The Lebanese security cabinet said after a meeting on Monday that the country’s army will fight until it “finishes with” a radical Sunni sheikh whose supporters have clashed with troops, killing 17 soldiers.
“The army has a duty… to continue its operations until it finishes with the armed men, brings [Shaikh Ahmad Al Assir’s] headquarters under control and arrests the army’s attackers,” the statement said.
Lebanese soldiers fought Sunni Islamist gunmen in the southern city of Sidon for a second day on Monday in one of the deadliest outbreaks of violence fuelled by sectarian rifts over the civil war in neighbouring Syria.
A Lebanese security source said that a ceasefire had been agreed between the two sides on Monday afternoon and the sound of gunfire died down. The army remained in their positions around the mosque complex.
Al Assir’s brother said that the cleric and his supporters were inside Abra’s Bilal Bin Rabah mosque, where Al Assir preaches, with the National News Agency saying the army was “metres” away.
“There has been a decision taken to finish us off, but we’re resisting up until now,” Amjad Al Assir told AFP by phone. “Sheikh [Al] Assir will stay in the mosque until the last drop of blood.”
The army said 12 soldiers had been killed in clashes that broke out on Sunday after security forces detained a follower of the hardline Sunni Muslim cleric Al Assir. His supporters retaliated by opening fire on an army checkpoint.
The army pledged to crush Al Assir’s forces, accusing them of trying to plunge Lebanon into a repeat of its 1975-1990 civil war. Contagion from the Syrian conflict has already exploded into deadly street fighting in the northern city of Tripoli and rocket attacks in Beirut and the Bekaa Valley.
Security sources put the army death toll at 17, with 65 wounded. It was not possible to verify casualties among Al Assir’s fighters, although the security sources said they believed more than 20 of his men were also killed. One said Al Assir himself was wounded.
Lebanon’s commissioner to the military court Judge Sakr Sakr said that Al Assir had been summoned “to be put on trial, along with 123 of his followers, including his brother and Fadil Shaker,” a prominent Lebanese singer who abandoned his career to join Al Assir’s ultraconservative group.
“Come and save your people, who are being massacred,” said an appeal on Al Assir’s Twitter account on Monday, apparently calling on other hardline Sunni Islamists, as sectarian clashes spread through the Middle east.
Sidon had been on edge since violence erupted last week between Sunni and Shiite fighters, at odds over the Syrian conflict, which pits mainly Sunni rebels against President Bashar Al Assad, who is a member of the country’s minority Alawite sect, an offshoot of the Shiite faith.
Tensions escalated when the Lebanese Shiite militant group Hezbollah sent fighters into Syria to lead the recapture of a strategic border town by Al Assad’s forces.
“The army has tried for months to keep Lebanon away from the problems of Syria and it ignored repeated requests for it to clamp down on Al Assir’s group,” the military command said in a statement on Sunday.
But Sunday’s violence “has gone beyond all expectations. The army was attacked in cold blood in an attempt to light the fuse in Sidon, just as was done in 1975,” it said, referring to the year that Lebanon’s own civil war began.
Al Assir, whose supporters accuse the army of giving cover to Hezbollah gunmen, called for people across the country to join him and demanded that “honourable” soldiers defect.
