A little after 8 am on July 12, 2006, Hezbollah fighters fired katusha rockets from Lebanon into Israel. Simultaneously, a squad of Hezbollah fighters crossed the “blue line” from Lebanon to Israel to attack two Israeli Humvees patrolling the frontier near the town of Zar’it. Three Israelis soldiers were killed, and two were wounded and were taken by Hezbollah back over the frontier into Lebanon. Following a failed rescue attempt, Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert declared the soldiers’ capture an “act of war” and ordered the Israeli air force to begin striking targets throughout Lebanon. The war between Israel and Hezbollah that analysts had been predicting for half a decade had finally broken out.
People across the Syrian capital crowded around television sets and tuned in their radios to get the latest news. After three days of bombing, Al Jazeera television reported that Israel had bombed a Syrian military installation near the Lebanese-Syrian frontier. In Damascus, people openly speculated whether Syria’s old enemy, Israel, was approaching the gates.
“Did you see the report?” Leila asked me as soon as I answered her call on my mobile. I could sense from the tone of her voice that she was panicking. “Do you think they will hit us as well?” she asked.
I didn’t know what to say. Syrians and Lebanese are socially and economically joined at the hip, but following the forced withdrawal of the Syrian Army from Lebanon in April 2005, formal political relations were more distinct than at any time in the last thirty years. When it came to a Hezbollah attack on Israel, however, it all came down to what Israel considered to be the “return address.” Given Hezbollah’s strong support from both Damascus and Tehran, it was anyone’s guess who Israel would hold responsible—and when.
It wasn’t clear that Assad knew the answer either. Syria’s state-dominated media reported the Israeli attacks without official comment for the first two days, instead using statements by Russian president Vladimir Putin and random Italian communist party officials condemning the violence. On July 15, Syrian information minister Mohsen Bilal responded to the border strike with a warning: “Any Israeli aggression against Syria will be met with a firm and direct response whose timing and methods are unlimited.” Iran quickly backed Syria up, warning Israel of “unimaginable losses” if it struck Syria. Tehran added that it was only offering “spiritual and humanitarian” support to Hezbollah. The Iranian regime denied, like Syria, that Tehran supplied Hezbollah with weapons.
President Bush thought otherwise. On July 17, as Putin openly teased Bush about Washington’s “democracy agenda” at that week’s G8 Summit in Moscow, a microphone that was inadvertently left on recorded a muffled and candid conversation between Bush and British prime minister Tony Blair that would shed light on Washington’s idea of how to end the crisis. “What they need to do is to get Syria to get Hezbollah to stop doing this shit,” Bush blurted out to Blair over the lunch table.1 The question was how.
As journalists in the West transcribed the candid Bush-Blair lunch exchange, the US embassy in Damascus held a leaving party for deputy chief of mission Stephen Seche, the de facto ambassador to Syria after Margaret Scobey was withdrawn following Hariri’s murder. When I arrived at the US ambassador’s residence—the recent remodeling of which was a bit ironic, given the historically low relations between Damascus and Washington—Seche greeted me at the garden’s entrance along with Bill Roebuck, the embassy’s political officer. After about five minutes of discussion, arms folded, looking down at the ground, I said how, despite their hard-line rhetoric, I thought that I heard some conciliatory gestures in Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah’s TV address as well as in Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert’s hard-line speech from earlier in the day. Perhaps the situation would calm down soon, I added.
“Are you kidding?” one of the diplomats said. “We wrote that hard-line speech!” And with that, he turned away to greet the garden’s next visitor. Seche’s message toed the diplomatic line on US support for Israel—but there was something about the way he spoke that told me that something big was up and that he wasn’t totally happy about it.
That “something” turned out to be the proxy war in Lebanon between Israel and its regional nemesis, the nuclear-hungry Islamic Republic of Iran. From the first days of the 2006 Lebanon War, stories reported how Israeli generals had, before the war, briefed US officials about a military response to an expected Hezbollah attempt to capture an Israeli soldier. These expectations were based on the fact that Hezbollah had attempted to capture two Israeli soldiers the previous January. Hamas, the Islamic resistance organization with a parliamentary majority in the Palestinian Authority, did successfully capture Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit in June, leading to an Israeli military rescue attempt.
So when Hezbollah used a tunnel under the “blue line”—the ceasefire line of 1949 that demarcates the southern border of Lebanon—to kill four Israeli soldiers and abduct two others on July 12, it was no surprise that Israel struck back with a massive military response.
