Hezballah makes war on Sunnies in Lebanon

NY Times:

For two and a half days, Hussein al-Haj Obaid lay on the floor of a darkened warehouse in west Beirut, blindfolded and terrified. Militiamen loyal to Hezbollah had kidnapped him at a checkpoint after killing his nephew right in front of him.

Throughout those awful days, as his kidnappers kicked and punched him, applied electrical shocks to his genitals and insulted him with sectarian taunts, he could hear the chatter of gunfire and the crash of rocket-propelled grenades outside, where Hezbollah and its allies were taking control of the capital.

He returned to this northern village only after family members won his release just over a week ago by threatening the kidnappers with retaliation. By that time Mr. Obaid, a Sunni Muslim, had gained a whole new way of seeing his Shiite countrymen and his native land.

“We cannot go back to how we lived with them before,” he said as he sat with relatives and friends at home here. “The blood is boiling here. Every boy here, his blood is boiling. They push us, they push us, they push us.”

Those feelings are being echoed throughout Lebanon. After almost a week of street battles that left scores dead and threatened to push the country into open war, long-simmering Sunni-Shiite tensions here have sharply worsened, in an ominous echo of the civil conflict in Iraq.

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... after Hezbollah supporters humiliated Lebanon’s main Sunni political leader, Saad Hariri — crushing his weak militia, forcing his party’s television station off the air and burning two of his movement’s buildings — many of Mr. Hariri’s supporters were enraged, and they said they would look to another Sunni leader who would help them fight back.

That sentiment has stirred fears that moderate, secular Sunni leaders like Mr. Hariri could lose ground to more radical figures, including the jihadists who thrive in Lebanon’s teeming Palestinian refugee camps. Fatah al Islam, the radical group that fought a bloody three-month battle with the Lebanese Army in a refugee camp in northern Lebanon last year, issued a statement Thursday condemning Hezbollah’s actions. The group also gave a warning: “He who pushes our faces in the dirt must be confronted, even if that means sacrificing our lives and shedding blood.”

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The Washington Post reports:

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... the new calculus in Lebanon, where tension is combustible and diversity is claustrophobic, may prove that Hezbollah's victory was Pyrrhic, as it inherits a country whose sectarian and political contradictions suggest another civil war ahead.

Even its supporters cringed at the sight of Shiite militiamen sipping coffee at Starbucks, their rocket-propelled grenade launcher resting in a chair. Tension between Sunnis and Shiites echoes the sectarian divide in Iraq. And across Lebanon, a crisis that remains unresolved even now has inspired revulsion in a country that has only rarely been a state over its short, often nasty, usually brutish history.

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You have to remember that this is more about Iran than Lebanon. Hezballah is Iran's proxy army in Lebanon and Iran pulls the strings. The Hezballah action may have had pretexts in Lebanon politics but it coincided with a butt kicking Iranian forces were getting in Iraq and it served a purpose of distracting from that defeat in Basra and Sadr City. The tenuous hold that the religious bigots have on Iran would have looked much more fragile if they had on the news from Iraq to contend with.