Lebanese Bomber’s Death, and Life, Leave Questions
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Version 0 of 1. HNAIDER, Lebanon — The last time his mother saw him, he joined the family for dawn prayers as usual. A few hours later, the 19-year-old engineering student had vanished. No one saw him leave, his cellphone was off and text messages went unanswered. Five days later, he surfaced — his face broadcast on the evening news. Investigators had found his ID in a building near the site of a suicide bombing in the Beirut area, as well as half of his body in the green Jeep Grand Cherokee that had carried the bomb. The police soon identified the man, Qutaiba al-Satem, as the bomber. “At first I saw only his ID and was relieved that they had found him,” said Mr. Satem’s mother, Fawziya al-Sayid, draped in black and sitting in the family home here. “But then. ...” she said, her voice trailing off as she recalled realizing what her son had done. As the civil war in neighboring Syria has inflamed tensions in Lebanon, a series of bombings has left dozens of people dead and raised fears that such violence could become routine. The local news has been flooded with reports of threats across the country, and the authorities have deployed troops to search for bombs on downtown streets. Since Mr. Satem was implicated in the bombing, which killed five people on Jan. 2 in a neighborhood dominated by Hezbollah, he has become the face of what many Lebanese fear most: fellow citizens so radicalized by the conflict in Syria that they would give their lives to attack their perceived enemies at home. But the picture is murkier in this isolated village near the Syrian border where Mr. Satem grew up. While Mr. Satem had sympathized with Syria’s rebels and had once gone to join them, his friends and neighbors did not recall any obvious signs of extremism. Many felt that the discovery of his body and of his ID — which was nearly intact, despite the blast — raised more questions than it answered. “This way of thinking is completely foreign to us,” said Ahmed al-Sayid, Mr. Satem’s cousin. “We know it was his body, but there are many questions about how it ended up there.” Very rarely do investigations into such attacks in Lebanon arrive at clear conclusions, leaving people free to interpret matters based on their own political views. Many supporters of Hezbollah, which backs the Syrian government, blamed Saudi Arabia, which backs the rebels, for the bombing. But some of Mr. Satem’s neighbors accused Hezbollah of kidnapping him and planting his ID at the scene. Neither side has convincing evidence. A claim of responsibility on a Twitter feed claiming to represent a Syrian affiliate of Al Qaeda could not be confirmed. The death of Mr. Satem has cast a pall over his village, one of the communities scattered over rocky hills in a part of Lebanon’s far northeast known as Wadi Khaled. The area’s residents have long had stronger ties to Syria than to Lebanon, thanks to clan relations that transcend the border and a long history of government neglect. Geography also plays a role. Many of the area’s homes are so close to the border that residents can see their Syrian neighbors from their windows. And a bulge in the border means that some villages are surrounded by Syria on three sides. But before Syria’s conflict began in March 2011, those borders meant little. “Before the events, we didn’t even know where the border was,” said Talal al-Ali, a community leader in Mr. Satem’s village. “Sometimes we’d end up in Syria and not even realize it.” That turned the area into a smuggling hub, and many of Wadi Khalid’s residents lived well by buying cheap gasoline, produce and cigarettes in Syria and selling them for a profit in Lebanon. All that changed when the Syria conflict started. Clashes between rebels and government forces cut off the smuggling routes, and errant bullets and shells hit the area, damaging homes and killing residents. As the war progressed, Syrian refugees streamed in, first staying with Lebanese families, then crowding into storerooms, cowsheds and unfinished buildings, roughly doubling the area’s original population of 40,000. “There are Syrians here, Syrian there and Syrians in every building you can see from here,” said Fatima Mustafa, standing near the two-room structure that has housed her family since they fled Syria two years ago. The Syrian city of Homs, where local residents used to shop, was visible on the horizon, and booms from the fighting across the border occasionally echoed over the hills. A sense of shock still pervaded the Satem family home on a recent afternoon. An overnight storm had left puddles along the village’s one paved road and reduced the stony lot in front of the house to mud. Inside, it was so cold that Mr. Satem’s mother’s breath was visible as she mourned her son. “I can’t even have his photo on my phone because I collapse every time I see it,” she said. Mr. Satem’s relatives said he had always been polite and quiet, rarely speaking in groups. He had been a devout Muslim, but no more so than his peers. He had studied engineering at a university in Tripoli. “He smoked water pipes, listened to music and sat in cafes,” said Mr. Sayid, his cousin. “He was totally normal.” After Mr. Satem disappeared, his family informed the police that he was missing. Three days later, his body and ID were found near the blast site. His remains were returned to the village and buried in a simple grave covered with green branches and yellow flowers. Residents are still baffled by Mr. Satem’s death. While many of the area’s mostly Sunni residents sympathize with the rebels in Syria, fewer than two dozen have gone to fight, and their elders have tried to stop them. One of Mr. Satem’s cousins has been fighting with the rebels for months, residents said, and a rebel commander near the border farther south said he had been contacted in the past by families from Wadi Khalid who were trying to find their sons. Once, he had delayed two youths from Wadi Khalid near the border until their families could retrieve them. Mr. Satem, too, had fought in Syria, but his father had used his connections along the border to bring him back, said Mr. Ali, the village leader. Worrying that his son would get swept up in the war, his father withdrew him from the university, enrolled him at a local college and put him to work in a men’s clothing store. At the time of Mr. Satem’s disappearance, his father was trying to send him to France so he would forget about the war, Mr. Ali said. Still, Mr. Ali felt there was something strange about Mr. Satem’s role in the bombing, and guessed that an extremist group had deceived him into carrying it out. “The body was his body, we can’t deny that, but this operation was too big for him,” Mr. Ali said. “There are lots of things about this that remain hidden.” |