What was unexpected, however, was Hezbollah’s ability to fight back. A week after the beginning of the bombardment, which included strikes on civilian targets that Israel claimed Hezbollah was using as “human shields,” diplomats attending the garden party were expressing surprise that Hezbollah continued to fire hundreds of rockets into northern Israel every day. Syrians seemed surprised as well, but pleasantly so. Day by day, more Hezbollah flags appeared across the Syrian capital, and young people lined up at shops to buy yellow Nasrallah T-shirts. Homemade decals showing busts of Assad, Nasrallah, and Ahmadinejad arranged together suddenly appeared on professionally printed posters in shop windows.
Over the next few days, the Syrian media’s pro-Hezbollah propaganda campaign made it hard to determine the depth of popular support for “the resistance.” State-owned Syrian television’s morning and evening news programs—the only two that most Syrians now watch (besides soap operas) in an era of pan-Arab TV satellite stations—led in with video footage of women and children being pulled from the rubble in Lebanon. Marching music played in the background, complete with war drums. The ruckus suddenly stopped, only to be followed by an audio recording of US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice’s statement of July 21 that the war in Lebanon was part of the “birth pangs of a new Middle East.” The linkage between Washington’s democracy agenda, Israel, and death and destruction was clear. Rice’s dictum was repeated every day on Syrian television for weeks, and many Syrians parroted it back to me with the addendum, “a new Sykes-Picot”—referring to the secret 1916 agreement between Britain and France that led to the division of the Ottoman empire into the Arab states we know today.
In many ways, history seemed to be repeating itself in Bashar al-Assad’s Syria in the summer of 2006. The late Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser was famous internationally for turning his country’s military defeat into a “diplomatic victory” over Israel, Britain, and France in the 1956 Suez Crisis and defiantly shifting Egypt into the Soviet camp during the Cold War. However, in the Arab world, Nasser is better known for his subsequent embrace of authoritarian socialism and its export during the pan-Arab revolution across the region. The domestic political reforms Nasser and his “free officers” promised when they seized power in 1952 were postponed until Arab “dignity” was restored by Israel’s defeat. The policy, which dramatically ended when Israel routed the Arabs in the Six-Day War of June 1967, was encapsulated in the slogan “No voice louder than the cry of battle.”
The question remained whether Syrians would buy into the regime’s version of “the plot.” After six years of Syria’s “reform process,” most Syrians were unhappy with the way they were ruled. A host of European countries had stepped forward to support Bashar al-Assad when he assumed the presidency in July 2000 following the death of his father, Hafez. The primary reason for engaging the son was political: Syria bordered Israel and controlled Lebanon, and Hafez al-Assad had nearly signed a peace agreement with Israel only three months before his death. The secondary, but nevertheless related, reason was to reform one of the most corrupt and authoritarian systems in the Arab world, to bring it into a Western orbit, and to arrange for a smooth transition toward democracy. Overly centralized decision making, combined with Syria’s continued socialist ideals a decade after the Soviet Union’s collapse, weighed heavily on Syrians. Their innate Levantine entrepreneurial spirit ensured that the private sector survived, however distorted it was by triple bookkeeping and a system of bribes that substituted for taxation.
What held the Syrian people back in the autumn of 2005 from rioting in the streets and demanding the downfall of the Damascus regime at perhaps its weakest point in the last forty years? Fear of arrest by the security services, for sure, but also serious doubts over Washington’s intentions for a post-Assad Syria. The Hariri investigation coincided with a rapid increase in the bloodshed in neighboring Iraq. If television news footage of the slaughter of civilians was not enough to raise questions in Syrians’ minds about Bush’s agenda, waves of Iraqi refugees flooding into Syria certainly was. Some brought suitcases full of money, but most did not. The Syrian government offered Iraqis basic support, but budgets ran out in early 2006. Charities and international relief agencies tried to fill the gap.
The “chaos” raging next door in Iraq was no accident, Syrians told me again and again. They said it was part of an Israeli-inspired plan, forged with neoconservatives prominent in the Bush administration, to smash Arab societies through military action, create sectarian strife, and cause civil war. While I argued back that the Levant was full of crazy conspiracy theories, Syrians would reply, “Do you think what is happening in Iraq for the past three years is just a mistake? No, it’s policy.”
