Tripoli; Hotbed for Fundamentalists

Army on the move

Just, and I mean just, as I was going to sit down and watch TV, I got a call from my editor to do 500 words on the ‘Tripoli issue’. The moment he said it, I knew something must have happened, because this morning, as I made my way up to Feraya, there was this absolute massive troop movement of the Lebanese Army. Tanks, jeeps, trucks, APC’s and even Humvees (Yes, the Lebanese army are the proud owners of a contingent of Hummers!), the colon must have been going on from downtown Beirut all the way up to Dbayeh, and then I lost sight of them. My instinct was to follow them, but I had two kids in the car, a dog in the back, and the army was moving excruciating slowly, so I dropped it.

When coming back from the mountains, I passed two major army checkpoints on the highway. Can you imagine this in Holland? The army just blocks of the highway, and checks every single car. They pulled out mainly the ‘shebab’ as we call them, the young boys, and let me pass. Two kids and a fleecy dog are not much of a security risk.
Later in the evening, while driving through town, I again passed army checkpoints, and soldiers were asking men to step out of the vehicle and searched them.
For a while I thought that maybe the army was doing a ‘visibility campaign’. Or training the new recruits in ‘how to set up a roadblock in 5 seconds.’ But then again, this is Lebanon, and it couldn’t be something that banal.

It does not come as a surprise really. Last week, while organizing my desk, I came upon some old, unused stories (i.e. stories written but not published) and one of them mentioned (on al-Qaida and Lebanon) that ex-minister Fatfat warned (this was way back in February of last year) that the situation in and around the Palestinian camp in Tripoli was a potential hotbed for fundamentalist terrorist organizations that were looking for a place to settle down. And Nizar Hamzeh, a political scientist interested in sunni groups, also mentioned than that this area was home to numerous radical religious groups who were all looking for a paymaster. It seems they found them. The place is poor, underdevelopped, nobody seems to be in charge, the border with Syria is 10 kilometers away, the Lebanese authorities do not have the right to enter the camps, and there isn't much else to do with your life anyway.

Well, I did my 500 words. Article can be read here. (in Dutch)