Northern Lebanon Rocked by Bomb Attacks
By HWAIDA SAAD, BEN HUBBARD and DAVID JOLLY
Omar Ibrahim/Reuters
A
body was carried near a mosque after explosions in Lebanon.
Explosions outside two Sunni mosques in Tripoli killed more than two
dozen people, an escalation of violence in a nation deeply unsettled by
the war in neighboring Syria.
The Lede: Images of Bomb Blast and Aftermath in LebanonNorthern Lebanon Rocked by Bomb Attacks
Published: August 23, 2013
TRIPOLI, Lebanon — Car bombs exploded with catastrophic force outside
two Sunni mosques in this northern Lebanon city on Friday as many
worshipers were leaving prayers, killing dozens of people and wounding
hundreds. The bombings were a major escalation of sectarian violence in
Lebanon, a country deeply unsettled by the conflict in neighboring
Syria, and reinforced fears that the Middle East could be plunging into
unbridled Sunni vs. Shiite warfare.
Related
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The Lede: Images of Bomb Blast and Aftermath in Lebanon (August 23, 2013)
President Michel Suleiman cut short a visit abroad to meet with security
officials on the double blast and exhorted them to “deploy their
efforts to reveal the perpetrators and the instigators.” Lebanon’s prime
minister-designate, Tammam Salam, said in a statement that “the Tripoli
crime is an additional indicator that the situation in Lebanon has
reached a very dangerous level.”
Witnesses and Lebanese media said the double blast hit the Taqwa and
Al-Salam mosques, which are on opposite sides of the city, at around
1:38 p.m. Tripoli’s mayor, Nader Ghazal, was quoted by Lebanese news
media as saying at least 50 people were killed. The Lebanese Red Cross
said more than 500 were wounded.
The bombings easily eclipsed the death toll and destruction from a
bombing a week earlier in southern Beirut that had targeted Hezbollah,
the Shiite militant organization that has aligned with Syria’s
government against a Sunni-led insurgency, which has contributed to an
increasing polarization in Lebanon.
With deadly sectarian violence now regularly convulsing Iraq as well, a
broad area of the region stretching from the Mediterranean east to
Baghdad and beyond has become a battleground between Sunnis and Shiites,
the major Islamic sects. Political historians said the Tripoli bombings
would not go unanswered.
“This was an upping of the ante,” said Mona Yacoubian,
the senior Middle East adviser at the Stimson Center, a nonpartisan
research group in Washington. “I think we’re seeing the contours of this
arena forming in front of our eyes.”
The first car bomb hit about 50 yards from the gates of the Taqwa
mosque, setting dozens of cars and a nearby building on fire and
shattering the windows of surrounding buildings. The blast snapped the
trunks of palm trees and left a crater in the street that punctured a
water main, flooding the street. On the roof of the mosque’s entryways
sat the carcass of blown-up car that people nearby at the time said was
the bomb car, hurtled into the air by the blast.
The second blast near the Al-Salam mosque blasted a six-foot-deep hole
in the asphalt and shattered the windows of apartment towers down the
block.
There were no immediate claims of responsibility for the blasts, but the
Taqwa mosque was where Sheik Salem al-Rafei, an outspoken Sunni
preacher, had inveighed against Hezbollah and had exhorted worshipers to
support the Sunni insurgency trying to topple Syria’s president, Bashar
al-Assad.
Many Taqwa worshipers said they believed their mosque had been targeted
because of Sheik Rafei. A large banner hung on the mosque’s fence bore
photographs of three men killed in the battle for the border city of
Qusayr, Syria, nearly three months ago, in which Hezbollah fighters
joined the Syrian Army to defeat Sunni insurgents ensconced there in
what is widely viewed as a turning point in the Syria conflict. Text
next to their faces said they had been “martyred defending the dignity
and pride of the nation.”
Sheik Rafei was not hurt in the bombing, worshipers said, but efforts to contact him were not immediately successful.
One Taqwa worshiper, Saad al-Din Turkomani, 27, said he was inside the
mosque listening to Skeik Rafei preach when the explosion blew out the
windows and filled the hall with smoke. He said he saw the bombings as a
response to last week’s bombing in a Hezbollah stronghold in Beirut.
“It was a response to our sheik,” he said. “One from our side went to
them, so they sent two of theirs to us. They are making us pay the
price.”
Like most people in Tripoli, he expected more sectarian violence. “We
are entering a hard stage,” he said. “Things are lighting up between the
Sunni and the Shia.”
Denying responsibility, Hezbollah condemned the bombings. “These two
terrorist explosions come as a translation of the criminal plot that
seeks to sow the seeds of discord among the Lebanese and drag the
country to internal strife under the headline of sectarianism and
religious differences,” the group said in a statement. Accusing unnamed
foreign forces of backing the attacks, it said such mayhem benefited
“the evil regional international plan that wants to break up our region
and drown it in oceans of blood and fire.”
Video of the scenes broadcast just minutes after the attacks showed
thick smoke billowing across Tripoli, a Mediterranean port city. One
video clip posted on YouTube showed angry crowds converged outside the smoking Taqwa mosque.
Video by Fares Syria
A second video clip,
apparently from a security camera inside the Al-Salam mosque, showed
the precise moment of an enormous blast as worshipers were still
praying.
Video by lbcgroup
Since the uprising started in Syria more than two years ago, fighting in Lebanon has flared sporadically, with Tripoli a tinderbox
because of sectarian tensions similar to those across the border. The
recurring street fights pit Sunni Muslims, who support the Syrian
uprising, against members of the Alawite sect, an offshoot of Shiite
Islam to which Mr. Assad belongs.
Israel C
laims ‘Successful Hit’ in Southern Lebanon
By ISABEL KERSHNER
The military said it bombed “a terrorist site” early Friday, a response
to four rockets that were fired into Israel the previous day.
Russia Urges Syria to Cooperate in Chemical Weapons Inquiry
By DAVID JOLLY
Moscow said it was now up to the opposition to guarantee safe access for
United Nations investigators to examine the site of a suspected
chemical weapons attack near Damascus.
COPY http://www.nytimes.com/
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