Nabil referred to Hizballah (which means Party of G.o.d) as Hizb al-Lat (Party of Lot), meaning the party of sin. Like many other Salafis, he also called them Hizb Ashaytan (Party of the Devil). "We are the shabab of Majd al-Anjar," he said. "We fight the rafidha. We ruled for hundreds of years. We have many mujahideen and martyrs in Iraq. If the Sunnis of Beirut call us, we will come." He told me many jihadist websites published calls for Sunni volunteers to come to Lebanon. Some required secret pa.s.swords, but he wouldn"t give me his.
Nabil had no formal military training, but, like many in the Beqaa, he began handling weapons at a young age. His life changed when he fell under the influence of Abu Muhamad, a local of Kurdish descent who had been one of Zarqawi"s deputies. Abu Muhammad"s real name was Mustafa Ramadan. An ethnic Kurd from Beirut who had once been a hoodlum who drank alcohol, he married a woman from Majd al-Anjar and moved to Denmark. He returned a Salafi and recruited some youth from the town to his own network, finally going to Iraq with his sixteen-year-old son. Abu Muhamad was trained in Afghanistan and was part of Basim al-Kanj"s Dinniyeh group. He was arrested in 2002 in a mosque in Majd al-Anjar. After four months in prison he used his connections and paid his way out. In Iraq he was said to have dispatched the car bomb that killed SCIRI leader Muhammad Bakr al-Hakim in 2003. He died fighting in Iraq, in an attack on the Abu Ghraib prison that nearly breached its walls.
Nabil"s brother-in-law was killed fighting in Rawa, a town in Iraq"s Anbar province, in June 2003. I visited the town the morning after dozens of Iraqi and foreign fighters had been slain in their desert camp by Americans. Locals buried them by a mosque, placing their ID cards in bottles that served as tombstones. Other youths from Majd al-Anjar were buried in Rawa that day. One of them was the son of Abu Muhamad, which was why he was also known as Abu Shahid, or father of the martyr. At least seven young men from the town were martyred in Iraq, and Nabil had a plaque in their honor in his guest room.
Nabil was jailed from 2004 until 2005, accused of plotting to bomb Western emba.s.sies and other targets. He later proudly showed me the many articles about his arrest and release. He was released with other jihadists at the same time as Samir Geagea, a Lebanese war criminal and leader of the right-wing Christian Lebanese Forces. The release of the radical Sunnis was meant to placate Sunnis and bolster the Sunni credentials of the Future Movement.
Majd al-Anjar was an important smuggling center. After the American invasion of Iraq, Nabil smuggled weapons and fighters into Syria and Iraq. Smugglers from the town relied on dirt roads through the mountainous border. All of Lebanon"s political factions relied on smuggling through Syria, Nabil told me. Many of the Lebanese officers at the border received salaries from smugglers that could reach five thousand dollars a month. Smuggling was still a good business, but it was more difficult now. Only special explosives were smuggled from Lebanon to Iraq, such as C4 and TNT. He showed me a picture of himself from the early days of the Iraq War, with a beard down to his chest. Back then he was so religious he refused to own a television.
Abu Muhamad would come from Iraq and meet Nabil in Damascus, where they rented apartments. Nabil delivered truckloads of weapons to him: bombs and explosives as well as missiles and silencers for pistols. They bribed Syrian customs officials and used clandestine dirt roads. Nabil"s friend Ismail Khatib purchased the weapons, sometimes with his own money, and handled communication with their brethren in Iraq. "We were a very tight group," Nabil said. "We couldn"t be penetrated." Ismail"s cousin Ali was among the dead in Rawa in 2003. After another fighter was killed in Iraq and two trucks of weapons were seized, the authorities began to watch their network. The Syrians, who still maintained bases in Lebanon at the time, had an intelligence headquarters nearby. Nabil was arrested on September 19, 2004, two months after his last delivery of weapons to Syria. The Syrians were the ones who sent Nabil to prison. "They decided to stop the flow of foreigners into Iraq," Nabil told me, "just like all the Arabs who changed their policies suddenly and decided to look good for the Americans."
Majd al-Anjar was also an important stop in the network that smuggled fighters to Iraq from Lebanon and its Palestinian camps, especially Ayn al-Hilweh. Dozens of men from that camp were martyred in Iraq. Among its most famous martyrs was Abu Jaafar al-Qiblawi. His poster hung above one of the main roads in that camp. Nabil was his friend and had smuggled him into Syria. Ismail took him on to Iraq. In the last film showing Zarqawi, Abu Jaafar was the one who handed a machine gun to him. He was killed with Zarqawi in June 2006. After his death a thirteen-minute video, filmed in August 2005 on the banks of a river, showed his last will. In the video he held a machine gun and addressed his parents, calling on his father to remain steadfast and his brothers to join the jihad. The mujahideen would be victorious, he said, in their fight against the greatest power in the world, America, which was the leader of nonbelief. America had to be destroyed, he said, and Muslim lands had to be liberated. He sang songs for his mother and to his beloved. One of Abu Jaafar"s brothers was killed in the Nahr al-Barid battle in 2007, and another was arrested in 2008 by the Lebanese army while attempting to smuggle a Saudi fighter out of Ayn al-Hilweh.
When Nabil and the men in his network were arrested (they were found with fifty kilograms of TNT and five kilograms of C4), they were tortured by members of the Interior Ministry"s Information Branch. During the interrogations Nabil was. .h.i.t in the back of his head with a club; his legs were bruised for months after the beatings. Nabil was accused of being the number-two man in the group. Ismail was tortured to death, and his funeral in Majd al-Anjar was an occasion for ma.s.sive demonstrations. With Ismail"s death, Nabil lost his connections to Iraq and no longer smuggled on behalf of the jihad. Nabil bragged about those days. "We are Al Qaeda," he told me. "We had connections to Abu Shahid." Nabil knew seven or eight men who had returned home to Majd al-Anjar from Iraq, and he knew there were others. In town I met a middle-aged Iraqi Baathist who, I was told, had been in the resistance, though he refused to discuss his past except to say he had served the state. "I"m wanted in Syria for terrorism," he told me, adding that he was also wanted in Lebanon for opening fire in a fight. Sheikh Dai al-Islam al-Shahal from Tripoli visited Nabil after his release from prison. "Dai al-Islam is a friend of mine," he told me. "He knows the truth, but he won"t speak all of it." It was clear Nabil didn"t think highly of him, and he made a contemptuous face.
Back at the roadblock Nabil and others set up in Masnaa, a convoy of expensive cars drove up, and Sheikh Muhamad Abdel Rahman, head of the Sunni religious endowment in the Beqaa, emerged. Hundreds of men surrounded him as he gave a speech with a loudspeaker. An establishment figure, he came, like others, to try to influence the men. The Sunni elite feared young men like Nabil, whom they could not control. Representatives from the Future Movement had asked them to open the roadblocks, Nabil said, as had the munic.i.p.ality. Although locals voted for the Future out of Sunni solidarity, they did not belong to the party-which had opposed the initiative taken by local youths to close the road.