The Syrian regime exploited the Iraq fiasco by issuing daily statements attributing the region’s problems to the “Zionist-American” conspiracy and implicated the Syrian opposition with a wave of arrests following the signature of the Beirut-Damascus Declaration. The regime also made Washington’s worst nightmare come true: the permitted burning of the Danish embassy in Damascus in response to caricatures of the prophet Muhammad published in a Danish newspaper, along with news reports of radical takfiri Islamic groups carrying out operations in Syria (with American weapons), fit in nicely with the regime’s newly strengthened alliance with Iran.
When Hezbollah and Israel went to war, therefore, it was a perfect regime safety valve for releasing popular aggression toward its enemies. Hezbollah is a Shiite Islamic movement, so Syria’s majority Sunni population, and its supporters in the Muslim Brotherhood, could not control it. It also helped people to feel that they were fighting the Western powers that supported Israel and were overseeing the carnage in Iraq. Last but not least, because the Israeli and American threat to Syria turned to violence in Lebanon, it allowed the regime to put off reform until the “enemy” was defeated and “dignity” restored.
The first government-organized demonstration for “the resistance” on July 17, 2006, indicated that popular support for Hezbollah was lukewarm. When I called Syrian friends and journalists that morning to ask if they were going to the rally, most were still in bed shortly before it kicked off at 10 AM. Only a few thousand state workers, who had been given two hours’ leave, attended.
The giant television-camera booms I had first seen at the pro-Syrian demonstrations in Damascus in March 2005 were back in action. TV cameras used close-up images of the crowd to exaggerate its true size. This technique was repeated at several Damascus rallies over the next week.
The demonstration was so uninspiring that a group of journalist colleagues and I decided to visit the nearby Rouda Café—an opposition hangout adjacent to parliament. As they sucked down cups of tea to wake up, a Syrian colleague leaned over the table and whispered in my ear to look behind me. Sitting only three feet away was Hussam Taher Hussam, the thirty-year-old witness cited in the first report of the Hariri investigation who had recanted his testimony against the Syrian regime the previous November. There was a brief but comical moment of excitement when I snapped a photo of Hussam stealthily over my shoulder. Meanwhile, the café’s patrons were extremely laid back, seemingly unconcerned about the war raging next door.
As civilian casualties increased, however, Syrians got behind the resistance. For weeks, I noticed that my friends’ cell phones had ringtones featuring excerpts from Nasrallah’s speeches. Some even bothered to play longer clips for me; they traded these among friends. As the war dragged on, my Syrian friends began including me in mass e-mails showing photos of dead women and children being pulled from bombed-out buildings in Lebanon and in the occupied territories. Some were even arranged into PowerPoint presentations, though they were badly made, with photo captions that had bad English and Arabic spelling and grammar mistakes. They were genuine expressions of popular concerns, however, and were a far cry from the state’s clumsy propaganda. Such sentiments grew after Lebanese refugees began flooding into Syria in the war’s second week.
“See, like Iraqis,” Othaina said to me as our car approached the swarm of Lebanese cars piling across the Syrian border crossing at Al-Jdeida. Iraqis continued to stream into Syria from Iraq every day too. The fact that Othaina made the connection helped me realize that popular sentiments and the regime’s official line were quickly merging.
This notion was reinforced by the genuine hospitality extended by Syrian society to the Lebanese refugees upon arrival. While semiofficial organizations like the Syrian Arab Red Crescent passed out water and food, it was the private sector that delivered truckloads of supplies. A phone booth set up by the mobile-phone operator Syriatel, owned by President Assad’s cousin Rami Makhlouf, offered free calls to anywhere in Syria and Lebanon. As Lebanese waited to pass immigration procedures, young activists from the Lawyers’ Syndicate—the equivalent of the Syrian Bar Association—and the Syrian Public Relations Association (led by Nizar Mayhoub, the Ministry of Information official responsible for foreign journalists) canvassed arriving cars and trucks, asking passengers if they had a place to stay in Damascus. Those in need of food and shelter were put in touch with Syrian families who had placed their names with the canvassers. “We have so many names!” one of them told me, pointing to a clipboard stuffed with papers in her hand.
