ANTECEDENTES

Many of the residents of the majority Sunni neighborhood of Bab al-Tabbaneh still remembered the massacre of the Tawhid Movement fighters in 1986 and still held a grudge against the Alawite militiamen of Arab Democratic Party located in neighboring Jabal Mohsen. During May 2008, when Hezbollah sent its militants to fight Sunni gunmen in Beirut, the conflict between Bab al-Tabbaneh and Jabal Mohsen reemerged (Al Arabiya, 2008).

The violence persisted after the signing of the Doha Agreement, despite a ”non- aggression pact'' between the city's Sunnis and Hezbollah, ADP’s political ally. It had claimed 40 lives in four months (Williams D. , 2008). On September 29, a military bus bombing killed five people and wounded 24 (Wander, 2008). But after 2008, despite several attacks on Jabal Mohsen in 2009 (NOW Lebanon, 2009) and the discovery of a bomb next to the house of the ADP leader Rifaat Eid in 2010 (The Daily Star, 2010), the security incidents never escalated into rounds of clashes.

The beginning of the Syrian protests against Assad reignited the conflict. The Sunni gunmen in Bab al-Tabbaneh battled the Alawite snipers of Jabal Mohsen in monthly rounds between 2011 and 2014. The conflict slowly started to encompass also the Lebanese Army. In May 2012, the clashes started after the arrest of Salafi activist Shadi

80

al-Mawlawi under the suspicion of aiding Syrian rebels. Lebanese soldiers exchanged fire with a group of young Salafis who were asking for his release and tried to attack the offices of the Syrian-allied SSNP (Al Arabiya, 2012). By June 2012, the front had expanded: Jabal Mohsen was attacked from Bab al-Tabbaneh, Shaarani, Baqqar, Riva, Mankoubin and Malouleh neighborhoods and several shops owned by Alawites in Tripoli were burnt (Hodeib, 2012).

In August, a standoff between Sheikh Hashem Minqara, a Hezbollah ally, and his men clashed with rival Salafis during a bid of the Islamists to “clean” the neighborhood of Hezbollah allies (Al Ali, 2012). The rise of the Salafi fighter groups in Bab al- Tabbaneh was also obvious later in August 2012, when, during another round of fighting with Jabal Mohsen, Salafi Sheikh Khaled al-Baradei, a commander of a Sunni Islamist brigade, was killed by a sniper (LBC News, 2012).

In September 2012, as a reaction to a Youtube movie ridiculing Prophet Mohammad that originated in the US and sparked protests across the Middle East, Salafis from Tripoli burned down a KFC restaurant (The Daily Star, 2012).

In December 2012, the clashes in Tripoli were sparked by an ambush in Talkalakh, a Syrian town in the vicinity of the Lebanese northern border; 22 Lebanese Salafis from Tripoli who were on their way to join the rebellion against Bashar al Assad were attacked by the Syrian army and killed (Elali, 2012). Only two of them survived. The clashes between Jabal Mohsen and Bab al-Tabbaneh continued throughout 2013 and the beginning of 2014. The security situation was worsened by a series of bombings, assassinations of local politicians and attacks against the Lebanese army. On August 23, 2013 two suicide bombings targeted Taqwa Mosque of Salafi Sheikh

81

Salem al-Rafei and the nearby Salem Mosque, killing 47 people gathered for the Friday prayer (Reuters, 2013). The bombings were never claimed by any group, but the Salafi community as well as other Sunni conservatives in the area perceived them as an attack on their community, the retaliation of the Syrian regime and its ally, Hezbollah, for their support for the anti-Assad rebellion (Morris & Jaidamous, 2013). The Lebanese security forces arrested Hezbollah allied Sunni sheikh Ahmad al-Ghareeb for organizing the attacks (Lucas, 2013). Abdul Rahman Diab, Alawite ADP official and father of one of the suspects in orchestrating the bombings in August 2013, was assassinated in

February 2014 (Naharnet, 2014). The leader of the ADP Ali Eid and his son Rifaat fled Lebanon after being summoned for interrogation in the case of the twin bombings on the Tripoli mosques (Naharnet, 2015).

After years of clashes and amid concerns of the rise of militant groups in Tripoli, the Lebanese government inaugurated the Tripoli security plan in April 2014, meant to curb militantism in the city and confiscate weapons (Al Bawaba, 2014).

However, despite the Army arresting scores of militants and armed groups members and commanders, jihadist militantism was still a problem in Tripoli six months after the launch of the security plan. Two young jihadist Salafis, Shadi al-Mawlawi and Osama Mansour, emerged as new leaders of armed groups seeking to avenge their fellow militants arrested by the army in 2014 (NOW Lebanon, 2014). The two young jihadists denied that they were officially affiliated to either the Islamic State or al-Qaeda’s Syrian branch Jabhat al-Nusra. “We are close to Jabhat Al-Nusra in terms of policy, ideology, and practice. We love Jabhat al-Nusra, but we have not pledged allegiance to it or to the Islamic State,” Mansour told LBC television station on September 12, adding that his

82

group was imposing sharia in Bab al-Tabbaneh (NOW Lebanon, 2014).

The Lebanese army patrols and checkpoints throughout Tripoli were attacked several times during 2014 and 2015 (The Daily Star, 2014). The attacks were claimed by jihadist militants who accused the Lebanese army of arbitrary detentions and of imposing the security plan only on the Sunni community, sparing Hezbollah.

On January 10, 2015 two suicide bombers targeted a café in Jabal Mohsen and killed 9 people (The Daily Star, 2015). Jabhat al-Nusra claimed responsibility for the attack. “We will spare no effort to strike you in your heartlands and you will pay the price of your continuous crimes against the Sunni community and your attacks against their holy sites in the land of Sham (Syria and Lebanon),” a statement published on the Twitter account of Jabhat al-Nusra’s Qalamoun branch, addressing its threat to Lebanon's Alawites, Hezbollah and “their allies” (Naharnet, 2015). Fugitive Shadi al-Mawlawi and Osama Mansour were among the 28 people indicted for the bombing (Naharnet, 2015). Osama Mansour was killed in Tripoli in April 2015, at a police checkpoint as the officers mistook him for another wanted Salafi jihadist sheikh (The Daily Star, 2015).