Word: hizballah
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Surrounded by a ring of mountains like a concert band shell, Beirut has great acoustics. So the roiling street battles on May 8 between Hizballah militiamen and supporters of the Lebanese government echoed through the city with a drumroll of rocket explosions and a chorus of machine-gun fire that sounded like the symphonic overture to civil war. When an early-summer thunderstorm began that night, it seemed as if the heavens themselves were taking up the ominous theme...
...next morning, the battle for Beirut was mostly over. After just six hours of all-out fighting, Hizballah militants were in control of areas of West Beirut that had previously been the government's preserve. This made for some incongruous scenes. Bearded men with rifles and rocket launchers secured lingerie shops and a Starbucks in the commercial Hamra district. Elsewhere, they surrounded the houses of ministers and members of Parliament and watched buses evacuate students from the American University of Beirut. "It was like a field trip for us," said a Hizballah fighter standing on the Corniche, the city...
...Hizballah's victory was hardly a surprise. Its Shi'ite militiamen, who number in the thousands and are armed by Syria and Iran, have survived battle with the mighty Israeli army, while the supporters of Prime Minister Fouad Siniora's government are poorly armed amateurs on neighborhood patrol. Neither the police nor the military--which has received hundreds of millions of dollars in arms and training from the U.S.--dared to lift a finger against Hizballah. Long after the militiamen had withdrawn from the streets, the army said it would intervene in any ongoing clashes but added that it would...
...ended with the Shi'ites demanding that Jumblatt's Druze forces must turn over all their medium and heavy weapons. "We want everything from rocket-propelled grenade launchers and up," says Hussam Asrawi, a senior official with the Syrian Social Nationalist Party, a secular opposition party and ally of Hizballah. But Jumblatt has signaled some defiance, saying that he is willing to yield his weapons to the Lebanese army, but "our dignity is important and the people of the [Chouf] will not allow anyone to enter their homes...
...Druze are legendary for their ferocity in defending their traditional mountain stronghold in the Chouf. It was reported that some Druze supporters of the Hizballah coalition even switched sides in the battles to join Jumblatt's men against the Shi'ites of Hizballah - politics suddenly taking a backseat to deeper feelings of loyalty to the clan and sect and unity against the outsider. "We are believers in peace and co-existence, but we will not accept any aggression against us," said Shawki Zeidan, a veteran Druze militia commander who led some 300 fighters against Hizballah on a 6,000-foot...