All in all, more than 230,000 Lebanese refugees found shelter in Syria. Around 80 percent of those were housed in private Syrian homes. In many cases, sons moved back in with parents to make room for the war’s displaced. As I walked among the throng of vehicles making their way into Syria, I reflected on the soft power of Syrians’ generosity. I also sadly realized that the United States—the world’s superpower and the champion of globalization—had absolutely nothing to offer as a counterweight. “Assad is sitting pretty now,” a friend said to me later that evening. If a regime’s legitimacy doesn’t come from its people, the next best way to obtain it is by responding to an external threat.
At the offices of Syria Today, the magazine’s staff had put up Syrian flags and banners on the walls and affixed prints of photos showing children killed and wounded from Israeli bombs. Every day that the civilian death toll climbed, the staff became more nationalistic, including wearing pins with i love syria on the lapels of their jackets. Others wore Hezbollah T-shirts.
High civilian casualties seemed to be helping the regime’s case, even among the opposition. “We denounce the Israeli aggression against Lebanese civilians,” Hassan Abdel-Azim told us a few days later. “Israel cannot attack Lebanon without an approval and support from the United States. We call on the Syrian leadership to strengthen the national unity through more opening to the Syrian opposition to make Syria stronger to face the Israeli threats.”
Meshal Tammo, the secretary-general of the Kurdish Future Party, said they drew the line at violence against civilians as well. “We as a Kurdish people condemn all kinds of aggression and violence against the Lebanese civilians,” Tammo said. “We sympathize with Lebanese because our people [Kurds] face the massacres and killing [of] civilians. The war in Lebanon is a regional war between Syrian, Iranian, and Lebanese Hezbollah front and the United States, Israel, and some Arab states which follow the American orders. The war aims to change the game rules in the Middle East.”
Even Riad al-Turk, one of Syria’s most outspoken opposition leaders, toed the nationalist line, though ever so critically. “Lebanon is a yard for the world to fight in,” Turk said. “Lebanon is a part of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Israel and the US used the capturing of two Israeli soldiers as a pretext to wage a war against Lebanon. The Syrian stance to open the border to Lebanese civilians and humanitarian aid is acceptable. Syria should support the Lebanese by using its army. In this regard, the Syrian official stance is very weak.”
The US State Department soon leaked a plan in the New York Times that a new US policy was being formulated to drive a “wedge” between Syria and Iran, but it didn’t get anywhere.2 According to another Times report a few weeks later, Secretary of State Rice sent Deputy Chief of Mission Seche over to meet Syrian foreign minister Walid al-Moallem and see if Syria was willing to negotiate. While the meeting took place, the report said that Moallem “gave no indication that [the Syrian regime] would be moderately constructive.”
So with Washington defying Damascus and Tehran and vice versa, the conflict dragged on for weeks. As the United States and France argued over ceasefire texts in the Security Council, Syrians (and later Lebanese) said to me over and over again that Washington was simply giving Israel more time to finish the job, at the expense of more Lebanese civilian lives.
Those specialists of “positive pressure,” the Europeans, then stepped in to give diplomacy a chance. On August 3, 2006, Spanish foreign minister Miguel Ángel Moratinos arrived in Damascus for talks with Assad. His arrival seemed promising, as his last trip to Damascus on February 14, 2005—the day of Hariri’s murder—marked the last time a European official had set foot in Syria. Moratinos told reporters after the meeting that Assad was willing to use his influence to rein in Hezbollah—a statement that was quickly denied by the state news agency. European newspapers reported that certain EU countries—led by Germany, the primary supporter of Syrian reform—were preparing a package of incentives for Syria to cut off arms supplies to Hezbollah. Among these “carrots” was reportedly a German-led effort to push the member countries of the European Union to sign its long-delayed “association agreement” with Syria. Once ratified, the agreement would lock Syria into a schedule of reform steps aimed at liberalizing trade, promoting investment, and bolstering respect for human rights.
Finally, on August 11—one month to the day after the conflict began—the Security Council passed Resolution 1701, which called for a ceasefire and the deployment of an international force in south Lebanon. The ceasefire, to which Hezbollah and Israel consented, was to take effect forty-eight hours from the resolution’s passage.
In a clumsy attempt at a public relations coup de grâce, Israel quickly launched its “largest airborne operation since the 1973 war” throughout south Lebanon. They were hoping to capture what would be the war’s great surprise: Hezbollah’s extensive network of tunnels and concrete-reinforced bunkers—some only one hundred meters from the Israeli frontier—from where daily rocket barrages were launched during the conflict. Their construction in hard limestone had gone completely undetected by Israel, the UNIFIL force (United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon) in southern Lebanon, and the Lebanese government. One UN commander told a friend that Hezbollah “must have been bringing the cement in by the spoonful.”