Sheikh Muhamad addressed them directly. "You represent Majd al-Anjar," he said. "The decision to open the road is yours. It"s impossible to open the road without your agreement. The decision must protect the interest of the town and the people of the town and the shabab of the town." He warned that there were some infiltrators among them. "You are not here for stealing. If there are people among you stopping and stealing, it"s harming your dignity." The issue was protecting Sunnis" dignity and autonomy, he said; they would open the road if it was in the interests of the sect. "The Islamic Sunni resistance begins today," he said. "We work for Lebanon, and they work for Iran." Young men shot into the air as he spoke.
"The sheikh, the munic.i.p.ality, the Future Current, the world came to open the border," one of the young men said triumphantly, "but the shabab of Majd al-Anjar who closed the border refused to open it."
The following Friday I visited the Abdel Rahman Auf Mosque in Majd al-Anjar, also known as the Wahhabi Mosque. Nabil met us at the entrance to town and guided us to the mosque, handing us over to a chubby bearded friend before going home. Expensive cars were squeezed in around the mosque, which was full of young men and boys. It had two floors, with a screen on the second floor so people could watch the imam give his sermon. Sheikh Adnan al-Umama, a local, spoke of Hizballah"s "barbaric raid" on Beirut and condemned Iran. In Iraq the mujahideen were called terrorists, he said, while Hizballah"s Shiite brothers in Iraq helped the Americans.
The battle was one of creeds, he said, meaning between Sunnis and Shiites. "These people who came against us are secular and infidels. If they were honest about what they say, then we have to be ready to fight them. We saw them invading Beirut with hearts full of hate and accusing us of the murder of Hussein. If they have a problem with the government like they claim, why did they attack civilians and humiliate our women and our Muslim homes in Beirut?" Hizballah "terrorized us in our cities. Their friends in Iraq are friends with the Americans. We are the real people of the resistance. Sunnis are the real resistance." The battle against Israel was a Sunni battle as well, he said. "I"m not agitating for a sectarian conflict. But, on the other hand, we won"t stand still if they try to humiliate or insult our homes and our women." The Lebanese army would fall apart soon because of the sectarian division inside it, he said. It was time for Sunnis to stop being afraid of Shiites to start rising up. "Until the government is able to defend us, we insist on carrying our guns," he said. "And we will resist [the Shiites] with our women and children and all the power we have. I praise our heroes who blocked the road. Yes, they did the right thing. We are the pure, n.o.ble Muslims, and we are merciful, and we won"t stay silent about the attack on the people and our women in our cities."
As I listened to the sermon with a friend, a man turned to question us suspiciously, but Nabil"s friend explained that we were with him. Then suddenly a thick older man with a long gray beard took my friend"s notebook from his hands and demanded mine as well. After the prayer ended he interrogated us as others surrounded us. He tried to read the notes and ordered Nabil"s friend to make copies of our ident.i.ty cards.
I later went to meet Sheikh Adnan at his home. Landscape paintings and gaudy European art decorated his guest room. Given the tone of his sermon, he was younger, quicker to smile, and more jovial than I had expected. He began by apologizing for the men who had interrogated us at his mosque. He normally preferred not to give political sermons, he told me, focusing instead on religion, because politics was always changing.
Majd al-Anjar, with its twenty thousand residents, was unique, he said, because it was close to the border, was populated only by Sunnis, had a large number of graduates in Islamic studies educated all over the Arab world, and had no secular political parties. Sheikh Adnan was not optimistic. "Outside powers determine events here," he told me. Shiites were doing the same thing in Lebanon that they were doing in Iraq, but Iraqi Sunnis were stronger because they had weapons from the former regime at their disposal and a better geographical location. Bin Laden and Zawahiri were wrong when they called for Al Qaeda to operate in Lebanon, because they did not know the nature of the country, he said. It was too divided and mixed, and Al Qaeda could never establish a stronghold.
He did not want fitna in the Muslim community, he said; he wanted to fix the problems of arms in Lebanon and the dangers they posed for Sunnis. After seeing what happened in Beirut, Sunnis understandably wanted to arm themselves too. The Future Movement had no creed, he said. Its people worked only for money, unlike Hizballah. Sunnis were looking for a leader to represent them, but the Mufti Qabbani was too close to the Saudis and the Future Movement, and he was weak, having done nothing in response to the events in Beirut. There was an opening now for Islamist movements, but the experience of Nahr al-Barid had made Islamists wary of organizing. He wondered why the Americans had abandoned the Siniora government and asked me if I had any insight.
We drove to Nabil"s house. He lived with relatives on the second floor of a compound. Nabil"s guest room was a shrine to jihad. He had a large collection of ammunition sh.e.l.ls and grenades on display in his cupboard. Upon entering his house, guests were greeted by framed pictures of the 9/11 attacks-the Twin Towers aflame and a smoldering Pentagon. "We are not in line with Sheikh Adnan," Nabil told me. "He is moderate, as they say." Instead Nabil and his friends took fatwas from scholars a.s.sociated with Al Qaeda. Nabil asked his little boy what he wanted to be when he grew up. "A mujahid!" his son grinned. A tall man wearing jeans and a T-shirt that were too tight (in true Lebanese style) burst in the room. His name was Hossam, and he was one of the organizers of the roadblock. Seeing the pistol on his belt, I asked if he was a cop. "No, I"m a mujahid," he said. He explained that closing the road was a spontaneous decision taken by the shabab. "Our conscience and our honor made us close it," he said. "I smoke hashish, I"m not religious. It was something from the inside."
I visited often in the spring and summer of 2008. Nabil always had his 9-millimeter Glock pistol in his hand, on his lap, or on the table beside him. Like many Glocks I had seen in Lebanon, it had been smuggled in from Iraq, an American gift to mostly Shiite Iraqi Security Forces now in the hands of radical Sunnis in Lebanon. Once, as I sat in Nabil"s guest room, he received a phone call. He grabbed his pistol and ran out. Three unknown cars with tinted windows had entered the town. He called Hossam. "Three cars came in," Nabil said. "They might be military. Park your car and I"ll send someone to pick you up. . . . They"re raiding your house. . . . Don"t worry about me. I"ll start shooting if they get close to my house." Nabil took out a walkie-talkie and contacted other men in their network. Hossam, sweating and out of breath, walked in with a thuggish-looking friend. Hossam wielded a new AK-47 equipped with a scope and flashlight as well as a drum magazine to hold far more ammunition. He wore an ammunition vest laden with extra ammunition and several American hand grenades that he said cost fifty dollars apiece. His friend carried a PKM, a belt-fed machine gun. "If Saddam Hussein was alive he would help us with ammunition," Hossam said. "That"s why they killed him."
