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The Sunni Tragedy in the Middle East

Northern Lebanon from al-Qaeda to ISIS

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

North Lebanon in Bilad al-Sham

Before the Lebanese Civil War — Karami's Leadership in the North

The city of Tripoli began to decline in the mid-nineteenth century. In less than a hundred years, it had become the "always less" city — less economic activity due to the growth of the port of Beirut, less prestige with the loss of its status as an Ottoman provincial capital, and less regional influence following the creation of Greater Lebanon in 1920. With the French mandate, Tripoli experienced the same phenomenon as did Bilad al-Sham in general — a weakening of power through territorial amputation and a loss of influence. Its marginalization was complete when its hinterland was appended to Syria and its trade links with Lattaqiyyeh, Homs, Hama, and Aleppo severed. Isolated, its inhabitants' self-perception was that of a Sunni minority outpost in the Lebanese state. At a time when the Sunni elite of Beirut foresaw the pragmatic benefits they could gain from the new state, the notables of Tripoli sought to regain their majority status in the political framework of Greater Syria. to this end, they would have to recreate the space known as Bilad al-Sham.

The son of a large family of Muslim legal scholars ('ulama'), Abd al-Hamid Karami was the very embodiment of a rebel figure during the mandate. In 1912, at the age of twenty-four, he became a mufti, and in 1918 Faisal's short-lived Arab government appointed him governor of Tripoli. rejecting the idea of a Lebanese state separate from the rest of Syria, he became one of the champions of the Arab union with Syria. His unionist stance helped turn the city into a bastion of Arab militancy. He financed the first rebellion in north west Syria in 1919– 1922, was briefly arrested by the mandatory power for supporting the Hashemites in 1924, and then once again aided the Syrian revolt of 1925. Desire for unification with Syria gradually gave way to aspirations of national independence. In November 1943, after being taken prisoner by the French along with the other prominent figures of the independence movement, he was able to rally to the Lebanese cause without losing face. He became a member of parliament and then later prime minister for a brief period in 1945. An old rule of political survival took hold of this Arabist leader of Tripoli: all notables, regardless of their degree of ideological radicalism, must participate in national politics, or else lose their status as "notable." The political leader (za'im, pl. zu'ama') rewards his political base with state money.4 accordingly, a za'im cannot hold a grudge against the state for too long, lest he lose access to the financial resources by which he retains his power on the ground.

When Abd al-Hamid died in 1950, his son Rashid inherited his position as notable. In 1955 Rashid became, at the age of thirty, the youngest prime minister in Lebanese history. From 1951 to 1972, he won every legislative election in Tripoli, even facing down a serious challenge from President Camille Chamoun, who had attempted in 1957 to rig elections against him. In the context of the United Arab Republic, the short-lived union between Egypt and Syria that had been declared a few months before under Nasser's authority, the Nasserist-leaning streets of Tripoli played a key role in the outbreak of the mini-civil war of 1958 that provoked Chamoun's departure. During that conflict, Karami was one of the leaders of an insurgency that lasted almost four months. His fighters, firmly entrenched in the old town, withstood a siege by security forces loyal to president Chamoun. For historian Khaled Ziadeh, Tripoli thus took its revenge for all the humiliations it had suffered during its decline. The insurgents' "confrontation with armored vehicles revived memories of the 1943 clashes when the French tanks plowed through crowds protesting for independence on the main square and its vicinity."

Ten years later, the failure of Nasserism following the June 1967 defeat weakened Rashid Karami's zu'ama' to the advantage of leftist political organizations favoring the Palestinian cause. the effendi of Tripoli would pay a high price for the loss of Nasser's arab leadership, for the latter's powerful though distant charisma helped preserve the autonomy of local elites, mobilizing the masses for rather than against them. After 1967, however, it was not a politically united Tripoli that decided, on its own, to influence its regional Arab sphere and assert itself against the Lebanese state. Instead, the increasing polarization of Arab politics gradually encroached on Tripoli — penetrating the privacy of its social fabric, changing the local equilibrium, bypassing the increasingly outdated traditional leadership — all factors that risked throwing the entire city and its surroundings into a much more violent state of upheaval than in the past.

Tripoli's Military Resurgence from the Late 1960s to the War

In the late sixties, Tripoli was the scene of intense militancy. An amalgam of Marxist references, slogans backing the Palestinian cause, and a desire for social reform shaped the political discourse of the period. After the defeat of June 1967, portraits of Nasser disappeared from the urban scene. In 1968, Palestinian commandos established bases in southern Lebanon along the border with Israel.

In North Lebanon, Arafat and his deputy commander-in-chief in Fatah, Khalil al-Wazir (Abu Jihad), relied on the politicized segment of Tripoli's population to penetrate Lebanese society more generally. After Black September (1970) and the PLO'S military defeat in Jordan, the Palestinian leadership began to prioritize harmonious relations with the local community. In executing this strategy, they exploited the numerous pockets of resentment in Lebanese society — especially among Muslims — in order to create the local alliances they had lacked in Jordan. In a climate of social tension and political clamoring, this was relatively easy to achieve.

