Arming Tripoli’s Fighters. Demand, not Supply.

I’ve been in Tripoli for a week now and I’ve gotten a pretty good exposure, through discussions at family gatherings and conversations with random people in shops and on the streets, to rumors and speculations about the situation in the city.

Who’s buying those expensive toys? The answer may surprise you

Change of Paradigm.

My overriding quest was to find an answer to the question I asked in a previous post: Who is arming Lebanon’s Sunni fighters? The important answer I found is not a neat list of people and parties who are funding the armed men, but a way of thinking about the situation that is a better theoretical model for understanding and analyzing what’s going on.

The general assumption in my previous posts was that powerful politicians and regional interests are showering people with arms and money to reach their own nefarious (or heroic depending on how you see it) ends. What I found out is that the dynamic is in reverse: It is the people who are clamoring for weapons, and Sunni politicians who are seeking popularity in a competitive field are obliging.

One sect, one enemy, different sponsors

As Mirella Hodeib reports in the Daily Star today (I strongly encourage you to read that report), the fighters are not driven by political affiliations or loyalties to individual zaïms, but by a deeply-held Sunni communitarianism that sees itself as the bulwark against the advancement of Alawis (the Assad regime) and Shiaas (Hezbollah). Their fighters are decentralized and have different loyalties, but they are bound together in a honor system in which Sunnis don’t shoot at each others and focus on their common adversary. According to one fighter:

There’s a kind of implicit agreement that intra-fighting among Sunnis is strictly forbidden […] As long as you don’t point your gun at your own people, I’ve got nothing to do with you and your political affiliations don’t interest me

Hodeib reports of men who are selling their lands to buy weapons, of people responsible of distributing humanitarian aid who are using the money instead to buy weapons. One such person is Khaled al-Ali, the man who distributes aid on behalf of Mikati’s Azm (عزم) foundation to the restive neighborhoods of Qibbeh and Riva. Al-Ali is also a known military commander in that neighborhood.

The curious case of Najib Mikqati.

What appears to be a counter-intuitive fact, that Mr. Miqati the Lebanese prime minister who is allied with Hezbollah, is funding anti-Hezbollah Sunni fighters, intersects with what people in the city have been telling me. Many people are confident that Miqati is doing a big part of the financing. Tripoli is a small town, and this kind of smoke must have some fire.

Mr. Miqati is having it both ways. He has the reputation of arming the Sunnis against their enemies, which gives him street-cred in the Sunni street. But he also has plausible deniability to keep his reputation with moderates and the international community. He can always blame “rogue” elements in the Azm foundation of financing the fighters behind his back, while reminding us of the charity work in education and health that his foundation undertakes.

If this sounds familiar, it’s because it is. Many have accused the ex Prime Minister Rafik Hariri of playing a similar role during the Lebanese civil war (arming fighters and educating people at the same time). Mr. Miqati might be much more ambitious than we think.