Hossam"s father had killed a man, and the two families were feuding, which was why he always carried a pistol. But in the battle against Shiites the two families were together, he said. "I never carried a rifle before," he said, "but since the Shiites attacked I started carrying one." Hossam had taken part in sectarian clashes between Sunnis from the nearby town of Saad Nayel and the Shiites of Talabaya. A few days earlier Sunnis and Shiites had fought each other in the nearby town of Sawiri as well. Hossam claimed he had forced Shiite officials at the Masnaa border crossing to stop working there. This was why security officers were paying a visit to the town. "We and the state are opposed," said the thuggish man.
"Before May 8 I used to love life," said Hossam. "I would never sleep. I was into women, drugs, alcohol-I was living life to the fullest. Something happened in my heart I can"t explain to anybody. Since May 8 I am a different person. I started praying five times a day, feeling more confident when I"m fighting." Now he fantasized about becoming a suicide bomber. "I should be doing martyrdom operations too," he told me, his eyes darting to Nabil, looking for approval. "I would like to blow myself up during Nasrallah"s speech when there is a large group of people." He got so much pleasure from shooting, he said, and he surmised that if he went on a martyrdom operation his soul would feel even better. Nabil expected suicide operations like those in Iraq to occur in Lebanon, targeting Shiites. "I won"t be surprised if it happened," he said.
Nabil didn"t seem to have a job, but I soon realized he had a lucrative underground business selling weapons. I asked him why he always carried a pistol with him. He quoted a hadith about how one must always be armed. I asked if he was not worried about the authorities. "The army is not allowed in here," Nabil said. I asked who didn"t allow them. "We don"t allow them," he said. "None of them will survive. Do they want another Nahr al-Barid?" Likewise the police were not allowed to come into town, he said: "If they do, the whole town will fight." I was reminded of the accusations that Hizballah was a state within a state. Outside Beirut there was little sign of any state willing or able to a.s.sert itself, and unlike Shiites, the Sunnis of Lebanon had no comparable social movement to fill the vacuum.
As we drove through the narrow alley leading to Nabil"s house, a man asked him to sell him two thousand rounds of ammunition. "Come to my house," Nabil said. One day when I visited Nabil I found his living room converted into an armory. He had an RPG launcher, many boxes of ammunition, and eight rifles, including AK-47s, a PKM, and a Degtyaryov machine gun. In a box that originally contained a Syrian dress, Nabil had stuffed an a.s.sortment of grenades. He took some out to play with, to my displeasure, and showed me how to take them apart.
Nabil introduced me to Marwan Ya.s.sin, or Abu Hudheifa, a gentle, friendly man he called his sheikh and emir. Abu Hudheifa was not formally educated in Islam, but he studied Sharia at home and memorized the Koran at the late age of twenty-five. He had six children. He had just been released from prison after serving ten months. I asked him if he had been tortured. "Not this time," he said with a smile. In 2004 the Syrians arrested him trying to enter Iraq. He spent eight months in a Syrian prison before he was transferred to a Lebanese prison, where he served three more months. He was tortured in both countries.
Majd al-Anjar was special, he said, because it had a lot of religious people of the same color, meaning Sunni. "We have a lot of people who went to Iraq and were killed there, so we have people who love jihad," he said. "Iraq is under direct American occupation. Here, it"s an indirect Iranian occupation." Sunnis in Lebanon were in a weak position, he said.
One night in June Nabil called around midnight to tell me he had just received word that two local boys, Abdallah Abdel Khalaq and Firas Yamin, had blown themselves up in Iraq on two consecutive days. Twenty-year-old Abdallah, whose nickname was Abu Obeida, called his family the night before to say goodbye and explain that the next day he would either park the car and detonate it or, if there was too much security, detonate it while driving. At noon the next day he blew himself up while driving in a crowded Baghdad street. Two hours later his companions called his parents to let them know the happy news about their son"s martyrdom. The family was religious and proud of him, and distributed candy. Firas, who was called Abu Omar, had gone to Iraq with Abdallah without telling anybody in town. Nabil had a film of them both with a Kuwaiti fighter who had been to Afghanistan. "If I had a chance I would go," Nabil said.
Nabil took me to meet a group of friends in an office. They were drinking tea. Several had long hair and long beards. One had the physique of a bodybuilder. I asked them what they expected to happen. "Very bad things," said one. Nabil spoke of prophecies in the Koran about a final battle occurring in Sham, or Greater Syria. The American invasion of Iraq was one sign of it. I had heard many jihadi Salafis in the region predict this imminent final battle, one that would be fought with swords. An older man in traditional Arab dress was the father of a young man who had been martyred in Rawa. As I chatted with the men, Nabil played absentmindedly with the pistol on his lap.
One morning one of Nabil"s friends drove me around town. He spoke on his cellphone to a woman. "We are ready," he told her. "We didn"t sleep since last night." The night before, Nabil said, the Lebanese army had arrested the father of one of the guys in their group in Masnaa. There were regular clashes with local Shiites, whom the men called Hizballah, probably inaccurately. "Last night we went down to Marj," Nabil"s friend said, "patrolling with our cars with tinted windows, driving back and forth in the main streets of Majd al-Anjar and Marj. We had guns, we were ready."
Nabil introduced me to a friend they called Dr. Saadi because he had a PhD in history from the University of Damascus. Only in his thirties, Saadi had a guest room well stocked with books on Islam. He"d been imprisoned for alleged involvement in the 2000 "millennium plot" to blow up the American Emba.s.sy in Jordan. After his release, he traveled to Falluja at the height of the jihad in 2004 and met Omar Hadid, a famed fighter in that town.
There was no Sunni party in Lebanon with a creed, Saadi complained, only those who fought for money. The Future Movement had become mercenaries without belief, he said. They controlled Lebanon"s Sunnis but obeyed the Americans, and Salafis were marginalized. But one day soon only the Salafi ideology would survive, and they would raise the Sunni flag in Lebanon. The May event had given a fillip to extreme movements in Lebanon such as Al Qaeda. The country"s unique diversity had moderated Saadi"s extremism, like it had for all of the Salafis I met in Lebanon. The variety of sects living in Lebanon meant that no single group could dominate the others, he said.
As we spoke, AK-47 shots suddenly erupted not far away. All the men burst out laughing, especially when they saw me flinch. A friend had just been released from prison and he was shooting into the air. "Army intelligence captured him," Nabil explained, "and we threatened to block the roads. Now he is shooting into the air in celebration for himself."
