clashes eruped between the Tawheed and the Arab Democratic Party, with the former been supported by the Mosques Committee and the Islamic Committee. The Tawheed’s position was strengthened when they gained control of the port area on 22 August, after a fierce battle on the streets of Tripoli that left more than 400 dead. Street fighting dragged for some days until 18 September, when it was brought to an end by a Syrian-mediated peace agreement between the IUM and the ADP. By 1985, Tawhid had control over Tripoli, and the Arab Democratic Party was entrenched in Jabal Mohsen.
In Tripoli on December 18, 1986 the Tawheed commander Samir al-Hassan was arrested by the Syrians. His men responded by killing 15 Syrian soldiers at a checkpoint, which brought the wrath of the Syrians on the Tawheed. Aided by the Arab Democratic Party, the Lebanese Communist Party, the pro-Syrian Lebanese branch of the Syrian Social Nationalist Party and Baath Party militias, the Syrians managed to defeat decisively the Tawheed, killing many of its fighters, arresting others and scattered the remainder.

2008 Conflict

During the 2008 conflict in Lebanon, pro-government Sunnis fought against anti-government Alawites. The Arab Democratic Party rearmed during the 2007 Lebanon conflict, after it was revealed that the Islamist group Fatah al-Islam had planned to attack the Alawites of Tripoli.
During the night between May 10 and May 11, heavy fighting broke out between Alawite Hezbollah sympathizers and Sunni supporters of the government in Tripoli. One woman was killed.

On May 11, Sunni supporters of the government had reportedly been fighting opposition followers in the Alawite dominated Jabal Mohsen area with machine-guns and rocket-propelled grenades. On May 12 clashes in Tripoli left one person dead and at least six others wounded. The Army stated that if the clashes did not end by morning of the next day they will intervene and use force if necessary to end the fighting.
On June 22 and June 23, at least nine people, eight civilians and a policeman, were killed and 55 others were wounded in Tripoli, in clashes between pro-government Sunnis based in the Bab el-Tabaneh district and pro-Syrian Alawites from Jabal Mohsen. Machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades were used in the clashes, which started around four in the morning.

Between July 25 and September 29, 23 people were killed in clashes between Sunni and Alawite militants in Tripoli. On September 8, Alawite and Sunni leaders signed a reconciliation agreement, which ended the fighting and tension which has haunted Tripoli since the civil war. Sunni Future Movement leader Saad Hariri subsequently visited Tripoli stating "We are both Lebanese and we will not allow anyone to tamper with us. I will do everything I can in order not to let anyone damage the Alawites' security in Tripoli and to foil any external plot to tamper with the security of the Alawites or the security of Tripoli".

Rifa'at Eid, current leader of the armed wing of the Arab Democratic Party said in an interview: "We're the most convenient targets, the stand-in for Hezbollah, our problem can only be solved when the Shiites and Sunnis solve theirs." As many as 9,000 Alawis fled their homes during the conflict.

2009

In October 2009, Jabal Mohsen was attacked with grenades by unknown assailants.

2010

In spite of "missilies" having been launched into Jabal Mohsen a few months before, children from both neighbourhoods, along with children from adjacent villages and refugee camps, played peaceful footbal-matches in mixed teams during the Open Fun Football Festival on November 2, 2010.

The Open Fun Football Festival on November 2, 2010


Weeks later, rockets were again fired into Jabal Mohsen, and a bomb was found near the house of Arab Democratic Party leader Ali Eid.

Clashes during the Syrian Uprising


June 2011 clashes

Seven people were killed and 59 were wounded in Tripoli, on Friday, June 17, 2011. Armed clashes erupted following a rally in support of Syrian protesters in Bab-al-Tabbaneh. Fighting broke out between gunmen positioned in Jabal Mohsen and Bab al-Tabbaneh. Among the dead were a Lebanese army soldier and an official from the Alawite Arab Democratic Party.


Lebanese army in Pro-Syrian Allawite Jabal Mohsen neighbourhood in Tripoli, northern Lebanon, May 15, 2012.


In the impoverished Jabal Mohsen area of the port city of Tripoli in north Lebanon, a small Alawite community is watching anxiously as Syrian President Bashar Assad fights to stay in power.

February 2012 clashes

Between February 10 and February 11, 2012, two to three people died in fighting in the northern Lebanese city of Tripoli, in the neighbourhoods of Jabal Mohsen and Bab al-Tebbaneh. The Lebanese Army stepped in and suffered six injured soldiers. There was a fear that the Syrian civil war would spill into Lebanon.

