Show your anger and cry for Tripoli..

He’s only 8 years old. He does not go to school. Despite his very early age, he works, all day long, giving a shine to the Tripolitan businessmen’s shoes, and injecting hope into his daily struggle to assist his family financially. He is one of many similar poor children in the streets of the capital of North Lebanon; but now he is unique, different.. He died today.. not because of an ever threatening hunger, but because he was killed in one of the harshest Baghdad-style explosions in the history of Tripoli.


But the unfortunate kid of Tripoli's Banks street did not leave this life alone: Nine hero soldiers from the Lebanese army in addition to nine civilian victims shared his bloody destiny.. As their passenger bus was crossing this usually-busy arterial of the "Tell" district, 1.5 kgs of TNT explosives diffused their hatred in a city that has witnessed continuous conflicts and tensions recently.


Today's martyrs join 23 other victims that died in the Sunni-Alawi clashes that dominated the Bab el Tebbaneh-Baal Mohsen areas few weeks ago. Some fundamentalist pockets in Tripoli grew an increasing hatred against the Lebanese National Army especially after the army's determined eradication of Fath el Islam movement from the Nahr el Bared Palestinian Refugee camp. There have been many attempts to demoralize the army -not only in Tripoli-, and today's attempt is another episode of this long Tripoli-based anti-armed forces drama. It is worth mentioning here that this week, veiled women were loudly protesting against keeping people who were arrested during the Nahr el Bared operations, in prisons "without real reasons or accusations, other than their belonging to Islam" - according to the protesters. Despite all that, the Lebanese authorities and the Lebanese army remained firm and maintained their presence in the North's capital with a solid commitment to keep peace and restore security all around the city.



The growing Salafi currents in Tripoli's poor pockets is a real concern for the whole spectrum of the city's political and influential figures. Tripoli's Mufti, Cheikh Malek el Chaar, did all his best to gather Tripolitan figures from all confessions in a unified stand against the danger threatening the city. The moderate Tripolitan political powers (Future Movement, Mohammed el Safadi's Tripolitan Bloc, Former PM Najib Mikati, MP Musbah el Ahdab and even Former PM Omar Karami) are the big losers amidst all this mess. Moderation is being slowly replaced by fundamentalism and agressivity in Tripoli. All the city's politicians and even its -moderate- religious figures are becoming increasingly powerless and their control over the situation became negligible. It is believed that Tripoli has Qaeda cells and members today, it is also believed that there are several Nahr el Bared-like pockets around the city. But who is supporting those, who is bringing them to the Lebanese North and who is turning Tripoli into Qandahar? The simplistic and superficial answer would accuse Sunni figures of empowering those terrorists in order to face the threat of Hezbollah's "shia weapons" that were used against the People of the Sunnah last May in Beirut. But given that the so-accused Sunni figures are all losing ground and control over Tripoli, this explanation cannot be a logical one. Moreover, burning the streets of one of the largest Sunni agglomerations of the country, killing many Sunni people, and attacking the Lebanese army are not what political powers who gave full political support and cover to the Lebanese Armed Forces against [again] the Sunnis of Nahr el Bared would do. Therefore, the Sunni political powers are all falling into a virtual accusatory trap in an attempt to divert the attention from the fact that when Sunnis were attacked in Beirut, they had no militia to defend them- They put all their trust and faith in the Lebanese Army.

But who would benefit from this negative picture of the Sunnis? In the heated debates that marked the parliamentary discussions of the Governmental declaration, there was particularly a loud and harsh exchange of comments between Tripoli's MP Musbah el Ahdab and Amal's MPs Ayyoub Hmayyed and Ali Hassan Khalil. Hmayyed was accused by Ahdab of favoring one side in Tripoli's latest conflicts- the Alawis of Baal Mohsen. Hezbollah's general sceretary Hassan Nasrallah had drawn red lines in front of the army's intervention inside Nahr el Bared's camp. The army was further targeted when some of its officers were condemend and trialled after having tried to put an end to a destabilizing demonstration in the Chiyah area by pro-March 8 supporters.

An interesting noticeable fact is that the Lebanese Shia community mainly supports a fundamentalist Shia entity: that is Hezbollah and its Wilayat el Fakih Iranian Khomeinist agenda; while the majority of the Sunnis of Lebanon, and despite their good relations with KSA for example, remain more under the moderate political umbrella of slogans such as "Lebanon First". The Tripoli changes are an attempt to turn the largely moderate Sunni image into a fundamentalist picture that would not leave Hezbollah as the lonely fundamentalist islamist "army" in the country. The Tripoli repetitive events are an attempt to plant Baghdad-like and Tekrit-like terrorist Qaeda sunni fundamentalists to counterbalance Hezbollah, the equivalent of Muqtada el Sadr's Mehdi Army on the shia end. Sad but true, there are continuous attempts to turn the Lebanese Summer 2008 paradise into a bloody Iraq.

In the meantime, President Michel Sleiman is having serious discussions in Damascus: diplomatic relations, mutual agreements and most importantly, the destinies of Lebanese prisoners in Syria are on the table. Tripoli's disaster was not the only attempt to destabilize President Sleiman's firm mission and clear goals; in fact, a very limited regime-orchestrated Syrian protest in front of the Syrian Ministry of the Interior gathered "parents and friends of Syrian workers who disappeared in Lebanon", in an attempt to reduce the pressure of the eternal file of Lebanese political prisoners in Syria. Those are expected moves from a regime that has always denied the presence of a sovereign and independent Lebanese Republic, a regime that oppresses whoever tries to speak against its actions, a regime that contributes to the destabilization of all its neighbors.

As long as people will easily bypass laws in Lebanon, there will always be 8-year old children working in the streets of Tripoli, and as long as regional interventions will keep on haunting our country, those children will not only be threatened by hunger - Explosions can burn their fragile lives anytime...