Like many Salafis I had met, Saadi was envious of Hizballah for confronting Israel but at the same time dismissive because Hizballah limited its activity to liberating Lebanese territory. "Hizballah protects the Jewish border with orders from the Syrian regime," he said. Moreover, by respecting UN resolutions, Hizballah proved that it had no genuine commitment to liberating Palestine. Hizballah had proved it had no principles, he said, by forming an alliance with a Christian party, the Free Patriotic Movement. The goal of Hizballah"s "takeover" of Beirut was to weaken Sunnis in the Arab world, he said. The group was acting like the Mahdi Army in Iraq, proving it was only a Shiite militia. "Sunnis around the world are mad after what happened in Beirut," he said. "The result will be a thousand Zarqawis coming after Hizballah." Nabil was a great admirer of Zarqawi. "Behind the sword was a merciful heart," he said, "an eye that cried for the whole Islamic nation. There will be thousands of Zarqawis now."
I went with my friend to see Khaled Dhaher at his mountain redoubt in Bibnine. When we arrived in town we called Dhaher, who told us to give a few thousand liras to any taxi driver and ask him to lead us to his house. "Everybody knows where it is," he said. A taxi driver agreed, and suddenly a man in civilian clothes approached the driver"s window, asking who we were and why we had weapons. We said we didn"t have any. He called Dhaher to see if we were authorized. Then he flashed his wallet open and told us he was an undercover officer for the Interior Ministry, but there was no government ID card in it.
Four fit young men slinging AK-47s stood outside Dhaher"s house, which was also a school. Inside there were three older men in a courtyard who were also armed. Dhaher was making and receiving phone calls when he arrived. "Tell them to stay away, and let"s wait until the dialogue is over because we might have to do to them what we did in Halba," he told somebody, referring to the negotiations in Doha, Qatar, to resolve the crisis and threatening another ma.s.sacre. "Let"s tell the brothers to gather and we can visit Mufti Rifai. At this point there is no turning back," he said in another phone call. Then he called a lieutenant named Arabi and thanked him for his cooperation. Finally he spoke to an a.s.sociate. "Stay in your position even if there is shooting at you," he said. "Keep your eyes wide open. Never retreat, never surrender. An attack might happen tonight." Dhaher"s brother was also there; he had come to ask about obtaining a gun license for somebody. "Who needs a license?" Dhaher asked. "Send some bodyguards to my center. There is no need to carry a license these days."
Dhaher was a short, chubby man with dark skin and a beard. He was a spokesman for the Independent Islamic Gathering, which had been established in December 2006. Now the Gathering had a presence on the ground, he said. "In Akkar we have twenty thousand retired soldiers from the Lebanese army ready to put their efforts and experience in order to protect the Sunni reservoir of Lebanon here in the north," he said. The recent fighting was a result of an Iranian, Safavid, Persian project, he told me, echoing a familiar litany. The Sunnis of Beirut were the people of bureaucrats, education, business, he said. They weren"t fighters like the people of the countryside. Now Sunnis were arming themselves in the north and the Beqaa and establishing a national Islamic resistance to create an equilibrium. "Now we are getting ready, we are arming ourselves so we can confront them and challenge them. Don"t forget that 60 percent of the army is Sunni. There are more then ten thousand trained and retired soldiers here, around us in Akkar. Sunni officers have resigned from the Lebanese army." He was getting calls from sheikhs, he told me, adding, "Now we are all fighters."
He explained that the Halba incident happened after the mufti of Akkar, Osama Rifai, called upon the Sunni street in the north to demonstrate against what had happened in Beirut. The Syrian Social Nationalist Party wanted to control Akkar, he said; they opened fire on the demonstration, killing two. The fighting wasn"t led by the Future Party, he told me; it was the citizens and sons of the area reacting to what happened in Beirut. "It"s only a simple reaction to what happened in Beirut. I personally protected the prisoners and gave them to the army," he said. "We won"t give our weapons to the state until they do, and we will add to them and buy more arms. It is forbidden for Hizballah to occupy Sunni Beirut."
Sunnis had lost their trust in the security forces, he told me, especially after seeing the Lebanese army side with Hizballah. "We will defend ourselves," he said. He had met with members of the Lebanese army who supported what they were doing and would join them to fight by their side when needed, he told me. Dhaher"s brother chimed in: "The Sunnis of Beirut were hit, but we will hit back one hundred times." Another brother added, "We don"t have a choice but to defend our honor." They were disappointed in Saad al-Hariri, who hadn"t supported the sect enough. Dhaher added that they were coordinating with Sunnis in the Beqaa and in Arsal.
I went to Arsal, a town bordering Syria that I had not heard of before talking to Dhaher. I saw more posters for Saddam Hussein on the walls than for Rafiq al-Hariri. "We all sacrifice ourselves for you, Saddam," read graffiti on the road approaching the town. Elsewhere I saw "We are all yours, glorious Saddam," "All the Muslim community is for Saddam," and "Saddam and 100 million Saddams." The town was sprawled across a valley, invisible at first beyond desolate hills. Its homes were unpainted, incomplete, with rebar sticking out. The land around it was arid and barren.
We stopped at a cellphone shop and asked a man there to guide us to the mukhtar. Arsal was surrounded by a sea of Shiites, he bragged, disparaging other Sunni towns for being "f.a.ggots." He got in his van, which had a Saddam sticker on it, and led us to the home of Basil al-Hujairi, the mayor. Hujairi was also a teacher who ran an Islamic school. His home overlooked the town from a hill. It was incomplete but ostentatious, with columns at the entrance. As we climbed the steps to the house, numerous calls to prayer echoed back and forth across the valley.
Hujairi had been mayor for four years. He was a supporter of the Muslim Brotherhood, he told me, but he admitted that in the recent fighting the Brotherhood had not had a strong stand. Only the Salafis had been strong. His town had forty thousand people, he told me, and they all had a strong Sunni ident.i.ty. It was a poor town that relied on farming and smuggling. The Syrian border, only twenty kilometers away, was not controlled. Before 2005 the townspeople had clashed with the Syrians.
The town had at least ten mosques. Another was being built in honor of Ismail Hujairi who was martyred in Iraq the day Baghdad fell. His brothers, who brought his body back, were paying for it. Others from the town had fought in Iraq and returned.
Only three officers in the army were from Arsal, though many townsmen were enlisted. There were no government services in town. Electricity was four hours on, four hours off. I was thus surprised to learn that townspeople from Arsal still identified enough with the state to go down to Beirut and demonstrate so often. They had gone to protest the Danish cartoons and to show support for Saad Hariri. Sometimes on the way to and from these demonstrations, townspeople would clash with Shiites in the neighboring villages.
Shiites want revenge for the death of Hussein, Hujairi told me. They believed they would go to paradise if they killed Sunnis, he said, but Sunnis would defend their dignity. "Life without dignity or death-people will choose death."
