Word: bekaa
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Walid Jumblatt, leader of Lebanon's Druze community and arch-foe of the militant Shi'ite Hizballah. And Lebanese long accustomed to a tradition of clan blood feuds immediately drew attention to the grievance of the Shamas family, a tough Shi'ite clan originally from a village in the Bekaa Valley in eastern Lebanon, some of whom live in the Ouzai slum quarter of southern Beirut. The Shamas clan lost one of its own, 29-year-old Adnan Shamas, in a sectarian riot in Beirut in January, and his brothers had subsequently told friends that they suspected members of Jumblatt...
...family went crazy with Adnan's death. I don't think it's over," said a friend of the Shamas clan who gave his name only as Jawad. Since Monday, friends say, some of the Shamas brothers have switched off their cell phones and gone into hiding. The uncompromising Bekaa clans are notoriously determined in matters of honor and revenge, which is why Hizballah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah took the unusual step of twice emerging from hiding to deliver personal pleas for restraint to the Shamas family. Hizballah is deeply worried that the political crisis created by the standoff between...
...Such views have little traction in the Shi'ite villages of the eastern Bekaa Valley where Toufeili lives. Local residents openly mock the stubborn cleric, accusing him of being on the payroll of Hizballah's opponents. Small wonder, then, that he rarely leaves his home, and that his bodyguard rarely leaves his side...
...garb of white turban and black full-length robe, and sports a thick white beard. His tiny black eyes, glinting like chips of anthracite, are almost hidden in the fleshy folds of his chubby, tanned face. A man of cast-iron principles, Toufeili is a product of the eastern Bekaa, an area notorious for its lawlessness, its feuding Shi'ite clans, smuggling and narcotics production. When Israel invaded Lebanon in June 1982, Toufeili was in Tehran and helped organize the deployment in Lebanon of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards who recruited and trained hundreds of young local Shi'ites to fight...
...odds with the younger and more pragmatic generation of Hizballah officials who gained prominence at the end of the Lebanese civil war in 1990. And he crossed swords with the Lebanese government in 1997 when he launched a campaign of civil disobedience to protest official neglect of the impoverished Bekaa. Toufeili insists he does not dwell on the past, and spends most of his time studying weighty tracts on Islamic jurisprudence. Yet one cannot help wondering what dark secrets swirl in his memory when he gazes out of his window at the imposing walls of the Sheikh Abdullah barracks down...