Fatah helped Faruq al-Muqaddem, the son of an illustrious Tripolitan family (rivals to the Karami family), establish the first training camp in the North, the "Hittin Base." the camp was near the town of Jeyroun, on the steep slopes of Dinniyeh, an area accessible only by donkey. Al-Muqaddem coordinated with Fatah to provide military training to volunteers from the refugee camps and the poor neighborhoods of Tripoli. Hittin provided a setting where those engaged in the Palestinian struggle could meet those excluded from the Lebanese "miracle," who exhibited the social rage that is felt by all disfranchised people. As in the other main coastal towns, part of the population lived in tune with the "Palestinian revolution," in an atmosphere of high tension and frequent run-ins with the army.

After clashes between the army and Fatah in October 1969, and despite the ban imposed by the government then headed by Rashid Karami, Faruq al-Muqaddem committed his group to participate in a demonstration of solidarity with the Palestinians on October 24, 1969. Violence between demonstrators and the army resulted in four deaths, and the seventeen days of fighting that followed paralyzed the city. Muqaddem's supporters, aided by Fatah, occupied the citadel of Tripoli in Abu Samra and set up a radio station. Very quickly, the movement found Arab legitimization. In solidarity with al-Muqaddem, the Syrian government closed its northern border with Lebanon. Nasser then offered to mediate, and the urban insurrection ended on November 2. the same day, the government and the PLO signed the Cairo agreement, which included a provision for the dissolution of the Jeyroun base. Faced with this perceived "betrayal," al-Muqaddem and his supporters refused to return the citadel to state control. Nasser again intervened to obtain legal guarantees for the insurgents and officially invited al-Muqaddem to Cairo, recognizing his new role as Tripoli's za'im. things calmed down and al-Muqaddem's "group" went on to become the progressive and Socialist October 24 Movement — better known as the October 24 Movement.

Another of Rashid Karami's adversaries was a physician, Abd al-Majid al-Rafi'i. Born into a large family of ulemas scattered across Palestine, Syria, and Egypt, al-Rafi'i was a notable engaged in social justice. the head of the Iraqi Ba'ath party, he was best known for his humanitarian activities, which included establishing many clinics in poor Lebanese neighborhoods. No doubt buoyed by support from those he had aided, he was elected to parliament in 1972, obtaining more votes than Rashid Karami.

Al-Muqaddem and al-Rafi'i were populist leaders hailing from highly respected upper-class families. They challenged Karami's leadership in order to reinstate their previous leadership. There were also leaders of low birth, who were often despised by the upper-class populists. In the underprivileged neighborhood of Bab al-Tabbaneh, Ali 'Akkawi, a baker's son, began to organize an antiestablishment revolt in the late sixties to denounce the shortage of hospitals, schools, vaccination programs, and the like. He also tried to encourage a peasants' movement in the Akkar against the landowning class supported by the state. While he was in prison (where he died in 1974), his brother Khalil took up the torch of the revolt that Ali began. In 1972, with support from Fatah, Khalil founded the popular resistance (al-Muqawama al-Sha'biyya), which was at the forefront of social dissent before the outbreak of the 1975 war. More than the great ideologies of the moment — Nasserism, the Palestinian cause, Islamism — what drove Khalil 'Akkawi was the simple wish to defend his neighborhood. The popular resistance was organized on an urban militia model, whereby youth would acquire basic military training in the neighboring Fatah-run Baddawi camp. In the early seventies, Palestinians also played a part in setting up an Islamist fighting group in Abu Samra, which would be known in 1975 by the name "Jund allah" (the army of God).

Right from the beginning of the war, in 1975, rebel groups in Tripoli besieged police stations and declared "civil disobedience." The October 24 Movement retook the citadel, where it established its headquarters and a radio station broadcasting in Arabic and French. Fatah took control of the more lucrative enterprises — the port and the oil refinery. Old tensions with the mountain suburb of Zghorta erupted into armed clashes between Sunni "progressives" from Tripoli and "conservative" Christians regrouped into president Suleiman Frangieh's Christian militia.

Beginning in January 1976, Palestinians from the PLA under Syrian army control deployed into the region as a peacekeeping force. When the Syrian army entered the region in November 1976, all of these militant activities came to an abrupt halt. The effervescent atmosphere of partisan fervor vanished, and all political parties were banned except the Syrian Social Nationalist party (SSNP). The October 24 Movement evacuated the citadel, and its radio station ceased broadcasting. Fatah cautiously retreated to its natural bases — the Palestinian camps of Nahr al-Bared to the north of Tripoli, and Baddawi on the city's outskirts.

