Street battles between pro and anti-Syrian groups in Beirut overnight left two people dead, a security official said yesterday, sparking fears the conflict in Syria is spilling across the border into Lebanon.
“During the night, groups of young men cut off the road in the Tareek el-Jdideh district and street battles followed,” the official said, requesting anonymity.
“Two people were killed and 18 were wounded,” he said, adding that machineguns had been fired and that the fighting had raged until about 3am.
An office housing a small pro-Syrian party was torched during the clashes and the facade of the building was riddled with bullets, a correspondent said.
Several motorcycles and cars parked on the street below were burned.
The situation in the mainly Sunni district of west Beirut had returned to calm yesterday morning and students could be seen heading on foot to the nearby Beirut Arab University.
The fighting erupted after reports emerged that army troops had shot dead an anti-Syria Sunni cleric when his convoy failed to stop at a checkpoint in northern Lebanon on Sunday.
CLASHES
The cleric’s killing followed a week of intermittent clashes that left 10 people dead in the northern Lebanese port city of Tripoli between Sunnis hostile to the Syrian regime and Alawites who support Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
The Alawite sect is an offshoot of Shiite Islam to which al-Assad belongs and which has controlled Syrian politics for decades.
The violence in Lebanon has raised fears of a repeat of sectarian unrest in 2008 that pitted Sunnis against Shiites and brought the country close to civil war.
POLITICAL PARTIES
The revolt in Syria has exacerbated a deep split between Lebanon’s political parties where the opposition backs those leading the uprising against al-Assad, while a ruling coalition led by the powerful Shiite Hezbollah supports the regime.
The opposition has accused al-Assad of seeking to sow chaos in Lebanon to relieve the pressure on his embattled regime.
OMINOUS WARNINGS
Lebanese newspapers yesterday carried ominous headlines warning of civil strife.
“Lebanon boils after sheikh killing,” the front-page headline in the Daily Star said.
The English-language paper warned in an editorial that the killing of the Muslim cleric on Sunday and other recent incidents had further inflamed tensions linked to the Syria unrest.
“These ingredients create a recipe for the possibility in Lebanon of civil or sectarian strife, the likelihood of which some have been warning about for a while now,” the editorial said.
The French-language L’Orient-Le-Jour stated in its headline: “Lebanon forcibly dragged into the Syrian storm.”
“The destabilization of Lebanon, with the Syrian crisis as a background, is ongoing,” it added.
Syria long held sway in Lebanese politics and had troops stationed in the country for 29 years until it was forced to withdraw them in 2005 following the assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq Hariri.
It has denied accusations that it was involved in his killing.
Kehinde Sanni spends his days smoothing out dents and repainting scratched bumpers in a modest autobody shop in Lagos. He has never left Nigeria, yet he speaks glowingly of Burkina Faso military leader Ibrahim Traore. “Nigeria needs someone like Ibrahim Traore of Burkina Faso. He is doing well for his country,” Sanni said. His admiration is shaped by a steady stream of viral videos, memes and social media posts — many misleading or outright false — portraying Traore as a fearless reformer who defied Western powers and reclaimed his country’s dignity. The Burkinabe strongman swept into power following a coup in September 2022
‘FRAGMENTING’: British politics have for a long time been dominated by the Labor Party and the Tories, but polls suggest that Reform now poses a significant challenge Hard-right upstarts Reform UK snatched a parliamentary seat from British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s Labor Party yesterday in local elections that dealt a blow to the UK’s two establishment parties. Reform, led by anti-immigrant firebrand Nigel Farage, won the by-election in Runcorn and Helsby in northwest England by just six votes, as it picked up gains in other localities, including one mayoralty. The group’s strong showing continues momentum it built up at last year’s general election and appears to confirm a trend that the UK is entering an era of multi-party politics. “For the movement, for the party it’s a very, very big
ENTERTAINMENT: Rio officials have a history of organizing massive concerts on Copacabana Beach, with Madonna’s show drawing about 1.6 million fans last year Lady Gaga on Saturday night gave a free concert in front of 2 million fans who poured onto Copacabana Beach in Rio de Janeiro for the biggest show of her career. “Tonight, we’re making history... Thank you for making history with me,” Lady Gaga told a screaming crowd. The Mother Monster, as she is known, started the show at about 10:10pm local time with her 2011 song Bloody Mary. Cries of joy rose from the tightly packed fans who sang and danced shoulder-to-shoulder on the vast stretch of sand. Concert organizers said 2.1 million people attended the show. Lady Gaga
SUPPORT: The Australian prime minister promised to back Kyiv against Russia’s invasion, saying: ‘That’s my government’s position. It was yesterday. It still is’ Left-leaning Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese yesterday basked in his landslide election win, promising a “disciplined, orderly” government to confront cost-of-living pain and tariff turmoil. People clapped as the 62-year-old and his fiancee, Jodie Haydon, who visited his old inner Sydney haunt, Cafe Italia, surrounded by a crowd of jostling photographers and journalists. Albanese’s Labor Party is on course to win at least 83 seats in the 150-member parliament, partial results showed. Opposition leader Peter Dutton’s conservative Liberal-National coalition had just 38 seats, and other parties 12. Another 17 seats were still in doubt. “We will be a disciplined, orderly
RSS