Alex Martin Astley is a freelance journalist based in Beirut, covering conflict, foreign policy and social justice issues. He has contribute to New Lines,The New Arab and other publications.
At first glance, Syria Street looks like any other busy road in Tripoli. Tuk-tuks beep their way through the traffic. From a nearby loudspeaker, plaintive Quranic verses fill the air. It's a calm and sunny weekday morning during Ramadan in Lebanon's second-largest city.
But the bullet holes that riddle the apartment blocks and shopfronts of Syria Street suggest it has not always been so peaceful here. An army checkpoint, with concrete pillboxes and an armored vehicle, guards the entrance from the main road to the neighboring precinct. The two neighborhoods straddling this road bear the scars of decades of sectarian strife.
The residents of the Bab al-Tabbaneh quarter, with its mostly Sunni population, have shared a long, bitter and bloody feud with the neighboring Alawites of Jabal Mohsen, which sits in relative isolation from the rest of the city atop a steep hill, like a medieval citadel. The enmity began during Lebanon's brutal civil war from 1975 to 1990, which pitted a dizzying mix of religious and political groups against each other.
In 1986, Syrian soldiers under then-President Hafez al-Assad's regime, which had intervened in the civil war on the side of its Maronite Christian allies, carried out a massacre in Tripoli to quash Sunni Islamist and Palestinian resistance. It was said at the time that the Alawites of Jabal Mohsen had assisted the soldiers of Assad, whose family belongs to the same minority offshoot of Shia Islam. There has been bad blood on Syria Street ever since.
This social and sectarian rift, along with degrading levels of poverty, government neglect and foreign influence, have long made Syria Street ripe for radical violence.
In Tripoli, Syria Street—perhaps a little too aptly named—became a microcosm of the conflict across the border.
- Alex Martin Astley
"I'm a former prisoner, a former terrorist if you will," says Bilal* with a self-aware smile. A resident of Bab al-Tabbaneh, Bilal and his brother had crossed the border into Syria a decade ago to join the ranks of Jabhat al-Nusra, a jihadist group affiliated at the time with al-Qaida, to fight against the forces of Hafez's son, Bashar al-Assad. Jabhat al-Nusra's founder, a Syrian jihadist who went by the nom de guerre Ahmed al-Jolani, later broke the group's ties with al-Qaida and refashioned the militia as Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), which went on to control Idlib province as Syria's civil war stalemated—until the surprise lightning rebel offensive led by HTS that toppled Assad's regime in December. Jolani, victorious, dropped his nom de guerre and, as Ahmed al-Sharaa, is now Syria's self-declared interim president.
When Bilal returned to Lebanon from fighting in Syria in 2014, he was imprisoned on terror charges, along with hundreds of other fighters who had joined rebel groups in Syria's civil war. His brother was captured in Syria and sent to the notorious Sednaya prison on the outskirts of Damascus. For years, he heard no more of his brother's fate—until Assad's regime abruptly crumbled in December. Like so many prisoners in Sednaya, his brother had died in its dungeon-like cells; he was most likely tortured to death.
Whereas Syria had intervened in Lebanon's civil war decades ago, Syria's civil war over the past 14 years spilled over into Lebanon. In Tripoli, Syria Street—perhaps a little too aptly named—became a microcosm of the conflict across the border. In Jabal Mohsen, Alawite residents were perceived to be supporting the Assad regime. But Bab al-Tabbaneh favored their own coreligionists, the Sunni rebels fighting to overthrow the regime. From 2011 to 2015, sporadic gun battles and several suicide bombings left scores of people dead and hundreds more injured in Tripoli.
This was when MARCH entered the stage, a Lebanese NGO established in 2011 to promote social cohesion and resolve sectarian conflict. It set as its first challenge the seemingly intractable vendetta between Jabal Mohsen and Bab al-Tabbaneh. The NGO organized a collaborative theater performance to bring the two bitter communities together. The play? Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, rewritten to fit the local narrative and performed by rival fighters on the rooftops of Syria Street, playing Montagues and Capulets.
