Tote bei schweren Unruhen in Beirut

Über schwere Unruhen in krisengeschüttelten Hauptstadt des Libanon berichtet der Guardian:

At least six people have died in Beirut’s worst street violence in 13 years, as hundreds of armed militia men took to the streets and much of the city was forced into lockdown by heavy fighting.

The bloody violence took on a sectarian tone that invoked images of the Lebanese civil war and alarmed residents who had long feared that the multiple crises ravaging the country could spark a deadly conflagration.

The trigger for the clashes in neighbourhoods near the justice courts, which left dozens more injured, was a protest by members of Amal and Hezbollah, two predominantly Shia political parties, against a judicial probe into the massive blast in the city’s port last year. (...)

Many of the residents in the neighbourhood where the shooting started support the blast investigation and view calls to end it as an attempt by one side of the country’s fractured politics to impose its dominance. Others view a termination of the investigation as a continuation of the political impunity that has plagued Lebanon and meant that crimes implicating its powerful brokers are almost never solved.

Interior minister Bassam Mawlawi said snipers had opened fire and aimed at people’s heads. All the dead were from one side, he said, meaning Shias. Politicians from the Shia blocs called for supporters to refrain from “being drawn further in” to fighting.

However, large numbers of men brandishing weapons took to the streets throughout the day, and gun trucks flying Hezbollah and Amal flags paraded through the Bekaa Valley in a show of strength not seen since Hezbollah overran west Beirut in May 2008 during a short-lived conflict with the Druze leader Walid Jumblatt.

Army trucks rumbled through otherwise empty Beirut streets on Thursday afternoon and ambulance sirens wailed as the injured were carried to nearby hospitals.

Chants of “Shia, Shia, Shia” were at times heard in areas near the frontline. In other areas, groups of Christian men and youths gathered on motorbikes.

As the fighting erupted children were taken from their classrooms in nearby schools and told to crouch in corridors, in scenes reminiscent of the conflict that ripped Lebanon apart between 1975 and 1990.