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Sleiman Jaafar's smiling, thinly bearded face beams down from his "martyr's" portrait at the funeral procession inching its way along the narrow street in Qmatiyeh, a small village clinging to a mountainside overlooking Beirut. Handfuls of rice and pink and white rose petals hurled from windows and balconies shower the throng of mourners below. The funeral was a moment to absorb the human cost of the recent deadly clashes between Hizballah and the Lebanese government in which nearly 40 people are thought to have died. But it also generated a mix of seething anger, anxiety and an ominous...
...Jaafar was killed two days earlier - wounded by a sniper and executed with a bullet in the head, according to residents -during heavy clashes between Hizballah and the Druze followers of Walid Jumblatt, an arch-critic of the Shi'ite party, in the hills of the Aley district above Beirut. Because of the tensions, there must be no shooting in the air during the funeral procession, a Hizballah organizer instructs the mourners. "Save your bullets for the Israelis and the traitors," he adds, referring the supporters of the Western-backed government...
Qmatiyeh is one of two predominantly Shi'ite villages nestled in a mainly Druze area at the northern end of the Chouf mountains. The village's isolation from the densely Shi'ite-populated areas of southern Beirut, clearly visible from here and where Hizballah holds sway, is a source of unease for the residents who look to the Shi'ite group for protection. "I don't think it's calm enough yet to feel confident," says Hussam Najjar, a criminal court magistrate. With his pressed gray suit, blue tie, sunglasses and neatly trimmed mustache, Najjar looked out of place among...
Sources close to Hizballah said that dozens of the group's fighters deployed from southern Beirut to the Qmatiyeh area on Monday night, taking up position in the woods and dense undergrowth surrounding the village to protect its residents from Druze incursions. Hizballah is thought to have lost 13 fighters in the battle with the Druze militants, a significant number for one of the world's most professional guerrilla armies. Hizballah militants told TIME that the Druze fighters had fought them from dug-in positions prepared well in advance of last week's outbreak of violence between the supporters...
Much rests on the outcome of an arbitration effort by a delegation of Arab foreign ministers set to begin in Beirut Wednesday. But few hold out much hope that the Arab delegation will succeed where months of Arab and international mediation to end the 18-month political crisis have led nowhere. "The negotiations are failing. The fighting will continue," predicts Asrawi of the SSNP...