A Lebanese Battle With Syrian Overtones

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/27/world/middleeast/a-lebanese-battle-with-syrian-overtones.html

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BEIRUT, Lebanon — In some of the worst spillover clashes from the Syrian civil war to strike neighboring Lebanon, fighting raged Sunday in the northern city of Tripoli between the Lebanese Army and Sunni Islamist militants. Eighteen people, including six soldiers, have died in the battles, which began Friday.

The fight in Tripoli may signal a shift in the government’s longstanding policy of cautious containment in the city, where Sunni militants have long had a foothold among a poor and marginalized local population. The militants have gained popularity and been further radicalized as the government in neighboring Syria has battled a Sunni-led insurgency.

Typically, the army has moved mainly to extinguish periodic clashes in Tripoli without pursuing militants into their strongholds concentrated in one restive neighborhood. But security officials on Sunday said the army would now carry out a full-fledged operation against the militants, and the army used a helicopter gunship for the first time in Tripoli in attacking militants it said were holed up in a vegetable market in the city’s historic bazaar area.

There is a complex constellation of militant activity in Tripoli. Local Lebanese Sunni militants have shown growing sympathy toward the Nusra Front, the Qaeda-linked insurgent group in Syria that has recruited fighters there. Syrian insurgents have taken refuge there as well, and security officials and residents say the Islamic State, the group that has occupied parts of Syria and Iraq and is seeking to create a caliphate throughout the Middle East, is also recruiting in the city.

The army has been facing newly intensified pressure to crack down on Sunni militants after months of protests from relatives of Lebanese soldiers being held by the Nusra Front. The militants captured the soldiers in August in the Lebanese border town of Arsal, in the Bekaa Valley east of Tripoli, and has since beheaded three.

The militants also took an aggressive stance on Sunday. Leaders of the Nusra Front threatened to behead another captive soldier if the army did not stop what the Nusra Front called attacks on Sunnis.

Tripoli has been divided for decades along sectarian lines between Sunni opponents and Alawite supporters of the Syrian government, and clashes periodically erupt across an entrenched front line between two neighborhoods, without spreading to other areas of Lebanon or even of Tripoli.

But this week’s fighting has spread to parts of the city that usually remain peaceful, including the city’s old market, which is being considered for designation as a Unesco World Heritage site.

And for the first time, the army has sent armored vehicles into Bab al-Tabbaneh, the Sunni neighborhood that periodically clashes with the neighboring Alawite area of Jabal Mohsen. (Tripoli’s Alawite leaders are aligned with President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, himself a member of the Alawite branch of Shiite Islam.)

Footage shot by Tripoli residents showed wounded people being loaded into ambulances, with one narrator accusing the army of being allied with Hezbollah, the politically and militarily powerful Lebanese Shiite group that has been fighting in Syria on the side of the Syrian government.

The mounting violence has left Lebanese political leaders scrambling to tamp down sectarian tensions throughout the country. Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, urged followers in a statement Saturday to resist what he called efforts to foment strife. The leader of the Sunni-dominated Future Movement, Saad Hariri, issued a statement Sunday saying he supported the army’s efforts to detain militants he called terrorists.

But Mr. Hariri’s hold on disenfranchised Sunnis has weakened in recent years as he has stayed mostly abroad because of threats to his safety.

Shiites, too, are increasingly restive. Families of the remaining captive soldiers, who are mainly Shiites, have frequently blocked roads and staged sit-ins around government buildings in downtown Beirut. While Hezbollah has urged its followers not to engage in communal revenge, residents of Shiite areas say that they are eager to defend themselves.

The new clashes started on Friday after the army raided a village near Tripoli, targeting militants involved in the capture of the soldiers in Arsal. Militants then attacked a Lebanese army patrol in Tripoli’s old market.

On Saturday, Sunni militants seized an off-duty soldier riding in a taxi, and on Sunday, the National News Agency reported that a second soldier had been kidnapped from his home.