Although many Western journalists live in Beirut, and many others descend on it whenever there is a crisis, few venture outside Beirut. This is despite the fact that Lebanon is such a small country. So the neglected Sunni population and the anger of that community are relatively unknown. Likewise, most Lebanese don"t venture outside their areas, let alone into the areas of other sects or the slums and villages of the poor. In many of these towns, there is little electricity or other services, and people rely on remittances from relatives abroad for survival. Despite the presence of several Sunni billionaires in the country, there was no party equivalent to Hizballah that could provide social services to poor Sunnis.
Continuing my travels through the Beqaa, I visited the hillside town of Qaraun. Its houses were made of white stones with red roofs. In the town square I found a poster for Prime Minister Siniora and Rafiq and Saad al-Hariri. The town did not appear overtly religious, and I did not get the same hostile looks that I had received in Majd al-Anjar and Arsal. It had three mukhtars, and I met the most important, Nasr Dabaja, at the gas station he owned. His father had also been mukhtar and was famous for resisting the Israelis when they occupied the town in the mid-1980s. The town"s population was 8,500, he told me. A quarter were Christian, and the rest were Sunni Muslims. There were only two mosques in town, and only one was in regular use. The Future Movement had no local office.
Before we began talking, Dabaja asked us if we were Sunni. He eyed my friend from Beirut suspiciously and asked if he prayed five times a day. As we spoke a Shiite man walked into his office, and Dabaja told us to stop talking until the man left. Muslims in the town supported the Salafis, he told me.
During the Dinniyeh events of 2000, Lebanese intelligence arrested seven or eight men from Qaraun while three or four others absconded. They were accused of fighting the army. Five eighteen-year-old boys from the town had gone to fight in Iraq in 2003, he told me. He and his brother were excited to learn that I was going to Iraq. They asked me to inquire about the fate of the young mujahideen from their town.
All Sunnis felt threatened and were uniting, he said, whether with the Muslim Brotherhood or the Future Movement. The Brotherhood was gaining in popularity in town because Sunnis felt marginalized. When they asked the Future Movement for weapons, they were turned down, he complained. "The Islamists will protect the Sunnis," he said, and the Salafi movement would emerge stronger after these events. Dabaja"s brother agreed. "People are moving to extremism," he said. "Before they were supporting Future, which is moderate, but now we cry for Nahr al-Barid. We could have used those people." Dabaja agreed: "Last year we supported the army in Nahr al-Barid, but now we regret killing the extremists. People are thinking of weapons. We are threatened now. Are we going to sit with our hands tied?" Hizballah was afraid of the Salafis, they said. Dabaja liked Dai al-Islam al-Shahal, who was a "big thinker." He asked me for Shahal"s phone number. As mayor Dabaja used to be invited to Shiite villages, but now that sectarian feelings were hardening he was not visiting them anymore. Roads between Qaraun and nearby Shiite towns were blocked.
Heading out we picked up an old Bedouin man called Ha.s.san Fayad, who lived in the town of Shaabiyat al-Faur. Fifty men from the town had gone to fight in Beirut, but they had only been given sticks. There was a strong sense of Sunni solidarity now, he said, and they wanted weapons. "Shiites exposed that they are against Sunnis," he said. He cursed Hariri for betraying Sunnis" trust and humiliating them. "If Hariri wants to gain Sunnis back, he has to arm us. Without dignity there is nothing. We won"t accept to be humiliated."
I continued visiting Tariq al-Jadida in late May and early June. The Muslim Brotherhood had put up new posters, one of which said, "The people of Beirut will only turn their weapons on the Zionist enemy. Peace in Beirut is the red line." All local shops owned by Shiites were now closed, even those that had been in the neighborhood a long time. Sunni shop owners who had been friendly with their Shiite colleagues did not help them. The brother of one man from Tariq al-Jadida who had been killed in the fighting had come back after the funeral and shouted, "We don"t want Shiites here!"
"The shabab are upset," said Fadi, the local militiaman I had befriended. "Future brought us down to the street but could do nothing. Future is popular because there is no Sunni alternative." Fadi and his men had asked Secure Plus for weapons but were told they didn"t have any. It seemed as though the leadership had sold the weapons for profit. Provocations were occurring on a nightly basis. One night a car drove down Fadi"s street blasting Hizballah songs. Before that motorcycles drove through the area with flags for Amal and Hizballah. They caught one man, beat him up, and burned his motorcycle.
"We know who was on the street and who was at home," he said. Those who fought were told they would receive a hundred-dollar bonus. "This battle changed our thoughts. We returned to our religion, to our sect. I won"t die for the [Future Movement]. I will die for my home, my sect. I am a Sunni. Now there is no Sunni living who likes Shiites." But Fadi still drank and didn"t pray five times a day. Like many other Sunnis, he was proud of the Halba ma.s.sacre. "It"s our right to do what we did in Halba," he said. "They shouldn"t have been involved in the game."
I found it ironic that the neglected and often impoverished Sunnis of Lebanon identified so closely with the state and with the Sunni elite. I returned to visit Hossam Ilmir, the princ.i.p.al at Bab al-Tabbaneh Elementary School. I found Mustafa Zaabi sitting in Ilmir"s office. Ilmir had 1,082 children in his school this year. The yard was dirty and smelled of urine. He complained that his students had to drink dirty water. He had not changed his mind about supporting the resistance following the clashes, he told me, because the weapons of the resistance had been targeted and the government had tried to make it a sectarian issue.
Ilmir blamed poverty for the fighting between Tabbaneh and Jabal Mohsen. The youth of both neighborhoods were unemployed. The elite, he thought, wanted to keep them poor. Ilmir and Mustafa agreed that the origins of the conflict were not sectarian but economic-rich against poor, with the elite making it seem sectarian. The people of Tabbaneh were ignored by politicians because most of the neighborhood"s thirty-five thousand people were originally from Akkar and so did not vote in Tabbaneh. Only five thousand of them voted in Tabbaneh, so politicians had little to gain from helping them.
The people of Lebanon were still divided while their leaders drank coffee together, he said. "The more the leaders agitate the street, the more power they get. Some young kids don"t want calm. They hope it escalates. They can go to the leaders and get money from them. The leaders hire men from Tabbaneh to be their armed bodyguards." The ideologies of both sides were bankrupt, he told me. Politicians escalated sectarian tensions in order to reach their goals. Leadership was based on creating fear and tension. Without fear and tension, they wouldn"t be leaders.
Mustafa agreed that the communities were being led by elites. He remembered throwing rocks at Jabal Mohsen when he was seven years old. "The rivalry goes back before the ma.s.sacre," he said. "We Sunnis oppressed the Alawites," Ilmir admitted. "They were garbage collectors, then they got educated, and we couldn"t believe they changed." When he tried to arrange a reconciliation involving youth soccer, he was discouraged. "The police said it would end in stabbings."