Eager to talk with Lebanese about the war, I passed through the only crossing point from Syria to Lebanon that had not been destroyed by Israeli bombing the minute the ceasefire took effect on the morning of August 14. The usual two-hour journey from Damascus to Beirut took a little more than six due to Israeli strikes on roads and bridges. When I arrived, I quickly rented a car and went for a drive around Beirut, including the Hezbollah headquarters in the southern neighborhood of Haret Hreik.
Israel’s “precision bombing” was impressive, as Israelis were able to destroy a sole building with very little if any damage to adjacent structures. Their intelligence information on targets seemed to have been less successful, however: nearly one thousand Lebanese civilians died from Israeli strikes during the war. In the south, Israel used so many cluster bombs that unexploded ordnance has since claimed the lives of almost fifty children and wounded more than one hundred.
Hezbollah hung huge banners off buildings in the southern suburbs to make their point. One banner hanging in Haret Harek read extremely accurate targets and was adorned with a photo of a bandaged child missing a limb. It was footnoted by the slogan “The Divine Victory.”
That afternoon, The New Yorker magazine posted an article on its website by veteran journalist Seymour Hersh, which stated that Washington had indeed planned Israel’s response to the Hezbollah kidnapping well in advance. The reason? To destroy Hezbollah’s ability to hit Israel during possible future US preemptive strikes on Iran, which had a UN deadline of August 31 to stop enriching uranium. As much of Iran’s program was literally underground, Hersh said that the United States wanted to understand the effectiveness of its weapons in Israel’s arsenal against such targets. The report also said that the Bush administration hoped that the raid would further democracy by strengthening the government of Lebanese premier Fouad Siniora “so that it could assert its authority over the south of the country, much of which is controlled by Hezbollah.”3
The next day, President Assad finally broke his silence in an address to a Syrian journalists’ conference in Damascus. The fire-and-brimstone speech, which featured the word “conspiracy” scores of times, dashed hopes for peace anytime soon.
“The more elusive the realization of peace becomes, the more important and necessary other ways and methods become,” Assad said. “The whole world only got interested in the Middle East after the 1973 War … [the West] only moves when Israel is in pain.” Resistance, Assad added, “is necessary for the achievement of peace.” While Assad’s pro-Hezbollah rhetoric was not unexpected, his open swipe at Europe, which supported Syrian reform efforts, was unprecedented. “The countries concerned with the peace process—and they are mostly European—are responsible for what is happening. We might wonder what motivates some officials in these countries to send messages about a sick prisoner [in a Syrian jail]…. What nobility! What humanity! What greatness! We might ask as well, where are these same officials concerning the massacres perpetrated in Lebanon?”
Assad had a few words for his fellow Arab leaders as well. “One of the other positive sides to this war is that it has completely uncovered the Arab situation. If we asked any Arab citizen about the Arab situation before this war, they will say it is bad—which is true. Arabs used to see our situation under makeup, now they see it as it is in reality. This war prevented the use of such cosmetics as it classified positions in a clear way. There was no room for half-solutions in such a war where it unveiled half-men, or people with half-positions … i.e., those who were waiting to see where the scales would tip have fallen along with their positions. This is one of the very important outcomes of this battle.”
Less than an hour after Assad’s speech, German foreign minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier canceled a trip to Damascus scheduled for later that day. He dubbed it a “negative contribution that is not in any way justified in view of the current challenges and opportunities in the Middle East.”
A few days later, in an interview with Dubai TV’s Hamdi Kandeel, Assad tried to mend fences with Arab leaders, nearly all of whom were refusing to speak with the Syrian president. Assad insisted that Iran had a strong role to play in the region.
“Iran is a country that has existed in the region for centuries,” Assad said. “It is the Arabs who are absent from the political arena, whether in decision making or in shaping the region’s future…. If strong countries play a just and positive role, this would serve stability in the region…. Iran says it wants its nuclear project for peaceful means. There is nothing to fear from Iran.”
