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Tripoli, Lebanon: Grenade blasts echo nightly across a sectarian frontline in Lebanon's northern city of Tripoli despite a month-old reconciliation pact.
Two bomb attacks that killed 17 soldiers and five civilians in August and September have also fuelled tensions in Lebanon's second-biggest city, a Sunni stronghold where hardliners are active - and perhaps some militants.
"There is old blood between us. There's no solution. It's us or them," growled Abu Bilal, an imposing man in a black T-shirt, who sat smoking with half a dozen young men and watching the dilapidated backstreets of Bab Tebbaneh, a Sunni bastion.
He boasted of the weaponry - assault rifles, machine guns mortars and rocket-propelled grenades - that he said his group had bought from arms dealers with locally raised funds.
Just up the hill in the rival Alawite district of Jebel Mohsin, Fuad Mutwari, a trader, said the reconciliation sealed on September 8 after four months of sporadic street fighting would not bring lasting peace unless both sides were disarmed.
Eye for an eye
"They got weapons from Egypt, hidden under mangoes. And we got arms from Syria too," he said. "You know how it is."
Buildings in both areas are scarred by bullet holes and rocket impacts. Some Alawite-owned shops in Bab Tebbaneh are blackened with fire after their Sunni neighbours torched them.
People on both sides link their troubles to Lebanon's broader struggle pitting an alliance led by Hezbollah, a Shi'ite group backed by Iran and Syria, against Sunni, Druze and Christian factions supported by the West and its Arab allies.
Muslim clerics say Tripoli's conflicts are political, not religious, but sectarian hatreds simmer at street level, despite sporadic efforts by Lebanon's politicians to calm them.
"Hezbollah's weapons are supposed to be against Israel, but they turned them on us in Beirut," said Walid Faraj, 40, alluding to Hezbollah's brief seizure of Beirut in May. "Of course Hezbollah is trying to crush the Sunnis."
Lebanese army troops separate the combatants along a main road dividing the two communities, which fought fierce battles in the 1980s during Lebanon's 15-year civil war.
People in Bab Tebbaneh readily recall the bloodshed of 1985 when Syrian troops and their Lebanese allies assaulted Sunni fighters who had created a mini-state in Tripoli.
Their Alawite neighbours, whose sect is an offshoot of Shi'ism, say they feel threatened by an Islamist revival in this city of 600,000, where they form a minority of some 40,000.
"We don't want war, so it would be best if the Syrians came back because no one controlled Lebanon like they did," said Sulaiman Khanat, a cafe owner sitting with Mutwari and a group of sharply dressed young men with gelled hair and tattooed arms.
Jebel Mohsin is the fiefdom of a party with close links to Syria, whose president, Bashar Al Assad, is himself an Alawite.
Assad said last month he was worried by "extremist forces" in Tripoli and raised fears of Syrian intervention by sending extra troops to the border with north Lebanon.
Syria also accused Islamists from a nearby Arab country of being behind a suicide bombing that killed 17 people in Damascus on September 27, but did not say whether they had come from Lebanon.
Diplomats in the region say Syria has deployed only a few hundred lightly armed troops near the Lebanese border.
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