"...Abu Ahmad admits that he is no innocent victim of last year’s fighting, which killed dozens of people in the aftermath of the sectarian violence that swept Lebanon last spring and continued most of the summer in the country’s second largest city. He led a militia of his own against his neighbours just a few hundred meters away. “We have hated the Syrians since 1985 when they came into Tripoli and killed more than 1,200 civilians in the fighting with the [Palestinian Liberation Organisation, then based outside Tripoli],” he remembers. “I worked for the Red Cross then and I saw the unarmed women and children the Syrian Army and their allies here murdered. We cannot forgive this, so last summer we defended our homes.”...Tripoli was the scene of much of the violence, even if the fighting between the adjacent neighbourhoods – Sunnis in Beb al Tibani and Allawite in Jabal al Mousen – was often overlooked because of higher profile clashes in Beirut....... The Lebanese Army now keeps the two sides apart by putting its soldiers in the line of fire between the two neighbourhoods, which are separated by the ironically named “Syria Street”, but the militants who took to the streets last summer now say the economic costs of the fighting were too much for the poorest community in Lebanon to bear.
That take on the situation means, according to Mr Zoubi, that hardly anyone can afford to fight and that the current economy relies on the elections, where young men are often hired to place political posters around the city.
“I have no job and neither do the Syrians,” said Mazen, an unemployed labourer who makes money by putting up posters for both the majority and opposition. “People all thought that if we fought the Syrians, we would be rewarded by our Sunni leaders,” he adds. “But now we never see them except on posters. Why don’t they help us with the jobs we lost while fighting for
them? That’s why I will put up posters from both sides as long as they pay.”
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