Fighting flares in northern and eastern Lebanon

05/11/08
    

BEIRUT, Lebanon - Heavy fighting broke out between pro- and anti-government supporters in northern Lebanon amid the country's power struggle, security officials said Sunday.

Beirut, for four days the focus of bloody sectarian clashes between Sunnis and Shiites, spent a quiet night. However, many of its roads remained blocked, including the one to the airport, by the ongoing civil disobedience campaign of the opposition.

The heaviest clashes took place in the northern city of Tripoli, where pro-government supporters in the Tebaneh neighborhood exchanged rocket propelled grenades and heavy machine gun fire with opposition followers in Jabal Muhsin, the officials said.

One woman was killed in the clashes, bringing the toll across the country for the past five days of violence to 38 — the worst sectarian violence since Lebanon's 1975-1990 civil war.

The fighting in the north intensified in the early hours Sunday but the situation calmed down later as Lebanese troops began deploying, said the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media.

At midday, Prime Minister Fuad Saniora and some of his ministers and staff members held a moment of silence at the government building in honor of people killed in the violence. A nearby downtown church tolled its bells to mark the moment.

Meanwhile, Muslim West Beirut has been mostly calm since Hezbollah and its allies seized control of many neighborhoods Friday from Sunnis loyal to the government.

In the eastern Bekaa Valley, sporadic clashes took place between the two groups in different towns and villages. The road leading to the main border crossing point with Syria was still closed by pro-government supporters in retaliation for the opposition's closure of the airport road.

Arab foreign ministers were to meet in Egypt on Sunday to try to find a solution to the latest deadly crisis.

The political standoff turned into clashes after the government confronted Hezbollah earlier in the week, saying it would sack the chief of airport security for alleged ties to Hezbollah and declared the group's private telephone network illegal and a threat to state security.

Saniora made a key concession to the Hezbollah-led opposition in a speech on Saturday, however, and the army afterward called for gunmen to withdraw from the streets of Beirut and reopen blocked roads.

Most Hezbollah gunmen complied, leaving just a handful of its armed allies on the streets.

The army had offered Hezbollah a compromise, saying the airport security chief would retain his post and it recommended to the government that it reverse the decision on the phone network.

Also on Sunday, Pope Benedict XVI urged the Lebanese people to find a "reasonable compromise" to end their conflict.

Benedict told pilgrims in St. Peter's Square that he was following "with deep concern" the developments in Lebanon, where, "with politicial initiative at a stalemate, first came verbal violence and then armed clashes, with many dead and wounded.

AP