For once the Palestinians had emerged unscathed, having wisely chosen to abstain from involvement. A local Hamas official told me that there had been a joint Palestinian decision to stay out of the fighting. Some Fatah men had been involved in the Tariq al-Jadida fighting, and others had shut the road from Saida to Beirut. Dai al-Islam al-Shahal asked Palestinians in the north to join him, but n.o.body responded. "Dai al-Islam is another kind of Salafi. We don"t trust him, and we don"t share his point of view," the official told me. "There is a general feeling that Sunnis in Lebanon were insulted in this battle," he said. Hizballah knew that if the conflict lasted any longer, it would spread in the region.
Some Sunnis were beginning to question their support for Saad al-Hariri. The Muslim Brotherhood had mediated between Hizballah and the Future Movement, so the Hamas official expected the Muslim Brotherhood would benefit from an increasingly influential role. Hizballah didn"t want bloodshed, the Hamas official told me, because every Sunni killed was a danger to the group. "Hizballah was very smart to end it in a short time."
Fatah al-Islam had spread outside the camps and might seek a role as the defender of Sunnis, he told me, even though Shaker al-Absi, who was still alive, had not sought a fight with Shiites. "The atmosphere is very welcoming for these groups," he said. "Sunnis felt that they were caught without their underwear on." Now some Sunnis asked why they had supported the war on Fatah al-Islam, because they could have used them in the recent battles.
In Bedawi Palestinian officials told me that the Palestinian leadership in Beirut took a united stand and decided not to take sides. The pro-Syrian and pro-Fatah groups worked together, coordinating and refusing to get involved. Hizballah also met with Palestinian leaders and urged them not to partic.i.p.ate. The Bedawi officials told me that Salafi clerics and leaflets had recently appeared in the camp, using the language of Iraq (such as referring to Shiites as rafidha), and Lebanese Salafi groups were active in the camps again. Representatives of Khaled Dhaher and Mufti Rifai were encouraging people to fight the Alawites of Jabal Mohsen. Shahal was openly calling for this, too, asking for Palestinians to fight Hizballah. There were rumors that Fatah al-Islam men were fighting the Alawites at his behest. Shahal and his fighters had allied with Dhaher and the Future Movement.
The officials believed Absi was alive and living in the Beqaa. One of the Palestinian intelligence officials had known him. Absi had come to Lebanon without Syrian backing, he told me. He had not wanted to fight Shiites, only the UN peacekeepers and Israel. But Abu Hureira, the Lebanese Fatah al-Islam member from Akkar, had wanted to take up the fight. The intelligence official had been in Nahr al-Barid when Abu Hureira attacked the Lebanese soldiers. Absi hadn"t known about it in advance and had emerged from his house astonished. Before the attack Abu Hureira had called Sheikh Bilal Barudi in Tripoli and told him that if his men from the bank robbery were not released, then they would attack. Fatah al-Islam had been more than one group. During the Nahr al-Barid fighting Mufti Osama Rifai issued a fatwa allowing for Palestinians to be killed and for their belongings to be looted. There was a backlash following the fighting with Fatah al-Islam. Many of the older sheikhs in the camp were resented and replaced by young ones. The Lebanese army still manned checkpoints around Nahr al-Barid and was still humiliating people.
Entry into Ayn al-Hilweh was harder than ever, but I managed to get the army"s permission to meet Abu Ahmad Fadhil, the Hamas leader in the camp. The various Palestinian factions had formed an emergency committee headed by Kamal Midhat of Fatah. "There was a Palestinian consensus against interference," he told me. "Even Usbat al-Ansar is in it. We as Palestinians won"t get involved in internal Lebanese affairs, we told the opposition and the government."
Fadhil worried that Al Qaeda in Iraq was sending fighters to Lebanon. "These guys, their situation in Iraq is difficult, and they can"t live in Syria either." As a result, some of them were coming to the camp and to the Beqaa, especially Majd al-Anjar. Both sides had an interest in getting the Palestinians involved in the fighting, Fadhil said, and attempts to draw them in had been especially forceful in Beirut"s Shatila camp. But Palestinians had rejected Fatah al-Islam, and even the most extreme groups like Jund al-Sham and Usbat al-Ansar did not have an anti-Shiite reaction following the May 8 clashes. Ayn al-Hilweh was different from Nahr al-Barid. Nahr al-Barid was far from Tripoli, while Ayn al-Hilweh was part of Saida. In Nahr al-Barid, the Palestinian factions were weak and could not stand up to Fatah al-Islam, but in Ayn al-Hilweh, Palestinians "are very strong and have the ability to prevent groups like Fatah al-Islam from appearing."
I went to see Abu Gha.s.san in the camp, with whom I had spent so much time in 2007. The last camp member to go fight in Iraq had left four or five months earlier. Now the border between Lebanon and Syria was hard to cross, and the Syrian Iraqi border was even harder. "We had nothing to do with the Beirut battles," he told me. "Neither side likes us; they would all have blamed us. Hizballah sent people here and said, "These guys killed you last year in Nahr al-Barid, fight with us." Future said, "These guys killed you in the war of the camps, join us.""
Attacks on Sunni mosques were evidence of sectarian hatred on both sides, he told me, but he regretted this. "We have doctrinal differences with them, but we have an enemy, Israel. I am speaking as a Muslim: if sectarian war happens here, like in Iraq, then Palestinians would get involved. In the end, we are Sunnis."
I asked him which jihadist ideologues were most influential in the camp. He named Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi, a Saudi called Sheikh Khalid Rashid, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, but "Sheikh Osama" bin Laden was the most important, "because he renewed jihad in our century." Although many "terrorism experts" in the West were excited that several prominent jihad ideologues had recanted, Abu Gha.s.san confirmed my view that most people knew they had been forced to change their mind.
He had sold his Glock pistol recently. Weapons prices in the camp were related to the prices in Syria and Iraq, he told me. He now had a CZ75 pistol, which cost $1,500. As we spoke, we heard shots fired outside. He told his son to come in the house.
Back in Tripoli, Musbah al-Ahdab publicly stated that if Hizballah had a right to fight, then so too did Salafis. If the army could not protect Lebanese citizens, then he could not ask Salafis to disarm. If Hizballah did not lay its arms down, the whole north would become Salafis, he warned. "The only solution is to put Hizballah"s arms on the table and find a solution; otherwise, the whole north will become Salafists, and I can only sympathize with them," he concluded.
In early July 2008 I returned to the Salam Mosque in Tripoli to hear Bilal Barudi speak. People sat smoking a nargila at a nearby cafe. I sat at one of the tables as Barudi"s sermon blasted throughout the area. Sunnis were in danger, he warned; they wanted tawtin, the granting of citizenship to the Palestinians. "We are in a rage now and we should take advantage of that rage," he said. "We have to keep our sect together. Why are they afraid of tawtin? Because Palestinians are Sunnis. . . . There is a conspiracy against us Sunnis." Why, he asked, did Armenians in Lebanon have citizenship when their homeland was stable but the Palestinians, who had nothing, were denied it?
