Hizbullah will sign on Monday a memorandum of understanding with 15 Sunni Salafist groups in a step aimed at easing Sunni-Shiite tensions and banning the use of violence to settle political disputes between Shiite and Sunni political parties. Hizbullah's information department said on Saturday that the agreement would be inked at 10 a.m. on Monday at the Safir Heliopolitan Hotel in Beirut. News reports on Sunday said that Hizbullah and the Salafist groups had agreed to the move after a series of recent meetings between representatives of different Salafist groups and Hizbullah's leadership. In a related development, a Salafist delegation visited Future Movement MP Samir Jisr at his residence in Tripoli to brief him on the content of the memo. Salafist figure Hassan Shahhal said after meeting Jisr that the relations between Salafist groups and the Future Movement of parliamentary majority leader Saad Hariri would not change because of the deal with Hizbullah. "Our relation with our brothers in the Future Movement will not be affected by signing this understanding ... We assure everybody that the Sunnis will remain united," he said.
Shahhal added that all Salafist groups believed in dialogue as a way to sort out political disputes.
For his part, Jisr said that the Future Movement had prior knowledge of the meetings that were taking place between Hizbullah and different Salafist groups. "We welcome such a move," he said. "We are against violence and we repeatedly said that most Salafist groups are also against violence," he added.