After what seemed like a fairly inflammatory speech by some political big cheese at the end of the otherwise-uneventful funeral of the recently assassinated Brig. Gen. Wissam al-Hassan, an odd combo of hard-line Sunni and right-wing Christian groups (for anyone wondering why these two make odd bedfellows check here) made a rush for the Serail (the Lebanese government's Whitehall, I guess) and had it out with the army and police who were guarding it. Sticks and stones versus tear gas wasn't really a fair fight, but I guess they started it. As an aside, for any one with a stuffy head, tear gas, it seems, is great for clearing sinuses once you get passed the whole retching confusion thing.
A new sight for me at the Sunni anti-Assad protests in Tripoli (that'll be the Lebanese one) on Friday was a small female contingent, albeit separated from the male demonstrators by a rather stern chaperone.
Following the protests, fighting erupted between militias in two neighbouring yet warring districts of the city. The hardline Sunni/Salafi and Alawite communities have been at each others' throats since the civil war but things are heating up here as it's now a sectarian microcosm for the fighting across the border in Syria. More about that from the tweets of the talented Mr. Joshua Woodhere and the BBC. Sadly I filed too late too make the Reuters deadline, dammit.
Apologies for the watermarks but it's still an ongoing news story and bloggers are fond of stealing pictures and not attributing them.
A sunni milita man runs beneath a Free Syrian Army flag as he heads toward the fighting.
Streets empty as gunfire rings out.
Tripoli residents cautiously peer down the street at Bab al-Tabbaneh, the Sunni neighbourhood involved in the fighting.
Islamist groups in Tripoli – Lebanon's northern city – have been staging protests against the Syrian regime for a while but tonight marked their first demonstration in Beirut. The protesters apparently clashed with a pro-Assad crowd early on in the event but were soon parted by a heavy security presence. There's a good report of how the evening played out here.
Assad supporters do their best to out-shout the Islamist demonstration, separated by lines of security forces.
A pro-democracy protester faces off against angry residents in the Cairo neighbourhood of Abbasiyah
Egypt's revolution took a sorry turn on Saturday (July 23) night. Some thousand demonstrators left Tahrir Square and marched toward the headquarters of SCAF, the military council currently not doing the greatest job in the world of governing post-Mubarak Egypt. The march was stopped by lines of soldiers behind barbed wire out side Noor Mosque in the neighbourhood of Abbasiyah. Around half an hour after the unstoppable force of the marchers met the immovable object of the military barricade, the inevitable occurred.
I didn't see who threw what first, but soon enough the Tahrir crowd were embroiled in running street battles with local Abbasiyah residents, angered by the demonstrators' presence and apparently bolstered by the infamous 'baltigia' thugs. Rocks, bottles and bricks rained down from the surrounding rooftops and side streets as the Tahrir protestors responded in kind: trashing cars, store fronts and probably homes in the process. There may have been more protesters in Tahrir following the events of Saturday night than there had been for a while, but this seemed like no way to fix the waning popularity on the Jan 25th movement. As a doctor spectating from the neighbouring hospital said to my colleague Remco Andersen of the Dutch paper Volkskrant for whom we were both on assignment in Egypt: "Egyptians fighting Egyptians. What a mess this has become."
Given the fairly firm grip Syria still holds over Lebanon, it was only a matter of time before the unrest there found its way across the border. Today a number of Syrians in Beirut took to the streets in support of Bashar Assad's regime; two protests organised somewhat provocatively in strong Sunni areas saw violence - one demonstrator was shot in the stomach in a drive by shooting, at a second protest demonstrators were set upon by onlookers. I caught up with a around 150 protestors who were yelling Assad's praises outside the Syrian embassy. After around an hour they then proceeded to march all the way back to Dora, where they'd come from this morning.
Exhaustive counting of the protestors who turned out today to mark their displeasure with Lebanon's sectarian malaise numbered roughly between 'rather a lot' and 'bloody loads'. It's good to see this movement gaining momentum but sadly any viable alternative to the confessional system of (mis)governance that has been slowly poisoning this country for far too many years seems far from clear.
Here's a sneaky preview of the feature by Josh Wood and I which Esquire Middle East will be running next month. I'm quite looking forward to seeing this one in the flesh, as it were.
These pictures are from a Pro-Muabrak demonstration Josh Wood and I ran into last Wednesday morning, our second day in Cairo. These boys sure loved their President and filled Mohandaseen square, across the river from Tahrir, in what we were told time and time again was an effort to show the world that there was no united Egyptian voice calling for the end of Mubarak's regime.
The protest was vast and there were a huge number of legitimate demonstrators; many whom I spoke to were all-out in favor of Mubarak, like this lady here...
But there was also an element who thought that whilst he should not stand at the next election, if Mubarak were to leave immediately as per the Tahrir protester's demands, then the country would face even deeper chaos. "We don't want to be like Iraq" was one sentiment repeated over and over.
However, compared to the demonstrations in Tahrir the previous day, there was clearly far more tension, particularly aimed toward myself and Josh – who found many a shady Mukhabarat man lurking behind him whilst he spoke to members of the crowd. For every time I was stopped and often told to take peoples picture, there were those who were fairly adamant that I shouldn't be there at all.
This anti-foreign sentiment, seeded by a relentless campaign on state television that 'Israeli agitators' were posing as Western journalists, led to the somewhat crazy situation myself and Josh found ourselves in on Thursday, which eventually led to us leaving the country. Still, I managed to get a ton of stuff in the few brief days I was lucky enough to witness one of the most interesting events of recent years and I'll be getting up here as soon as I can, before y'all start saying "Sam, shut the f*ck up about Egypt."
It took a few hours of persistence to get into Tahrir square this evening, but I made it eventually. By the time I arrived, the anti-Mubarak protesters had barricaded the street by the Egyptian Museum just north of the square, using metal sheets and burned out vehicles. The protesters rained a literal hail of stones upon the pro-Mubarak 'demonstrators' – some of whom were captured and found to have security service ID's and are largely believed to be a government orchestrated 'rent-a-mob' – who had attempted to take Tahrir square earlier in the afternoon.
The traffic must have been two way - I was taken to a make shift hospital in a precinct beside the square where doctors were treating a stream of injured demonstrators.
Tonight it really felt like the Tahrir demonstrators were fighting for their survival - many of the pro-Mubarak crowd were believed to be armed with sticks, knives and such. It sounds corny to repeat, but one old guy smashing up kerbststones to be thrown said: "We are doing this for our freedom." He looked me straight in the eye and meant every word. It sent shivers up my spine.