I interviewed Barudi in his office. He was born a sheikh, he told me, explaining that his family had provided sheikhs for seven hundred years. Barudi had met Shaker al-Absi when Absi first arrived. "He started attracting young men with a call to defend Sunnis," he told me. "I told him you are all going to get killed." Barudi claimed he had gone to Beirut to meet Ha.s.san Nasrallah and other Shiite officials after the 2006 Samarra shrine attack, but he said that Nasrallah had been very aggressive with him. He also claimed that Iran and Hizballah operatives blew up the shrine, and stressed that two hundred Sunni mosques in Iraq were destroyed on the same day.
"There is no alternative to Hariri," he told me. "Hizballah is trying to control us and remove us from the Lebanese equation, but we asked the mufti and Saad al-Hariri to arm the guys on the street, and we know that the guys on the street are capable and ready to fight. There is no solution but the armed solution. This period of time will be dangerous. There is a chance for Al Qaeda to appear in Lebanon. We expect suicide bombers in Lebanon soon." Barudi described the Islamic Gathering as "a national Islamic resistance against the Iranian plan in Lebanon," warning that the Shiites would make him don an imama, as a Shiite clerical turban is known.
I asked Nawaf al-Musawi of Hizballah if he expected Al Qaeda to establish itself in Lebanon. "Saad won"t stay in Lebanon if this happens," he said. "They will pay the price for this. The Al Qaeda agenda has other priorities. Musbah al-Ahdab will be the first victim."
Musawi was feeling triumphant. "We are always thinking about how a threat can become an opportunity," he told me. "The situation in Lebanon is different than Iraq. The Future Movement doesn"t have a future without an agreement with us. Experience shows that facing us is a losing battle for them. If they threaten us with Salafis, they are committing suicide. Dai al-Islam works for the Saudis, but his environment is an incubator for killer takfiris. We avoid any form of sectarian conflict."
Future had a plan to control Beirut, Musawi explained. It was a good plan, he admitted: Future wanted to seize neighborhoods, isolate Dahiyeh from Beirut, surround Shiite neighborhoods, and close the roads around Dahiyeh and the Beqaa. The Future plan was not to occupy opposition areas but to besiege them and have an extended period of street fighting so that the government would tell the UN that Hizballah was an outlaw group. Then there would be an excuse to invite international forces into Lebanon and press the issue of Hizballah"s arms. "We had a quick operation, and we caused this plan to fail," Musawi said. "As an organization we had good intelligence." He explained that Hizballah had the centers of power in Beirut surrounded. "We had the head. The Saudis lost on the battlefield."
Hizballah and its allies did not seek to change the government by force, nor did it seize control of government officers. Its demand was merely the revocation of the government"s two decisions targeting the resistance. On May 13 the government finally relented. Following the clashes in Beirut, a delegation from the Arab League managed to establish a truce. Roadblocks were removed, the country was reopened, and militias removed their weapons from the streets. Then the parties to the conflict were flown to Qatar, where the national dialogue resumed to resolve the crisis. For the Saudis it was a double humiliation: not only had their proxies been defeated in Lebanon but they had lost their lead diplomatic role to their rival Qatar.
March 14 proved itself utterly dependent on the Bush administration and the neoconservatives, widely perceived as closer to Israel and more anti-Arab than any other American regime. But Hizballah also suffered a blow to its credibility because it had violated its longstanding commitment never to use its weapons internally. In this sense American and Saudi proxies scored a victory by portraying Hizballah as merely one more sectarian militia in Lebanon, and no longer the national resistance.
"Backed by Syria and Iran, Hizballah and its allies are killing and injuring innocent citizens and undermining the legitimate authority of the Lebanese government and the inst.i.tutions of the Lebanese state," said Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. "Seeking to protect their state within a state, Hizballah has exploited its allies and demonstrated its contempt for its fellow Lebanese."
The May incidents demonstrated the futility of Future adopting any kind of armed program. Hizballah"s brief takeover of Beirut demonstrated how little the Saudis, Americans, and French were willing to do for their local proxies in Lebanon, and in Doha March 14 was forced to conform to most of the opposition"s stipulation.
Sectarian Hatred Spreads Across the Region.
In Palestine the Americans had pushed Fatah and Hamas to the point of civil war, and then in Lebanon they had also managed to push political tension to armed conflict. In both cases the goal was to discredit overwhelming popular movements, subverting democracy and ignoring the popular will. In Lebanon the Bush administration pressured the ruling coalition not to compromise with the opposition. In December 2009 Nasrallah condemned Arab states-not for being silent, he said, but for their partnership with Israel in the murder of Palestinians. He called on the Egyptian people and army to protest and pressure the Egyptian dictatorship to open the siege on Gaza. It was the first time Hizballah had ever singled out an Arab state. Even during Israel"s 2006 war on Lebanon, the movement had not gone this far. The next month Nasrallah stated that although Hizballah had not made enemies of Arab states that supported Israel in the 2006 war it would make enemies of those that collaborated against Gaza and the Palestinians. If the Egyptians opened the border, he said, then food, medicine, and even weapons could reach Gaza-and the victory of the resistance in Lebanon could be repeated.
Sunni Islamists resent Hizballah for monopolizing the struggle with Israel and denying them access to fight the Zionists. The American invasion of Iraq gave them a worthy enemy for the first time since the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. It must have been galling to Al Qaeda leaders to see Hizballah regularly praised on Arabic satellite networks while it was condemned, to see that Nasrallah was the most beloved individual in the Arab world while bin Laden and Zawahiri were reviled or ignored. In September 2008 one of the Muslim world"s most prominent Islamic scholars, Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who had condemned Al Qaeda in the past, denounced Shiites as heretics and warned that they were trying to penetrate the Sunni world.
In 2006 a poll of majority-Sunni Egypt revealed that Nasrallah, Iranian leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and Hamas leader Khalid Meshal were the three most popular figures in the country. But following the execution of Saddam there was a backlash against Shiites. Some Fatah supporters took to labeling Hamas as Shiites because it received help from Iran. Iranian nuclear intransigence has led the Americans to seek an alliance with Sunni Arab dictatorships. The Americans and Israelis campaigned to convince regional governments that Iran was their real enemy. The notion of "moderate Sunni" states was propounded by the Americans, but the people of these states hated their regimes.