An uneasy calm has prevailed on Syria Street since 2015, when the Lebanese army deployed onto the streets of Tripoli. But it hasn't always been easy for Lea Baroudi, the founder and director of MARCH. "You know, one time they threw a Molotov cocktail at us," she tells Democracy in Exile from her office above Kahwetna, the café and workshop designed as a neutral territory for residents of the two neighborhoods to come together. She doesn't know who threw the Molotov. Her small grey Schnauzer guards the door a little unconvincingly, yapping at everyone who walks past.
For Baroudi, who has a background in conflict resolution, the key to establishing a resilient peace is to cultivate peacemakers and facilitators from among the rival groups. "It's not like you can change people's mindset with a set of workshops. It doesn't work this way," she says. "They stay here. They become youth leaders. They work on actively changing their communities."
But sectarian tensions are never far below the surface. With the toppling of the Assad dynasty, the Alawites of Jabal Mohsen feel more vulnerable, no longer benefiting from the protection of a friendly state over the border.
With the toppling of the Assad dynasty, the Alawites of Jabal Mohsen are more vulnerable, no longer benefiting from the protection of a friendly state over the border.
- Alex Martin Astley
Outside his pockmarked café in Jabal Mohsen, Khalid, an Alawite, remembers those murderous years in the 1980s, when he was a child. "It was much more dangerous back then," he says, recalling the street battles and the bodies that he would find afterward. "Then we became aware that we were like two different areas that were being used as scapegoats," he says. "But you are forced to live like this. People here are poor."
Khalid admitted that he does fear the possibility that violence will bubble up into the streets of a city already flooded with guns and pent-up animosity and resentment. But he says this would be the fault of "militias" and foreign actors exacerbating tensions. The people of Jabal Mohsen, he insisted, want nothing more than peaceful coexistence with their Sunni neighbors down the road.
In early March, Sunni Islamist forces aligned with the new Syrian government carried out a vengeful spate of massacres against Alawites in northwestern Syria after reported attacks on Syrian government forces by remnants of Assad's army. In some cases, entire Alawite families in mountain villages along Syria's coast were rounded up and executed. For many Alawites and other religious and ethnic minorities in Syria, the massacres were exactly what they feared under Sharaa and the new authorities in Damascus, mainly drawn from the ranks of HTS. In the aftermath of the killings, more than 15,000 Syrians fled across the border into the Akkar region of northern Lebanon. Around 2,000 among them have settled in Jabal Mohsen, according to the local member of parliament in Akkar, Sajih Attieh.
Although the new arrivals have been settling in as quietly as possible, old scars might be reopening in Tripoli, with a string of shootings and other violence in recent weeks. In one incident, Sunni youths from Bab al-Tabbaneh stormed a hospital treating a suspected Syrian former Assad regime officer. Lebanon's new prime minister, Nawaf Salam, hastily visited Tripoli and announced a new security intervention to restore calm.
"When the Assad regime fell, at the same time you had the issue of Sednaya prison, so all of this trauma came back to the surface," Baroudi says. The Alawite community in Jebel Mohsen can feel like it is "surrounded on all sides," she adds. "Whatever happens in Syria is going to have an impact here."
She sees poverty as an "amplifier" of the violence, but not the root cause. "The main root cause of all of this is this feeling of victimhood. The feeling of oppression," she says. "A sense that I'm fighting for a cause. No one has ever given them the sense of belonging to a nation at the end of the day. And people need to belong to something."
At the entrance to Bab al-Dhahab, another Sunni quarter adjacent to Jabal Mohsen, residents have erected a large poster of Syria's new president. "We love Ahmed al-Sharaa," says Anas*, who also fought in Syria against Assad before spending two years locked up in Lebanon once he returned. "He defeated the criminal," he says, referring to Assad. Anas had also taken up arms against his Alawite neighbors in Jabal Mohsen, but today, he says, he strives for peace.
"If young men want to fight, we tell them no, we won't allow you to do that," he says as his two young children approach him from across the street. Anas left school at the age of seven and never learned to write in Arabic. He ruffles his son's hair and smiles—his children will be staying in school.
* Editor's note: Some names have been changed to protect their identities.
