 Six people have been killed and 15 people wounded in Lebanon, according to security sources, as the country's political crisis threatened to spiral out of control.
| It's not a political crisis. It's a civil war. Hezbollah's been trying to kick it off for the past couple years. |
| Seems like it's the government, the March 14th part of it at least, that's actually provoking this one. The Hezbies don't have their usual support -- Auon can't get the Christians in the north to join in, for example. I'm beginning to wonder if the March 14th faction knows something we don't ... |
Fighting in Beirut intensified on Thursday, the second day of anti-government protests, after a speech by Hassan Nasrallah, the Hezbollah secretary-general, in which he called a government crackdown on the Shia group "tantamount to a declaration of war".
| So the rubes quite naturally rushed home to grab their RPGs... |
In several neighbourhoods across the capital automatic rifle fire could be heard as fighters in support of Hezbollah and the allied Amal group exchanged fire with pro-government fighters in the worst domestic fighting since the 1975-90 civil war. Clashes were reported to have broken out in other parts of the country, with another seven people reported injured in the Beqaa valley.
The Lebanese army did not participate in the fighting. But Robert Fisk, a journalist in Beirut, speaking to Al Jazeera, said that could change if the fighting escalated. "If we have a situation where one group of people move into another group's area - either Shia or Sunni - then the army may have to take much harsher measures and that immediately raises the question of 'what is the future of the Lebanese army', because it's made up of all the citizens of this country, not just one group or the other," Fisk said.
Gun battles
"The fighting seems to be spreading," reported James Bays, Al Jazeera's correspondent in Beirut. "It's something all the political parties said they wanted to avoid."
| Watch the hands, not the lips. Hezbollah's been truculent from the start. Nasrallah intended to set this off, in the expectation that Hezbollah's going to come out on top. He wants to be satrap. |
| But it's an existential fight this time: if Nastie fails he's out of a job and maybe out of a life. Nastie can't capitulate. |
Thursday's fighting occurred on Corniche Mazraa, a major thoroughfare in Beirut that has become a demarcation line between mainly Sunni and Shia neighbourhoods, and the nearby Ras el-Nabeh area. The violence later spread to Khandaq el-Ghamiq, adjacent to the centre of the city. Television footage showed armed and masked men taking cover on street corners next to shuttered shops.
| Yeah. I saw footage of some hard boy handing a gun to a guy in a blue suit, who stepped around the corner and blew off a few rounds toward Dog knows what. |
Shootings and explosions were also reported near the office of Aisha Bakkar, the Sunni spiritual leader allied with the government, and in Ein el-Tineh where the opposition-aligned parliament speaker has his official residence.
| PFLP-GC and its clones should be jumping in any time now, to add in the Paleo flavoring these affairs like. |
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