Saber Mrad grinned up from his bed on the third floor of the Islamic Hospital with a hero’s smile.

“I’ve always been the kind of person to interfere if someone’s being hurt,” he said. “I’ve never been scared in my life.” Which is just as well. For the cheerful Lebanese with the Australian accent, his torso covered in bandages and far too many tattoos, had deliberately crashed his car into the motor-cycle-riding Isis killer who opened fire on crowds of civilians preparing for the Eid al-Fitr festival in the Northern Lebanese city of Tripoli.

The back of Mrad’s head is also swathed in gauze and bandages because – this being a truly bloody tale without many Hollywood happy endings – the Isis veteran from Syria shot him three times in the brain and once below the neck.

“I felt the bullets hitting me in a blur and then the back of my head opened. It was surreal,” Mrad said – and he never stopped smiling at me as he remembered – “but this guy had big hate-filled eyes, he seemed to hate everybody. He had a beard like me but longer, and he kept saying filthy things at all the people round me. It was surreal.”

Even Mrad’s aunt and his other female relatives standing at the bottom of the 31-year-old construction worker’s bed open their mouths in awe at such a frightful description.

Timeline of the Isis caliphate Show all 19 1 /19 Timeline of the Isis caliphate Timeline of the Isis caliphate ISIS began as a group by the merging of extremist organisations ISI and al-Nusra in 2013. Following clashes, Syrian rebels captured the ISIS headquarters in Aleppo in January 2014 (pictured) AFP/Getty Timeline of the Isis caliphate Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi declared the creation of a caliphate in Mosul on 27 June 2014 Timeline of the Isis caliphate Isis conquered the Kurdish towns of Sinjar and Zumar in August 2014, forcing thousands of civilians to flee their homes. Pictured are a group of Yazidi Kurds who have fled Rex Timeline of the Isis caliphate On September 2 2014 Isis released a video depicting the beheading of US journalist Steven Sotloff. On September 13 they released another video showing the execution of British aid worker David Haines Timeline of the Isis caliphate The US launched its first airstrikes against Isis in Syria on 23 September 2014. Here Lt Gen William C Mayville Jnr speaks about the bombing campaign in the wake of the first strikes Getty Timeline of the Isis caliphate Isis militants sit atop a hill planted with their flag in the Syrian town of Kobani on 6 October 2014. They had been advancing on Kobani since mid-September and by now was in control of the city’s entrance and exit points AFP/Getty Timeline of the Isis caliphate Residents of the border village of Alizar keep guard day and night as they wait in fear of mortar fire from Isis who have occupied the nearby city of Kobani Getty Timeline of the Isis caliphate Smoke rises following a US airstrike on Kobani, 28 October 2014 AFP/Getty Timeline of the Isis caliphate YPG fighters raise a flag as they reclaim Kobani on 26 January 2015 VOA Timeline of the Isis caliphate Isis seized the ancient Syrian city of Palmyra on 20 May 2015. This image show the city from above days after its capture by Isis Getty Timeline of the Isis caliphate Kurdish forces are stationed on a hill above the town of Sinjar as smoke rises following US airstrikes on 12 November 2015 AFP/Getty Timeline of the Isis caliphate Kurdish forces enter Sinjar after seizing it from Isis control on 13 November 2015 AFP/Getty Timeline of the Isis caliphate Iraqi government forces make the victory sign as they retake the city of Fallujah from ISIS on 26 June 2016 Getty Timeline of the Isis caliphate Iraqi forces battle with Isis for the city of Mosul on 30 June 2017 AFP/Getty Timeline of the Isis caliphate Members of the Iraqi federal police raise flags in Mosul on 8 July 2017. On the following day, Iraqi prime minister Haider Al Abadi declares victory over Isis in Mosul Getty Timeline of the Isis caliphate Members of Syrian Democratic Forces celebrate in Al-Naim square after taking back the city of Raqqa from Isis. US-backed Syrian forces declare victory over Isis in Raqqa on 20 October 2017 after a four-month long campaign Getty Timeline of the Isis caliphate Female fighters of the Syrian Democratic Forces celebrate in Al-Naim Square after taking back the city of Raqqa from Isis. US-backed Syrian forces declare victory over Isis in Raqqa on 20 October 2017 after a four-month long campaign AFP/Getty Timeline of the Isis caliphate Trucks full of women and children arrive from the last Isis-held areas in Deir ez-Zor, Syria in January 2019 They were among the last civilians to be living in the ISIS caliphate, by this time reduced to just two small villages in Syria’s Deir ez-Zor Richard Hall/The Independent Timeline of the Isis caliphate Zikia Ibrahim, 28, with her two-year-old son and 8-month-old daughter, after fleeing the Isis caliphate, on Saturday 26 January 2019 Richard Hall/The Independent

“There was a lot of blood and I started to walk and I couldn’t see and I kept telling people, ‘Where are you?’ I couldn’t see anything. One guy stayed with me during the rest of the shooting and wouldn’t leave me till an ambulance came and he kept saying, ‘It isn’t that bad,’ and he stayed with me till the ambulance came and then he disappeared.

“All I did was try to help people – I’ve always been like that, all my life. I just said, ‘I can’t let this man go on shooting at these people’. I just couldn’t let those people go on getting killed.”

Wounded Saber Mrad, shot in the brain by an Isis gunman, talks to relatives in Australia (Robert Fisk)

So much for the drama last week, which cost the lives of two Lebanese soldiers and two cops. But the drama did not end when Abdul Rahman Mabsout, the Isis veteran who had fought against the Assad regime in Syria, smashed his way into an empty fourth-floor apartment, shot his last victim from the balcony and blew himself up with a grenade amid a blaze of army gunfire.

