Word: sunni
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...Last week the Lebanese army failed to stop Hizballah from closing down Beirut and much of the rest of Lebanon. The Shi'ite organization made sure everyone knows it can take Beirut, historically a Sunni city, whenever it wants. The rioting that followed will be to Hizballah's benefit, since it thrives on chaos...
...Lebanon's political crisis has slowly intensified since last December when the Hizballah-led opposition launched its campaign to unseat the Western-backed government of Prime Minister Fouad Siniora. A general strike earlier in the week had turned violent, with rival Christian factions battling north of Beirut, while Sunni government supporters and Shi'ite partisans of the opposition fought each other with stones and clubs...
...always so: Indeed, the Sunni-Shi'ite hostility in Lebanon is a new phenomenon, now overshadowing the more traditional Christian-Muslim divide. When Lebanon gained independence from France in 1943, the Shi'ites were confined mainly to the impoverished rural south and east, politically and economically marginalized by the Christian and Sunni elite in the coastal cities and ruled over by a handful of feudal landlords...
...time through his Amal (Arabic for "hope") movement. Hizballah was born with Iranian assistance in the early 1980s, to resist Israel's occupation of Lebanon. And by the 1990s, the dynamism of Hizballah and the demographic advantage of the Shi'ites had begun to eat away at the historical Sunni dominance of Lebanon's Muslim communities...
...Lebanon's political fault lines today tend to follow sectarian boundaries, with the Shi'ites overwhelmingly following the Hizballah-led opposition, while the majority of Sunnis back the government and the Future Tide movement of Saad Hariri, Rafik's son and political heir. The tension between the two camps also mirrors the broader Shi'ite-Sunni political rift throughout the Arab world that has been rekindled by the Iraq conflict. The chief protagonists in this new "cold war," as some analysts describe it, are Shi'ite Iran and Saudi Arabia, the leader of the Sunni Arab world...