Throughout the region the Iraq War reinvigorated pre-existing sectarianism and provided a new framework for reviving sectarian politics. Since the mid-1970s Kuwait had been the most important center of Shiite radicalism and organization in the Gulf, with movements there reaching out to Shiites in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia. Kuwait had historic tensions between Shiites and Sunnis, which occasionally flared. Sunnis would gang up on Shiite candidates in parliamentary elections to sabotage their electoral chances. The social contract in which the ruler protected Kuwait"s Shiites from persecution collapsed after the Iran-Iraq War, but after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait it was restored because of the exaggerated role of Shiites resisting the Iraqi occupation. Some said that Shiites hadn"t fled from Kuwait like others because the Saudis wouldn"t let them across the border. Following the American invasion of Iraq tensions increased, fomented by members of the royal family. Given regional fears of a Shiite revival, Kuwait was vulnerable to these machinations.
After the February 2008 a.s.sa.s.sination of legendary Hizballah commander Imad Mughniyeh, up to two thousand Kuwaiti Shiites marched in his honor, including two Parliament members. They were met with anger and political maneuvering because any expressions of sympathy for Hizballah, Iraqi Shiites, or Iran were seen as disloyal.
Like in Kuwait, sectarian tensions in Bahrain had been a regular feature of the political landscape since the 1980s. They were typically initiated by the government but there were also flare-ups initiated by Shiites, who are the majority. Following the American invasion of Iraq the ruling family in Bahrain, like that of Kuwait, was better able to play the sectarian card-warning of a powerful Iran, a Shiite-dominated Iraq, and a fifth column at home.
In July 2009 Egypt charged twenty-six men with spying for Hizballah and plotting to attack tourists. "Iran, and Iran"s followers, want Egypt to become a maid of honor for the crowned Iranian queen when she enters the Middle East," Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Abul Gheit declared. The next month Jordan put six of its citizens on trial for fomenting religious sectarianism and promoting Shiism. The Moroccan dictatorship severed its ties with Iran after accusing it of spreading Shiism in Morocco. Yemen accused Hizballah of training Zaydi rebels in the north. The Yemeni dictatorship was in the midst of two civil wars: one against southern secessionists and one against Zaydi tribesmen in the north. Zaydis, who ruled Yemen for centuries, are related to Shiites but are also very close in their beliefs to Yemen"s Sunnis. The Yemeni dictatorship had manipulated its sects, supporting Al Qaeda-like Salafis and veterans of the anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan when it suited it, and then supporting Zaydis to counterbalance the Salafis. Now it was invoking the phantom Iranian and Hizballah threat as well as an exaggerated Al Qaeda presence to bolster its weak status, with American and Saudi help. Hizballah did admit to supporting Hamas, but it denied getting involved in conflicts between regimes and their people.
The Shiite belief that succession to the Prophet Muhammad should run through his bloodline through his cousin and son-in-law Ali is viewed by the Saudi clergy and royal family as a threat to their power. Shiites in Saudi Arabia are considered subhuman, an official view that is promoted in state schools; they are not allowed to practice their religion in public. During Israel"s 2006 war on Lebanon, leading Saudi cleric Sheikh Abdallah bin Jabrin banned support for Hizballah. In December 2008 Saudi security forces fired rubber bullets at crowds of Shiites demonstrating in solidarity with the Palestinians of Gaza. In 2009 the imam of the Grand Mosque in Mecca attacked Shiite clerics, calling them heretics. Even ordinary Shiites had no excuse for the ignorance and error of their beliefs, he said.
In Lebanon nothing has been resolved; the crisis has been merely further postponed. The 2009 elections were a slight setback for Hizballah"s Christian allies, but Hizballah lost no popularity, and all its candidates were elected. Although Hizballah"s Christian allies, led by Aoun, received the most votes among Christians, they were defeated thanks to some clever gerrymandering, which allowed Sunni voters to tilt the balance in favor of March 14 in Christian districts. But when the time came to apportion ministries, the Aoun movement received five, while Hariri"s Christian allies received only three.
In June 2009 Saad Hariri was sworn in as prime minister. The Syrians supported his election. The Saudis, who had begun their rapprochement with Syria earlier that year, pushed Hariri to visit Damascus and reconcile with the man he accused of killing his father. Hariri was now head of a national unity government, with Hizballah as his partner. But although Lebanon"s elites were governing together and even playing football matches, their const.i.tuency had not reconciled and remained at odds with one another. Sunnis, in particular, were still feeling humiliated and resentful. After the elections Dai al-Islam, Future"s main Salafi ally, expressed disappointment with the disrespect and neglect they felt Hariri was showing them.
The country"s volatile sectarian structure remained, as did its underlying social and economic injustices. The sectarian leaders who profit from the system-which forces these injustices to be expressed in sectarian and xenophobic language-remained too. The Palestinians remained without rights or hope. Nahr al-Barid remained under siege. No Palestinians had returned to the original old camp, while up to twenty thousand returned to the new one. The camp was now run by Lebanese army intelligence, which still arrested people and accused them of Fatah al-Islam membership. Humiliations and hara.s.sment continued at the checkpoints. Lebanon"s Sunnis remained bitter, though the state did begin taking aggressive action against my friends in Majd al-Anjar. Meanwhile, people waited for the next war with Israel.
CHAPTER ELEVEN.
A Guest of the Taliban.
ZE TALIBANO MILMAYAM: I AM A GUEST OF THE TALIBAN-IMPORTANT words to remember in Afghanistan. One Sat.u.r.day afternoon in August 2008, two Taliban commanders met me in Kabul to take me to the Ghazni province, south of Afghanistan"s capital. The plan was to spend a week with various Taliban groups in areas they controlled. A well-connected Afghan friend I trusted had made the introductions. He knew many groups of fighters in Afghanistan, he said, but he would trust my security only with a group who knew that if anything happened to me, then they and their families would be killed. Contact had been made through a well-respected dignitary from Ghazni who connected us with Mullah Abdillah, a midlevel Taliban commander, who then contacted Mullah Baradar, the Taliban defense minister, and approved my trip.
Mullah Abdillah was a thin man with dark skin and a wispy beard that was long and tapered beneath his chin. He was quick to smile and looked like Bob Marley. He walked with a limp and was bandaged from a recent injury. He had come to Kabul to meet me a week earlier. I explained what I wanted to do. He promised to submit the request to his defense minister, but he was then called away on a mission to the north. I waited impatiently and nervously in my Kabul hotel to receive word about my trip, contemplating the many dangers and trying to ignore the admonitions of friends with more experience working in Afghanistan. Journalists had been able to access armed groups in the 1980s and "90s, but now it was more dangerous. Afghan journalists were killed by the Taliban or arrested by the government if they succeeded in meeting the Taliban. In 2007 an Italian journalist was arrested by the Taliban; he was released at a price, but his driver and fixer were both murdered. In 2008 a British filmmaker, Sean Langan, was held for three months with his fixer, but both were eventually released. David Rohde of the New York Times also spent seven months in the company of the Taliban. Lack of access meant that very little was known or understood about the Taliban, one of the most important groups resisting the U.S. occupation.