The balcony is now gutted black, bullet holes spattered around it, an ugly black hole in a new apartment block almost as dark as the holes which Mabsout blew in the body politic of Lebanon.

For it has now emerged that the “have-a-go” hero of Lebanon risked his life for a people whose country had refused to give him its citizenship – for the simple and disgraceful reason that while his mother was Lebanese, his father was Palestinian.

The fourth floor Tripoli apartment and balcony on which Isis attacker Mabsout killed himself after shooting at Lebanese soldiers (Robert Fisk)

The exodus of 750,000 refugees from Palestine in 1948, and Lebanon’s fear of contaminating its carefully balanced Muslim-Christian-Druze society with the aliens who fled the Israelis more than 75 years ago, has largely sealed the descendants of that distant war into the squalor of the camps. And if the menfolk later married Lebanese women, the status of their children did not change.

The Lebanese authorities have been quick to lavish praise on Mrad, but less keen to discuss the fact that while he is now an Australian citizen, he was never allowed a Lebanese passport – nor the right to live equally in the country of his birth.

True, they are ensuring the best of treatment for their hero’s wounds, although even the word “their” is a bit dodgy. After all, if they rewarded this fine man with the right to call himself Lebanese, that would set a precedent for the continuing arguments of thousands of Lebanese women who married foreign citizens but want the law changed so that their children can be Lebanese. The government has repeatedly been asked to change this legislation – and has refused.

Saber Mrad’s brain has clearly been affected by those Isis bullets. He still speaks perfectly in English and Arabic – he was taking calls from relatives in Australia when I walked into his private hospital room – but he can no longer use numbers. He had to count up to 10 on his fingers three times and hold up a thumb when I asked him his age, to illustrate his 31 years. Mrad is divorced but has two children in Austrialia, Maria and Ace – when I asked their age, he twice held up his hands before he reached 10 and 11. But despite his wounds, he is a lucky man.

And so this might be the moment – since the victims of last week’s lone Isis attack also had families who sobbed over their coffins across Lebanon this past week – to recall the names of the dead: Lieutenant Ali Farhat and Private Ibrahim Saleh of the Lebanese army and Sergeant Johnny Khalil and Corporal Youssef Faraj of the Internal Security Forces (ISF).

So now to the Isis killer. Mabsout had fought in Syria, a full-time member of the “Islamic State” cult, and his attack on the festival crowds in Tripoli with both automatic rifle and six grenades also wounded dozens of civilians. Lebanon’s interior minister, Raya el-Hassan, quickly called him a “lone wolf”, although most people in Tripoli I talked to believe he must have had help. After all, he was a veteran Isis man, considered so dangerous that when he returned to Lebanon in 2015, he was imprisoned within the grim concrete walls of the hopelessly overcrowded Roumieh prison north of Beirut.

But his Isis activities had been committed in Syria, a foreign country – and Lebanon’s Muslims and Christians remain divided in their support and hatred for Bashar al-Assad’s regime.

The Shia Muslim Lebanese Hezbollah have been fighting alongside the Syrian government army. Sunni Muslim politicians, while hardly espousing the Isis cause, largely oppose Assad. And the Lebanese prime minister, Saad Hariri, who holds a Saudi as well as a Lebanese passport and remains loyal to the Saudis – despite his brief kidnapping in Riyadh last year – is no friend of the Syrian regime. He still blames it for the 2005 murder of his ex-prime minister father Rafiq.

So it was not surprising that the pro-Assad Christian Free Patriotic Movement (FPM) – whose founder and former leader is Lebanese president Michel Aoun – should have accused Hariri’s Sunni Future Movement (FM) of freeing Mabsout early from prison, after only 18 months, because of the Isis man’s record as an anti-Assad fighter.

A former Aounist parliament member then circulated a fake photo on social media of the bearded Mabsout apparently standing next to Ashraf Rifi, a Sunni Tripoli FM politician and the former director of the paramilitary ISF – which is itself often accused by Aounists of being over-sympathetic to Hariri’s party.

Rifi himself suggested that the inspiration behind the fake picture had been Christian Lebanese foreign minister and leader of the FPM Gibran Bassil, who also happens – by chance, of course – to be President Aoun’s son-in-law.

Thus did Mabsout’s attack open up sectarian divisions – a principal and stated aim of Isis commanders when they first encouraged their supporters to stage attacks in countries outside their Iraqi-Syrian “caliphate” in 2014. And no better confessional cocktail at which to strike than Lebanon. But the divisions don’t end there.

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For the hopeless state of Lebanon’s prisons, especially Roumieh – where inmates of all religions are crammed into tiny cells and often wait without charge for years before being put on trial or released – has long been a national scandal. Now there are politicians who say that if Mabsout set off on his killing spree to revenge himself for the 18 months he spent in Roumieh (another Lebanese report), then other Islamists in the jail should be freed and given psychiatric treatment to “cure” them of their extremism as quickly as possible.

Equally, and rather more understandably, there are others who would like to keep the Islamists – some of whom participated in a bloody uprising against the state in northern Lebanon more than a decade ago – locked up for the rest of their lives.

And so the political repercussions of Mabsout’s three-hour act of murder and multiple woundings have painfully divided this tiny country of Lebanon, perhaps a quarter of whose present inhabitants are refugees from the war in Syria. I’m conscious that I’m a foreign journalist, clumping around town to chart the sectarian suspicion and ice-thin anger of this moment, and so it is a useful counterpoint to remind you that life can go on happily in the middle of all this. Just last week, I attended the glorious wedding of a Sunni Muslim and a Christian Maronite scarcely 30 miles from Tripoli.