Deadly flare-up in Lebanon stokes Syria spillover fears

TRIPOLI, Lebanon: New clashes between pro- and anti-Syrian factions in the Lebanese city of Tripoli killed two people yesterday holing a fragile truce and stoking fears of a spillover of bloodshed, a security official said.
The deaths brought to 13 the number of people killed in factional fighting in the Mediterranean port city over the past five days. A further 86 people have been wounded.
A sniper killed Sunni cleric Sheikh Khaled Al-Baradei, 28, at dawn, sparking the flare-up between fighters from the anti-Syrian Sunni Muslim Qobbeh district and those from the neighboring pro-Damascus Alawite district of Jabal Mohsen, an AFP correspondent reported.
The militiamen exchanged rocket-propelled grenade as well as small arms fire in the two neighborhoods in the east of the city, Lebanon’s second largest, sparking several large blazes, the correspondent reported.
Families hammered holes through the walls of their apartments to escape to safety down makeshift ladders as the clashes raged.
A journalist and a technician from Sky News Arabia were slightly hurt by stray bullets near the Sunni Bab Al-Tebbaneh neighborhood, another scene of recent clashes on the city’s northern outskirts, medical sources said.
The fighting continued until around 8:30 a.m. (0530 GMT) when militiamen on both sides pulled back from the frontline and a fragile calm returned.
Earlier this week, hundreds of soldiers with tanks and military vehicles deployed on the aptly named Syria Street — which acts both as the dividing line between Sunni Bab Al-Tebanneh and Alawite Jabal Mohsen and as the frontline when fighting erupts.
A wave of kidnappings preceded the latest round of violence and rattled the already fragile security situation in Lebanon, which lived under three decades of Syrian domination.