Iran takes Beirut

British journalist reports on the week Iran took Beirut from U.S. backed Government in Lebanon.

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Robert Fisk: Gun battles as Hizbollah claims Lebanon is at war

The Independent - Friday, 9 May 2008

If you want to fight us, you'll have to fight us. This was Sayed Hassan Nasrallah's message to the Lebanese government yesterday and his words were followed within seconds by two massive gun battles in the streets of Beirut.

He had spoken in that careful, thought-through, distressing way in which he always threatens the Hizbollah's enemies. He even swapped the names of the Lebanese Prime Minister, Fouad Siniora, with that of the Druze leader Walid Jumblatt – calling Jumblatt the real prime minister and Siniora his deputy – and blamed both for trying to set up a CIA-Mossad base at Beirut airport. What other reason could there be, he asked, for the two men to demand the dismantlement of Hizbollah's communications system and the suspension of the head of airport security? This was "a Lebanese government declaration of war against the resistance". Well, maybe. But Nasrallah still wants the Hizbollah's enemies to be the Israelis – not his Lebanese opponents.

So what happened in the minutes after he spoke? At least one Shia Amal gunman started shooting at an office belonging to Sunni supporters of the government, some of whom may have been the youths apparently brought down from Tripoli for just such a battle. The Lebanese army was not fully engaged on the streets last night but its armoured vehicles were driving between the sectarian interfaces and apparently taking fire from both sides.

It was a dark and distressing speech by the secretary general of Hizbollah, which came less than 24 hours after the Grand Mufti, Mohammed Kabbani, furiously referred to the Hizbollah as "armed gangs of outlaws that have carried out the ugliest attacks against the citizens and their safety". Needless to say, neither Nasrallah nor Kabbani stated the obvious – that the first represents a large number of the Shia Muslim community and the second most of the Sunnis.

The sectarian background to this dangerous game is the point, of course. The street battles in Beirut are between Shia and Sunni, the first supporting the Iranian-armed Hizbollah, the second the Lebanese government, which now regularly carries the sobriquet "American-backed". In other words, the collapse of Beirut these past two days is part of the American-Iranian conflict – even though, be sure, the Americans will blame the Hizbollah for this and the Iranians will blame the Americans.

Yet still the language of Nasrallah – like that of Kabbani – was frightening, even though he had behind him the national flag of Lebanon with its green cedar tree as well as Hizbollah's own yellow banner. To call Jumblatt "a liar, a thief, a killer..." – though this view might be heartily reciprocated by Jumblatt himself – is language that puts Lebanese in danger of their lives.

Nasrallah's complaint that the suspension of Wafiq Chucair as head of airport security was part of an American-Israeli plot might sound a bit much, but his long and point-by-point insistence that Hizbollah should maintain its new communications links – including its cameras along the Beirut airport perimeter – was perhaps more reasoned, albeit that it helps allow his organisation to remain part of a state with the state. Wireless communications can easily be tapped, he said, and he added that new communications were the "most powerful tool" in Hizbollah's 2006 war against Israel.

Nasrallah intriguingly pointed out that Siniora's government had previously told the Hizbollah that it would allow the secure communications circuits to remain if the movement closed down its largely empty "tent city" in the centre of Beirut. Indeed, it has largely been in place for more than a year. Hizbollah had no argument with the Lebanese army – a view that might not be shared by General Michel Sulaiman, its commander, who stated yesterday that the situation is "threatening the army's impartiality".

All of which continues Lebanon's crisis. Beirut airport remained largely empty of aircraft yesterday – the Christian daily L'Orient Le Jour rightly suggested that it had been taken hostage by Hizbollah, who control all roads to the terminal – and there were brief gun battles between government and opposition supporters in the Bekaa Valley town of Saadnayel. Yet again, burning tyres were set up in areas demarcating Shia and Sunni districts, and the army closed the Corniche Mazraa highway, which divides west Beirut. By last night it was the scene of a gun battle. Kuwait urged its citizens to leave Lebanon – without being obliging enough to tell them exactly how to perform this task without an airport.


Robert Fisk: Hizbollah rules west Beirut in Iran's proxy war with U.S.

The Independent - Saturday, 10 May 2008

Another American humiliation. The Shia gunmen who drove past my apartment in west Beirut yesterday afternoon were hooting their horns, making V-signs, leaning out of the windows of SUVs with their rifles in the air, proving to the Muslims of the capital that the elected government of Lebanon has lost.

And it has. The national army still patrols the streets, but solely to prevent sectarian killings or massacres. Far from dismantling the pro-Iranian Hizbollah's secret telecommunications system – and disarming the Hizbollah itself – the cabinet of Fouad Siniora sits in the old Turkish serail in Beirut, denouncing violence with the same authority as the Iraqi government in Baghdad's green zone.

The Lebanese army watches the Hizbollah road-blocks. And does nothing. As a Tehran versus Washington conflict, Iran has won, at least for now. Walid Jumblatt, the Druze leader and MP and a pro-American supporter of Mr Siniora's government, is isolated in his home in west Beirut, but has not been harmed. The same applies to Saad Hariri, one of the most prominent government MPs and the son of the murdered former prime minister Rafik Hariri. He remains in his west Beirut palace in Koreitem, guarded by police and soldiers but unable to move without Hizbollah's approval. The symbolism is everything.

When Hamas became part of the Palestinian government, the West rejected it. So Hamas took over Gaza. When the Hizbollah became part of the Lebanese government, the Americans rejected it. Now Hizbollah has taken over west Beirut. The parallels are not exact, of course.

