“As a Shiite I feel threatened,” said Fayyad, a skinny young man who sat recently at a shawarma shop in Labweh, keeping wary watch on gravel trucks rumbling down the road from Arsal.

Nodding toward the intersection where that road meets the highway to Beirut, he gave it an ominous name, one used for the dividing line between Christian East Beirut and Muslim West Beirut during the civil war that tore Lebanon apart a generation ago. “It’s a Green Line,” he said.

Here in the northern Bekaa, Shiite, Christian and Sunni villages were intertwined, intermarrying and sharing schools and businesses, including smuggling and agriculture. Life was more enmeshed with the similarly diverse Syrian region around the city of Homs than the more distant Lebanese capital, Beirut.

But now, like others in Labweh, Fayyad views Arsal’s people as traitors.

“We can hurt those people, but we don’t want to,” he said, as a friend listened, a pistol tucked in his waistband. But restraint was getting harder, Fayyad added. Above the intersection hung portraits of two young men from Labweh, killed in a Nusra Front ambush of a Hezbollah observation post two weeks earlier outside the nearby Shiite village of Brital.

“It’s hard to see friends die,” Fayyad said, giving only his first name because of concerns about his safety. “We don’t have anything to lose. We are not ready to do anything individually, but we are waiting for orders.”

Labweh’s mayor, Ramez Amhaz, called his town Lebanon’s bulwark.

“Even if we lost 1,000 dead from Labweh, we will not fall into this internal conflict,” he said. “We in Labweh protected the civil peace of Lebanon. We preserved Arsal’s people. We didn’t let any villagers hurt them, although there was resentment from the people, because they hold the Arsalis accountable.”