May 2012 clashes
Between two to four people were killed, when fighting erupted on the night of 12-13 May in the Lebanese city of Tripoli between members of the Alawite minority, loyal to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, and members of the Sunni majority, witnesses and security officials said. Rocket-propelled grenades and automatic rifles were used in the fighting in an Alawite enclave and surrounding Sunni neighborhoods in the port city.

Hours before the clashes, Lebanese troops exchanged fire late Saturday, May 12, with a group of young Islamists, protesting in Tripoli for the release of a terrorism suspect. The outbreak of gunfire between the Islamists and the army happened as the youths, sympathizers with the ongoing revolt in Syria, tried to approach the offices of the pro-Assad Syrian Social Nationalist Party.

In all, three of the dead were reportedly Sunni civilians, while one was an Army officer.

The fighting continued on May 14th, with six more people being killed, five Alawites and one Sunni.

The army deployed to the area on May 15, and engaged in gunbattles with residents that left eight wounded, including a soldier. By May 16, the clashes had left 11 dead.

"Western diplomatic sources" stated these incidents where the beginning of a Salafist revolution, aimed at arming the uprising in Syria. The Saudi-backed March 14 coalition accused Syria of trying to drag Lebanon into its crisis. "It is actually an attempt to make of Tripoli a zone of terrorism. It also aims at striking Lebanon's northern area which has welcomed and helped out the Syrian displaced," said March 14 figure Mustafa Alloush after the coalition held its regular weekly meeting. Tripoli and north Lebanon have seen an influx of Syrian refugees since the unrest in Syria began in March 2011.


Mustafa Alloush of the March 14 coalition

By May 18, a total of 12 people were dead and over 100 wounded in the May clashes.

On May 21, several RPGs where fired between the two neighbourhoods, with no reports of wounded.[64] On May 30, two more were wounded in clashes between the neighborhoods.[65]

June 2012 clashes

On June 2, 12 people were killed and 40 wounded in renewed clashes between the neighborhoods.

[pieter]

Allawite Turks

[pieter]

[pieter]

[pieter]

Note to Syria interventionists: Be careful what you wish for

Half-baked U.S. initiatives could push the Alawites over the edge, along with their ballistic missiles and chemical weapons.


By Chemi Shalev | Jun.01, 2012 | 2:38 PM | 10

The slaughter of innocent women and children at Houla has elicited calls for American intervention in the ongoing Sunni uprising in Syria. Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney has urged that the U.S. arm the rebels, while Senators John McCain and Joe Lieberman have advocated direct airstrikes against the Syrian regime. And while a Pew Research poll released Thursday indicated that only a quarter of all Americans believe that Washington should intervene in the Syrian conflict, a front page article in Thursday’s New York Times suggested that if a Srebrenica-type massacre occurs, even the reluctant Obama Administration may find itself forced to intervene.

But there are two elements of the Syrian standoff, one historical and one strategic, that are rarely discussed in the public debate about Syria. It is the potentially lethal mix of those two elements - the centuries old blood feud between the Alawite minority and the Sunni majority and the Syrian regime’s arsenal of surface to surface missiles and weapons of mass destruction - that should give pause to anyone advocating military intervention, especially if it’s just for the sake of “doing something”. Because that “something” could set off a chain reaction that might have far worse consequences than another round of massacres, as harsh as that may sound - especially, though not exclusively, for Israel.

The Syrian conflict may have been sparked by the Arab Spring, but by now it has very little to do with it. The standoff between the Alawi-dominated regime and the exclusively Sunni opposition is not a part of some Facebook revolt or Twitter rebellion and is no longer, if it ever was, an insurrection of democracy-seeking civilians against an oppressive autocratic regime. This is now a sectarian blood feud, an age-old vendetta, another bloody chapter in an ongoing conflict between a pilloried, outcast and persecuted sect that 40 years ago, after a millennium of persecution and degradation, ingeniously succeeded in seizing power and turning the tables on its historical oppressors.

Under the ruthless and cunning leadership of Hafez el Assad, aided and abetted by Ba’athist and middle-class Sunnis, the Alawite regime used subjugation, torture and tyranny to consolidate its hold on power. In 1982, Assad’s forces massacred 20,000 members of the opposition Muslim Brotherhood in the town of Hama in what Thomas Friedman called “Hama Rules.” These same rules are still in force for Assad’s son and his Damascus partners in crime.