Hamas won a convincing electoral victory. Hizbollah was a minority in the Lebanese government; its withdrawal from cabinet seats with other Shias was occasioned by Mr Siniora's American-defined policies and by their own electoral inability to change these. The Lebanese don't want an Islamic republic any more than the Palestinians. But when Sayed Hassan Nasrallah, the Hizbollah chairman, told a press conference that this was a "new era" for Lebanon, he meant what he said.

Mr Hariri's Future Television offices were invested by the army after Hizbollah surrounded it on Thursday night, its staff evacuated and the station switched off. When I turned up there yesterday morning, I joined a queue for manouche – Lebanon's hot cheese breakfast sandwiches – at Eyman's bakery in Watwat Street. I patiently waited behind four black-hooded gunmen from Hizbollah's allied (but highly venal) Amal movement only to find uniformed Lebanese soldiers representing the government patiently queuing at the next window. Law and disorder, it seems, both have to eat.

But I found far more powerful symbolism in Hamra Street, one of west Beirut's two main commercial thoroughfares. More than 100 Hizbollah men were standing or patrolling the highway, clad in new camouflage fatigues, wearing new black flak jackets and new black, peaked, American-style baseball caps and – more to the point – what appeared to be equally new American sniper rifles..

No, this is not a revolution. No, this is not a "hijacking" of west Beirut or the airport, which remains cut off by burning tyres on roads guarded by Hizbollah militiamen. But the government's supporters deserve some space. Several pointed out that the Israelis closed Beirut airport in 2006. So what right did Hizbollah have to do the same to the Lebanese now? And, according to Saad Hariri, Mr Nasrallah – when he called Mr Jumblatt "a thief and a killer" – was "authorising his murder and clearly stating that, 'I am the state and the state is me'." No wonder, then, that Mr Jumblatt fears for his life and that Mr Hariri claims the Hizbollah's coup de folie is a form of fitna, the Arabic for chaos. "I invite you, Sayed Nasrallah, to take back your fighters from the streets and to lift the siege of Beirut to protect the unity of Muslims," he said. "Israel will be rejoicing at the blockade of the country and the collapse of its economy."

Marwan Hamade, Mr Siniora's Telecommunications Minister – and victim of an attempted assassination in 2004 – admitted he had turned a blind eye to Hizbollah's underground phone system but could no longer when he realised that Hizbollah now maintains 99,000 numbered lines.
Mr Nasrallah also insisted on the reinstallation of Brigadier General Wafiq Chucair as head of security at Beirut airport, since he was not a member of Hizbollah. General Chucair was suspended after Mr Jumblatt claimed he worked for Mr Nasrallah's outfit, a demand which prompted Mr Jumblatt to say he did not know General Chucair was so important to Mr Nasrallah that it was worth closing the international airport.

And so it goes on. There was an unusually good editorial in the French-language daily L'Orient Le Jour, which asked how the Hizbollah – literally "the party of God" in Arabic – could have war as its raison d'etre yet be a factor of stability and security in Lebanese domestic affairs. "And this party, can it really call itself the 'Party of God' without creating, in the long term, the distrust of all those other children who count themselves to be from the same unique and one God?"

No, this is not a civil war. Nor is it a coup d'etat, though it meets some of the criteria. It is part of the war against America in the Middle East. The Hizbollah "must stop sowing trouble," the White House said rather meekly. Yes, like the Taliban. And al-Qa'ida. And the Iraqi insurgents. And Hamas. And who else?

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Editorial:

A tool of foreign ambitions

The Independent - Tuesday, 13 May 2008

After more than 30 years of civil war, invasion and conflict, you might have thought that the poor people of Lebanon deserved a period of peace and reconstruction. It is apparently not to be. First came the Israeli invasion of 2006 and now comes the sudden falter of violence between Shia and pro-government forces over the weekend.

True the first flares appeared to have died down by yesterday, at least in Beirut. But there were ominous signs of the fighting spreading as Druze and Hizbollah engaged in running battles in the mountains north of Tripoli. And, while both sides seem to have accepted the imposition of the army, at least in the main parts, there are few who believe that this is anything other than a moments pause in a conflict for power which is very far from being resolved. Indeed there remain many who fear that the underlying quarrel for pre-eminence among the different religious groups cannot be resolved without an out-and-out conflict in which one side or the other emerges as victor.

It can only be hoped that this is not so, or rather it need not be. That the various factions are intent on pursuing their aims by whatever means possible should not be doubted. The Shia forces of Hizbollah, newly triumphant from their battles with the Israeli invaders, demand a greater say in government than the old constitution allows. The Christian and Druze-backed government insist that Hizbollah be disarmed before it can be integrated into civil society. And overhanging it all is the still unresolved issue of the assassination of Rafik Hariri and Syria's responsibility for it.

But then that is the problem of Lebanon, as so much of the Middle East. Its fate is to be the constant tool of the ambitions of others. Hizbollah has the backing of Iran, which sees its rise as a means of furthering its own interests in the region, and Syria, which views Hizbollah as a means of maintaining its influence in the Lebanon. The government has the support of the US together with Israel, which view the defeat of Hizbollah as a way of combating Iran's influence, and Saudi Arabia, which sees Lebanon as a front line in the fight between Shia and Sunni. Even the Arab League is tainted by the commitment of the Saudis and Egyptians to one side rather than the other.

Lebanon will never achieve peace until outsiders stop meddling in it for their own purposes and until the factions within the country achieve their own accommodation. If the latest outbreak serves to concentrate minds for fear of total civil war, it will have served a purpose. If it proves to be just a forerunner of violence ahead, then the Lebanese have indeed cause to despair.