Saad Hariri basically looked defeated and decided for defusing tensions when he said that the governmental decisions shall be left to Army Commander Suleiman, who will probably refrain from widening the schism with the opposition & will keep Gen. Wafik Shouqayr in post... all the rest are details! Where is Waldo? (aka. Fuad Siniora) And now the rhetorical question: Why these decisions? Why Now?
Judah Grunstein said "...what jumped out at me from this AP report is that Hezbollah's private telecommunications network that triggered the confrontation is a "secure network of primitive private land lines [that] helped the guerrillas fight Israel's high-tech army in the 2006 summer war." Of course,an asymmetric communications capacity makes sense in the age of tracable satellite links, especially for an insurgent force playing on its "home field." But for some reason, it got me thinking about carrier pigeons."
3 comments:
will the situation de-escalate?
and do you have any sense of what actually happened today?
was the figting spontaneous after nasrallah's speech? or was there some kind of battle plan? which groups were fighting?
were hezbollah fighters actually fighting? did the hariri militia get beaten?
i just spent 24 hours between barbur and tariq al mazaraa, stuck on the front lines with a small group of amal fighters who were shooting RPGs for 12 hours and emptying all their ammunition into the other side on tariq al jadida, which was mostly sniping from buildings across the street. we were actually in a mostly sunni neighborhood but most of the residents had fled and shiites from barbur and dahyeh came down and seized control of the streets. in the morning thursday the amal fighters told us to stay because we would get to see action. just before nasrallah's speech the lebanese army which had been dividing the two sides fucking disappeared.
there were several men in the gray internal security forces uniforms fighting on our side alongside the amal and hizb guys, they were security for the parliament, they said, and confiscated the memory chips from the cameras of the photographers there and even took film from al jazeera
amal had a lot more power on the street than anybody expected, but there were hizballah guys fighting with them and coordinating them
i have so much to write but i'm heading back out to areas that are still contested
....A funny thing just happened. A group of armed guys, about seven of them, were tearing down all the Hariri posters, banners and ribbons on my street corner (I'm in a super March 14 area) but before they left, one asked the rest of the group if he should tear down the Adel Imam poster hanging there. The rest of the group laughed and said that he shouldn't tear it down. Then they left. Hamra's pretty quiet now. Still lots of shooting nearby but no more RPGs (I hope!). I feel safe, though. No one seems to be putting up a real fight in Hamra."
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