But now it is no longer just the regime but the entire two million strong Alawite community and its Sunni collaborators, as the opposition will view them, who are fighting for their very survival. And every day that the fighting continues, with each atrocity that is committed by the Syrian army and its militias, the Alawites are cutting off their own means of retreat, pushing their own backs up against the wall, running up a tab of blood and cruelty that will be repaid in kind ten times over, approaching a point of no return in which desperate measures may be the only option left on the table. When the stakes are so high, the unthinkable suddenly becomes conceivable, the abominable begins to look like a practical plan of action and even the suicidal may seem like a risk worth taking.

Which brings us to Assad’s “doomsday option.” Unlike Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi, who voluntarily disarmed and relinquished his own ballistic missiles stockpile of chemical weapons - and whose fate may have been completely different, let’s admit it, had he not done so - Assad, in addition to a standing army, also controls one of the Middle East’s biggest arsenals of surface to surface missiles and the Arab world’s largest stockpile of chemical and possibly biological weapons.

Faced with his own political demise and convinced that his people may face murderous retribution, it is not too outlandish to imagine a scenario in which Assad comes to believe that a conflict with Israel or an all-out regional war is his best remaining option. He is, one should never forget, capable of wreaking havoc and destruction not only on most Israeli cities but also on Turkey, Cyprus, Jordan, Iraq and Saudi Arabia - and this before one factors in Hezbollah, with its 50,000+ stockpile of rockets and short range missiles, and Iran, which views the Assad regime as an irreplaceable strategic asset and which may also come around to viewing a regional conflagration as a way of overcoming crippling sanctions and growing isolation.

Syria is now the “sick man of the Middle East” to paraphrase Tsar Nicholas’ portrayal of the Ottoman Empire, or, to use a similar metaphor, the Assad regime is like a wounded and cornered animal whose reactions are growing increasingly erratic and dangerous for the region as a whole. Israeli Northern Command IDF General Yair Golan said this week that Syria is quickly turning into a “failed state” and that its vast arsenal of unconventional weapons could fall into the hands of renegade Islamist groups - some of which are part of the very same opposition groups that the Obama Administration is being urged to arm.

In order to deal with such a complex and threatening situation, the international community could either unite in a resolute diplomatic gesture, backed by a willingness to put thousands of troops on the ground as keepers of the peace and guarantors of the safety of both sides - or it might launch a concerted military operation of such magnitude that it might “shock and awe” the Assad regime into quick submission. But both of these scenarios are completely unrealistic, as is the possibility that the Alawite regime will suddenly lay down its arms and turn itself over to its historic tormentors.

If one may use yet another World War I analogy, Syria is to the Middle East as the Balkans were to Europe a hundred years ago - a powder keg that needs just one superfluous match to ignite the entire region. Although the desire to take action against the murderous Assad regime is understandable, the “shot heard around the world,” in this case, could be a half-baked intervention that sounds the alarm and lights up the panic buttons in the Presidential Palace in Damascus. Even in a go-for-broke presidential campaign, that nightmare possibility should give pause to headline-seeking politicians, especially those who claim to have Israel’s best interests at heart.

[karl]

Pieter

Yes, the situation as presented in this time and place is some what unstable in terms of peaceful resolution in conflict brought upon by the leadership of the sister of Arab Spring.

If these people had completed their home work on time, the situation as now would never have been.

But, so bit it so. Now what?

Each situation seems to be the prelude to another that follows, for as an opinion, it would be a good thing for the leadership of this attempted over throw of the government of Hafez el Assad. To pack up their belongings and call it a day, for at least for the sake of the Syrian people.

In the manner of information release of weapons of the Syrian arsenal. Perhaps this needs be addressed by the Russians, for they are the manufacturers and transfer agents to The Government of Syria.

At present, Israel holds the key to lighting up the desert with their nuclear arsenal. With the present arsenal, more is on the way for transfer from our Kiel construction yards with additions of Dolphin Class Submarines. These have within the manner for torpedo discharge, have built in, the tubes of discharge of nuclear tipped cruise missiles.

As most well known, The Dolphin weapon is surface propelled by conventional diesel propulsion, in conjunction with electric motors powered by fuel cell technology. They give off a very very small heat signature with very little propeller wash noise.

The entire package of these underwater weapons are much more cost effective then to use nuclear fuel as a heat conversion of steam to turbine as a power source. With this plus, eliminates the high insulation needed to cover the heat signature of a nuclear fueled power system.

Karl

[pieter]

edition.cnn.com/2012/05/24/world/meast/lebanon-syria-explainer/index.html?iid=article_sidebar



Pro Syrian voice