Blast heightens tension in Lebanon
An early morning explosion at an apartment building in the northern Lebanese city of Tripoli killed one person Saturday and injured 24 amid rising political and sectarian tensions in the country, a security source said.
Ambulances raced to remove casualties from the building, and troops flooded the area. Police officers reported sniper fire targeting rescue workers. Panicked residents fled into the street in their pajamas.
Officials offered no explanation for the 5:30 a.m. blast, which largely destroyed a six-story apartment building in the mostly Sunni Muslim coastal city’s poor Tabbaneh district. Lebanon’s state news agency attributed it to a bomb placed at the building’s entrance.
The explosion followed days of intense fighting in northern Lebanon between Sunnis who support the U.S.-backed government and members of the small Alawite sect allied with Syria and the Iranian-backed Shiite Muslim group Hezbollah. Those battles left nine people dead.
The upsurge in violence has alarmed analysts.
“It means that the situation might get worse over a long period of time,” said Fawaz Sankari, editor of Attamaddon, a Tripoli newspaper. “The problem is that there is a hodgepodge of fighters on the ground who are difficult to control.”
The Hezbollah-led opposition accused Sunnis in the north of sparking the violence by providing their supporters with weapons. But leaders of the pro-government Future Movement accused the heavily armed opposition of stirring up trouble.
“There is a clear intention from Hezbollah and its allies to keep the tension in the north,” said Mustafa Allouch, a lawmaker with the Future Movement. “Hezbollah is training its Alawite allies in the north militarily and providing them with arms and ammunition.”
The upsurge in violence comes as the political factions strive to reach an agreement over a national unity government. After months of political stalemate and small-scale outbreaks of violence, Hezbollah’s well-armed militia stormed mostly Sunni West Beirut last month, forcing the U.S.-backed factions into granting the group veto power over government decisions.
After talks in Doha, the capital of Qatar, former army chief of staff Michel Suleiman was named president of Lebanon and began the process of forming a new consensus government.
All political groups have agreed to not resort to violence to settle disputes, but talks over the naming of a Cabinet have stalled, leaving Lebanon once again in a perilous political vacuum and raising fear of renewed street clashes.
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Rafei is a special correspondent and Daragahi is a Times staff writer.
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