Kandeel then asked Assad about concerns that the Islamic Republic’s influence would feed an already “growing religious current” that could undermine the regime’s pan-Arab ideological bedrock. The president responded that he could handle it. “Syria is a secular country, and has no problem cooperating with Iran. If one looks to what is happening in Iraq, it’s easy to see that the Western powers, which are propagating secularism, are working to consolidate the nonreligious radical current in the Arab world as well.”
When Kandeel asked Assad point-blank if Syria would adopt the resistance model that it was now championing in the region, Assad mapped out a Saddam Hussein–like insurgency strategy in the event of war. “We know there is a semi-siege imposed on Syria, and we know that the US backs up Israel one-hundred percent,” Assad said. “So we have changed the army’s duties and are preparing, at least in the first phase, to defend our territory. Israel is an expansionist state, and if peace is not achieved, war is the natural future in the region…. The resistance is a public process, not a state resolution, and people may overtake their governments to carry it out.”
While Syrians were now free to resist Israel, Assad, like Nasser, was clear that political reform would remain on the back burner until the enemy was defeated and dignity restored. “We have made steps [toward greater freedoms], and we have a vision,” Assad said. “But we don’t want freedoms that are exploited from the outside, which is happening…. [We do not want to] enter into the framework of chaos or dependency and cheat our domestic situation. Loyalty to the country means not accepting foreign interference from any embassy…. Work continues on a new parties law, but we must have more room to accomplish it under the circumstances.”
After two weeks of surveying Israel’s destruction in Lebanon, I took the Damascus Road over the Lebanon mountains and across the Bekaa Valley back to Syria’s Al-Jdeida border crossing. A Syrian border guard whom I knew smiled when he took my passport, sat down at his computer terminal, and typed in my name and passport number. I had made the crossing hundreds of times, so stamping in and out was a formality.
He suddenly frowned and repeatedly hit a key on the keyboard, like he was scrolling down my file. Then he stood up, threw back his shoulders, and thrust my passport back at me. “You are forbidden from entry,” he said. When I tried to ask him what the computer said or what the problem was, he just brushed me aside with his hand.
“You will never get back into Syria.”
While Leila tried to sort out what was behind my ban and figure out how to get me back in the country (which eventually did happen), events in Washington and Beirut did not bode well for the Bush administration’s Syria policy. With sectarian violence spiraling in Iraq throughout 2006 and no end to the war in sight, Republicans and Democrats began openly questioning President Bush’s Iraq policy. The Iraq Study Group (ISG)—a bipartisan commission established in March 2006 to assess the situation in Iraq—had spent the better part of the year evaluating the Bush administration’s Iraq policy, with the goal of proposing a way out of the chaos. Its co-chairs, former secretary of state James Baker and former US representative Lee H. Hamilton, promised that, in order to keep the report nonpartisan, its findings would not be released until after the US general election on November 4.
In reaction to the Iraq chaos as well as the summer war in Lebanon, Americans voted en masse for Democratic Party candidates, wresting the House of Representatives and the Senate away from Republican control. The following day, President Bush announced the resignation of secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld. In the days that followed, the international media reported that the ISG report would recommend engaging Syria and Iran over Iraq and the Middle East. Baker began appearing on national television openly advocating “hard-nosed” engagement with Damascus, based on his experience negotiating with Hafez al-Assad to get Syria to attend the 1991 peace conference in Madrid.
A few days later, on November 11, 2006, one day before a key vote in the Lebanese cabinet concerning the establishment of an international tribunal into the assassination of Rafik Hariri, Shiite ministers, led by Hezbollah, plus a Christian ally, walked out of the cabinet. While Lebanese premier Fouad Siniora technically had enough ministers to continue to hold cabinet sessions, the Hezbollah-led pullout from the cabinet left it with no representatives from the country’s Shiite community, essentially breaking the long-standing practice of communal shared participation in government. The opposition claimed Siniora’s rump cabinet was illegal, making its decisions nonbinding.
In response, Hezbollah followers, as well as their Christian allies, took to the streets of downtown Beirut. The protestors surrounded the Grand Serail, Siniora’s administrative offices, and erected a tent city, essentially occupying the center of the Lebanese capital. The state’s internal security forces erected a barbed-wire barricade between the protestors and the Grand Serail, which divided the downtown area in two. Hezbollah and its allies opened hospitality tents for visitors and foreign journalists. Their message was simple: the tribunal into Hariri’s murder is a US-Israeli plot to destroy Lebanon.