Battles spill into north of Lebanon
Pro- and anti-government forces engaged in heavy combat in Tripoli, the No. 2 city.
BEIRUT, Lebanon - Fighting between pro- and anti-government factions jumped to northern Lebanon yesterday, but a grim calm hung over the nearly empty streets of Beirut - a capital crippled by roadblocks, suspicion and fear.
As black-clad Shiite extremists of Hezbollah carried their latest dead to burial, so did the families and friends of civilians caught in the middle of combat that has routed Sunni factions supporting the Western-allied government from Muslim western Beirut.
More than 50 people were confirmed dead since fighting erupted Wednesday - first in Beirut, then in the mountains overlooking the city, and yesterday in the northern city of Tripoli. It is the worst sectarian violence to wrack Lebanon since a 15-year civil war ended in 1990.
That war killed 150,000 people and laid waste to many parts of Beirut, leaving the city divided into ethnic and religious districts deeply suspicious of one another, and the new fighting has torn open old wounds.
"They abandoned their cause against Israel and have come to kill us," Wadad Abdel Nasser Shamaa, a 27-year-old Sunni, said of Hezbollah's militiamen. Her brother, Mohammed, was killed Thursday night when Hezbollah and its allies swept through the predominantly Sunni neighborhood of Tarik Jadideh.
Their father, Abdel-Nasser Shamaa, 47, a vegetable vendor, said he once sympathized with Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah and even pasted a picture of the Shiite cleric to his bedroom mirror. He wants to know why his son was killed in what he called indiscriminate shooting by Hezbollah.
He said 22-year-old Mohammed was not a combatant. He said his son was visiting his parents when fighting erupted and he rushed off to get to his pregnant wife.
Heavy combat was reported in Tripoli, the country's second-biggest city. About 25 to 30 Sunni fighters with AK-47 assault rifles exchanged fire with Alawites in the neighboring Jabal Mohsen area. Alawites are members of a small offshoot of Shiite Islam.
The unrest exploded out of a 17-month struggle between the pro-U.S. government and the Hezbollah-led opposition over control of the government. The trigger was the cabinet's order a week ago that an airport security chief with links to Hezbollah be fired and that the Shiite movement's private telecommunications network be dismantled as a threat to the state.