Clashes on Syrian Border Split Lebanese Town

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/02/world/clashes-on-syrian-border-split-lebanese-town.html

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RAS BAALBEK, Lebanon — Waleed Fayyad coaxed his sport utility vehicle through a chilly rain, peering down dark streets in search of suspicious vehicles. Later that night, a few miles down the road, Lebanese soldiers and Hezbollah fighters would rush to thwart insurgents trying to descend the mountains from the Syrian border, but on Mr. Fayyad’s patrol through this remote Christian village, nothing moved.

Mr. Fayyad, a municipal employee, is among many local men joining new security patrols to protect the village amid growing tensions along the border. Ras Baalbek is determined to stay out of the Syrian conflict, even as it is pushed toward deeper reliance on one of the combatants, Hezbollah, which is battling insurgents in Syria.

Like Christians across Lebanon, the volunteers in Ras Baalbek are divided on Hezbollah, the powerful Shiite Muslim militia, which grew from its roots here in the Bekaa Valley into the country’s strongest political and military force. Some belong to pro-Hezbollah political factions and, residents say, have quietly accepted guns from the group to defend Ras Baalbek. Others are suspicious of Hezbollah’s Islamist ideology and its alliance with the Syrian government that long occupied Lebanon.

The split here reflects a larger one across Lebanon about the role and standing of Hezbollah a year and a half after it sent fighters into Syria in a decisive intervention against insurgents in Qusayr, just across the border from here. It has since waged an expeditionary war that has both strained and galvanized its Shiite base, and renewed debate in Lebanon on the ability of one political party, however influential, to commit the country to war.

But here in Ras Baalbek, at least, the encroaching conflict has forged a new, provisional unity. Even longtime critics of Hezbollah grudgingly welcome its presence as a bulwark between them and the Syrian and foreign Sunni militants in the highlands, although some blame Hezbollah for inflaming the threat. The critics contend that Hezbollah’s military intervention in Syria has dragged Lebanon closer to war, while supporters say that without it, extremists crossing from Syria might have already driven Christians from the northern Bekaa Valley, along with the Shiites who are a majority here.

“Maybe if they hadn’t gone to Syria, we wouldn’t have these problems,” the village mayor, Hisham al-Arja, said on a recent night in his hunting shop, where business is down because of Lebanese vacationers’ new fears of the area. “And maybe if they hadn’t gone, the extremists would have come to us sooner. It’s a very hard question. Everyone tells the story his own way.

“For now, of course, we all want to be on the same side,” he said.

In recent statements, Hezbollah’s leaders have credited their fighters with defending Lebanon against a wave of extremist Sunni militancy that could threaten the country, the most religiously diverse in the region. Al Akhbar, a left-leaning Lebanese daily, recently published a telephone poll conducted last month by the Beirut Center for Research and Information that found that two-thirds of Christians said Hezbollah was protecting Lebanon.

In Ras Baalbek, that sentiment is strong, but it comes with some ambivalence. The Rev. Ibrahim Nehmo, the priest at St. Elian Greek Catholic Church, put it this way: “We feel positive about Hezbollah today, but not as positive as their communities do.

“We are not asking them to come here,” he said. “But I profit from Hezbollah. I am not fully with Hezbollah, but if Hezbollah is powerful, I am not sad.”

At the church, deserted on a recent weekday, red and blue stained glass filtered light into a quiet sanctuary. A sign on the door displayed the insecurities of Christians, who are more powerful in Lebanon than in any other Arab country but see themselves as increasingly beleaguered in the region.

“This land belongs to our people,” it read. “Some of us have died, some of us are still alive, but some of us haven’t been born yet. This land is not for sale.”

The priest said Ras Baalbek had been wary of demographic change since refugees, mostly Sunni, began flooding into Lebanon three years ago.

The makeshift tents that have sprung up throughout the valley are forbidden here, and only Syrians whose relatives have previously worked as laborers in Ras Baalbek are welcome. A curfew on Syrians runs from 6 p.m. to 8 a.m. That has given the village an air of being untouched by the conflict, unlike the nearby Christian town of Qaa, which is thronged with refugees.

But fears in Ras Baalbek deepened, Father Nehmo said, after militants from the Islamic State, the extremist group that seeks to establish a caliphate throughout the Middle East, swept into the Iraqi city of Mosul in June, displacing one of the region’s oldest Christian communities.

“Daesh created a phobia,” he said, using an Arabic acronym for the group, also known as ISIS or ISIL. He said he now joked with a friend, a Sunni doctor, that she “might be Daesh.”

As a Christian, he said, he was also wary of all Islamist movements, including Hezbollah. He compared its public overtures to Christian leaders to his childhood feints, when he would pat his sister gently in front of their father and then, in private, pinch her.

He said that militias wielded power at the expense of the army and government, and that he would prefer the Lebanese Army handle the security threat.

“But the danger is coming, knocking on the door,” he said. “What can I do?”

Some of the local Christians on patrol here are with a group called the Resistance Brigades, which supports and receives assistance from Hezbollah, the priest said. Others are from the Lebanese Forces, a Christian party vehemently opposed to Hezbollah.

“They don’t want to say that Hezbollah was right” about Syria, Father Nehmo said, so Hezbollah avoids publicizing the role of Christian militias. “They don’t want to put the Christians in a corner.”

He and others took pains to push back against news reports that painted the new local forces guarding Christian towns as a throwback to factional militias from Lebanon’s long civil war a generation ago, likening them instead to a neighborhood watch that includes all factions.

That night, Mr. Fayyad, on his patrol, stopped by a small house decorated with stone sculptures of a guitar and an oud, a pear-shaped string instrument. Inside, Georges Bitar, who owns an oud workshop in Beirut, played a song about the apricots of Baalbek by the Lebanese diva Fayrouz. Then, as his wife served cake, he showed off his flak vest and rifle.

He said he had moved back to his hometown from Beirut several months earlier to help defend it. “If Daesh comes,” he said, “I will fight them.”

But the mayor, Mr. Arja, said Hezbollah would never let things get to that point. “If they come here, for Hezbollah it is as if they entered one of their areas,” he said.

Christians are not part of this war, he added: Though it may not have begun as one, “it’s a Shiite-Sunni war.”