The Rise of the Alawites

the Lebanese Alawites, who lived in certain villages of Akkar and in the Ba'al Mohsen neighborhood of Tripoli, came originally from the Jabal Ansarieh (still called the "Alawite mountain") to the north west of Syria, and they belong to the same tribes as their Syrian coreligionists. In 1972, a movement of young Alawites, the Movement of Alawite Youth (harakat al-Sha'biyya al-Alawiyya) formed in Tripoli to reclaim the status of a "religious community" — a sine qua non for political existence in a country where citizenship is mediated by the confessional community (at the time, an Alawite had to convert to Sunnism to become a civil servant). At the end of the year, a certain Ali Eid, originally from Ba'al Mohsen, "the very figure of these political adventurers that the region got us accustomed to," took control of the movement with a goal of mobilizing the alawite community of the city and the Akkar plain — an area with a population of around 30,000 inhabitants at that time. this under taking was made possible by Eid's privileged relationship with president Frangieh's family — which was very close to the Assads in Syria. This proximity allowed him to incorporate his community into the regional system and to turn it into a kind of satellite for the Syrian regime in North Lebanon. He thus obtained, in the early 1970s, the naturalization of 20,000 Alawites originally from Syria, then consolidated his confessional hold by becoming the patron of his community.

The Alawites of North Lebanon also indirectly helped to provide the Hafez al-Assad regime with Islamic legitimacy through the most charismatic figure of the Lebanese Shi'ite community, Imam Musa al-Sadr. In July 1973, speaking from a hotel in Tripoli in his capacity as chairman of the Supreme Islamic Shi'ite Council (SISC), as-Sadr recognized the Lebanese Alawites as belonging to Twelver Shi'a Islam. As a Shi'ite religious leader, he was acceding to a request from President Assad, who was threatened by Sunni protests in Homs, Hama, and Aleppo following the January 1973 publication of a constitutional draft in which the drafters "forgot" to grant Islam the status of state religion. The initiative by the Shi'a imam might also be read as an attempt to gain control over the Alawites of Lebanon and thus to subvert the political ambitions of Ali Eid. the latter then developed a close relationship with Rif'at al-Assad, brother of the Syrian president and chief of the defense brigades (saraya al-difa'), who was also a proponent of a community mobilization of all the Alawites of the region in defense of the Syrian regime. During the Syrian army's invasion of Tripoli in November 1976, Ali Eid allowed one of Rif'at al-Assad's sons to plunder the port and the refinery. Others among Eid's supporters specialized in various mafia-like activities, such as setting up protection rackets, carrying out assassinations, and kidnapping for ransom. Under the supervision of its new leader, the community gained a vehicle for expression with the 1982 formation of the Arab Democratic party. they added an armed militia as well, the Red Knights, to whom the Alawite soldiers in the Syrian army always offered a fighting hand. the Ba'al Mohsen neighborhood, which overlooks Bab al-Tabbaneh, became the symbolic heart of this community, which was now unified both politically and geographically. All throughout the Lebanese conflict, Ali Eid's militia served as an auxiliary corps, supporting all of the actions carried out against the Syrian regime's enemies in North Lebanon — among them Fatah, the Islamists, the Iraqi Ba'ath, and the combatants of Bab al-Tabbaneh. At the war's end in 1990, with Lebanon completely under Syrian hegemony, Eid's zeal would be rewarded. The alawites received recognition as the country's eighteenth religious community.

The Struggle between the Syrian Regime and Fatah

From the early 1970s until the 1990s, North Lebanon served as the key battleground in the conflict between the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) and the Syrian regime. Once Syria began to see itself as a regional power, it could no longer tolerate the risk of Palestinian self-affirmation in neighboring Lebanon. First because the creation of a Palestinian power at its border might provoke an Israeli military intervention — a threat to the stability of a regime still fragile since Assad's 1970 takeover. even more important, the consolidation of Palestinian power in Lebanon would instill a climate of revolutionary discord that would inevitably reverberate inside Syria, where the new Alawite president held little legitimacy in the eyes of the majority Sunni population. Finally, if the PLO acquired a territorial base in the Middle east, it might develop an independent diplomatic policy favorable to a peace treaty with Israel — eventually isolating Syria within the region. Whether moderate or radical, the mere idea of autonomous Palestinian leadership was extremely worrisome to Syrian leaders.

Faced with these threats, Syria had to obtain control over the PLO in order to enhance the regime's Arab legitimacy and gain crucial regional influence in the Middle east. This Syrian desire for control would clash with an opposite desire, the principle of the "independence of the Palestinian decision" that was promoted by Yasser Arafat, president of the PLO and leader of Fatah — his strongest constituency. Indeed, escaping Syrian tutelage was one of Arafat's main goals. Not only did he strive to frustrate the hegemonic ambitions of the Syrian regime, but he also knew how to leverage internal Syrian affairs so as to weaken Hafez al-Assad. North Lebanon has always served as a geographic launching pad for such initiatives.

When the Lebanese civil war broke out in 1975, Syrian intervention (in June 1976) prevented a likely military victory by the "Islamo-progressive" camp — consisting of an alliance between Ka mal Joumblatt's Lebanese National Movement and the PLO — over the Christian forces self-identified as champions of the Lebanese cause. Thereafter, political and military struggle between the Syrian regime and the PLO was the only constant throughout a conflict that would last fifteen years and witness constantly shifting alliances.

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Excerpted from The Sunni Tragedy in the Middle East by Bernard Rougier. Copyright © 2011 Presses Universitaires de France. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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