adminThe death of 28-year-old Sheikh Khaled al-Baradei on Friday brought to 17 the number of people killed in fighting in the city over the past five days and stoked fears of a spillover of major violence from the conflict in neighbouring Syria.
A further 86 people have been wounded.
The exchanges of rocket-propelled grenade and small arms fire pitted fighters from the anti-Syrian Sunni Muslim Qobbeh district against those from the neighbouring pro-Damascus Alawite district of Jabal Mohsen.
The intensity of the exchanges sparked large fires in the two neighbourhoods in the east of the Mediterranean port city, Lebanon’s second largest.
Al Jazeera’s James Bays reporting in Tripoli yesterday said: “The authorities have been trying to contain this trouble for five days, but the killing of the sheikh could change this.”
Families hammered holes through the walls of their apartments to escape to safety down makeshift ladders as the clashes raged.
Hundreds of soldiers with tanks and military vehicles have deployed on the aptly named Syria Street which acts both as the dividing line between the two districts and as the frontline when fighting erupts.
Several families displaced by the fighting had returned to the two districts on Thursday to inspect the damage to their homes, as a truce agreed on Wednesday had appeared to take hold.
“I can no longer cope with this situation. In my house I have got three families who have fled the violence,” said Ahmed Breiss, who runs a car workshop in Qobbeh. “We have nothing to do with what’s going on in Syria. We want to live in peace,” he said.
The authorities have instructed the army and security forces “to bring the situation under control, to prohibit any armed presence and to arrest those implicated” in the violence, he said in a statement.
A wave of kidnappings preceded the latest round of fighting and rattled the already fragile security situation in Lebanon, which lived under three decades of Syrian domination.
The United Nations has called for more international support for Lebanese authorities to prevent a spillover of the 17-month conflict in neighbouring Syria.
The latest unrest in Tripoli, which has been the scene of several deadly incidents over the past year, follows a wave of tit-for-tat kidnappings of Lebanese citizens in Syria and of Syrians living in Lebanon.
Meanwhile, the Syrian government has guaranteed Russia that it will not use or move its stockpiles of chemical weapons, the Russian foreign ministry’s point man on Syria has said.
Speaking in an interview on Thursday, Gennady Gatilov, the Russian deputy foreign minister, said that Moscow was working closely with Damascus to make sure its arsenal of chemical weapons remained securely in place.
The statement follows a warning from US President Barack Obama earlier this week that Washington might be forced to intervene in the Syrian civil war if the Damascus government were to utilise or move such weapons of mass destruction. Damascus has said it might use its chemical weapons if attacked by outsiders, although not against its own people.
But some activists have accused government forces of using chemical weapons to attack opposition-controlled cities and towns in its bid to crush the country’s 17-month popular uprising. The reports can not be confirmed due to restrictions on foreign journalists. — Al Jazeera.
Online Reporter