Hariri Offers to Help Renovate Tripoli's Syria Street

Al-Mustaqbal Movement leader MP Saad Hariri on Wednesday expressed willingness to offer financial aid aimed at conducting repair works in Tripoli's Syria Street, the scene of fierce clashes over the past years that left scores of casualties.

According to the Hariri-owned Future TV, the former premier sent a letter to Prime Minister Tammam Salam, offering a “grant to renovate Syria Street in Tripoli.”

The message was conveyed by Justice Minister Ashraf Rifi, who hails from the northern city, MTV said.

On April 13, the minister had announced that Hariri was “seriously thinking of turning Syria Street into a … piece of art, similar to what martyr premier Rafik Hariri did in Beirut” after the civil war.

“Military conflict, fighting, wars and shelling will be things that belong to the past,” Rifi said at the time.

The aptly named Syria Street separates the impoverished neighborhoods of Bab al-Tabbaneh and Jabal Mohsen, which fought around 20 rounds of deadly sectarian battles between 2008 and 2014.

Badly damaged buildings, some abandoned, straddle the street, creating an atmosphere of fear and neglect, despite the presence of several army vehicles and checkpoints along the thoroughfare.

Once filled with military barricades, the street flanks the al-Bazar and Bab al-Tabbaneh neighborhoods and the city's vegetable market.

The war in Syria had aggravated decades-old sectarian and political tensions between the Bab al-Tabbaneh and Jabal Mohsen neighborhoods.

But since April 1, a strict and unprecedented security plan in the city has managed to restore calm and put an end to fighting, amid the fleeing and arrest of many of the two districts' top gunmen.

Jabal Mohsen, where most of the population belongs to Syrian President Bashar Assad's Alawite sect, has long backed the Damascus regime.

Majority-Sunni Bab al-Tabbaneh, however, supports the rebels who have been fighting to overthrow Assad for the past three years.

The war-scarred neighborhoods saw their first clashes in 1976, when Alawites and supporters of then Syrian president Hafez Assad fought against the Palestinian Liberation Organization then headquartered in Lebanon.

In the 1980s, the front changed to pit pro-Assad fighters against the Islamist Tawhid movement, which was strong in Bab al-Tabbaneh.

Then in 1986, when Syrian troops entered Bab al-Tabbaneh, they and their Lebanese backers killed hundreds of people in a massacre remembered to this day.

Y.R.

S.D.B.