Dec 12, 2013

Tripoli, the so-called capital of northern Lebanon, is regarded as the flash point that clearly shows the extent of the Syrian crisis’ impact on its smaller neighbor. Since the outbreak of the events in Syria, the security situation has worsened in Tripoli, which is demographically considered the capital of the Lebanese Sunni Muslim community.

To a large extent, the demography of Tripoli resembles a microcosm of Syria. While 400,000 Lebanese Sunnis reside in Tripoli, a few thousand Lebanese Alawite citizens reside in the city’s Jabal Mohsen neighborhood, located on a low-lying hill. The Alawites are called the 18th sect in Lebanon, and they are truly a minority in Tripoli, just as Syrian Alawites are a minority in Syria with its overwhelming Sunni majority.

Residents of Jabal Mohsen are loyal to the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and his picture hangs in their mostly modest houses. This is while the Sunni residents of Tripoli raise the flags of the Free Syrian Army (FSA), Jabhat al-Nusra and lately those of al-Qaeda and the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS). The rift in Tripoli, against the backdrop of the Syrian crisis, seems to be a replica of the one in Syria. The resemblance has reached its farthest degree, since the fighting in Syria has been practically implemented in Tripoli in the past few months, where it resulted from the exchange of fire between the Alawite residents of Jabal Mohsen and the Sunni residents of Tripoli.

Moreover, under the Sunni political climate in Tripoli, civil and leftist forces have receded, and extremist Salafist groups have prevailed instead. The imams in the mosques have become emirs in the place of the traditional and historical political leaders, who had led the Sunni street in Tripoli for decades. In short, the traits that characterize the Syrian opposition have all come to characterize the Lebanese Sunni scene in Tripoli. This is while the Alawite residents of Jabal Mohsen have also became more extremist in expressing their religious identity and fiercer in defending it, in a way interrelated with the ferocity with which the Syrian Alawite minority defends itself.

Just as the residents of Syrian rural areas that have allied with the Syrian revolution are relentless in besieging the cities that the regime controls, the poor rural Sunni areas in northern Tripoli — such as Akkar — have started to send fighters to support their Sunni residents in their fighting against the pro-Syrian regime in Jabal Mohsen. As time passes by, the fighters of Tripoli’s rural areas have become powerful in [the city], and have repeatedly attempted to break through red lines under the pretext of supporting Sunnis. They do so by carrying out attacks to topple the besieged Alawite neighborhood of Jabal Mohsen, whose residents just have one outlet on one side linked to a Christian area controlled by Suleiman Franjieh, one of the most prominent Christian allies of the Syrian regime in Lebanon.