I was too young to understand. As my parents drank their afternoon coffee on our balcony in Beirut, I would point to the three bullet holes in the wall and ask my Dad where they had come from. “Why would anyone shoot at someone else’s home?” my 8-year-old self would ask.
His answer was always the same: “Lebanon’s 15-year civil war.” But I was born after the war. I didn’t understand what civil war even meant or, more importantly, that the war had done more damage than those three bullet holes over our balcony door.
The older I got the more I realized that being born after the ceasefire didn’t matter: the war was the background theme to everyone’s life – young or old – in Lebanon.
You saw it in the bullet-riddled buildings across the country, and in the people who bore its physical and mental scars. You heard about it in your parent’s childhood stories and in most descriptions of Lebanon, which too often start with “Before the war …”
With the onset of the Syrian crisis next door, I joined the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) as a communications officer. I wanted to be part of the organization that alleviated some of the burdens that my parents had experienced during times of conflict. I wanted to visit some of the affected locations in Lebanon and help in some way.
Two such places were Tripoli’s notorious neighborhoods of Jabal Mohsen and Bab el-Tebbaneh. When I visited those adjacent communities for the first time what I saw felt like a slap in the face. I thought the Lebanese war was over. Why did these two areas look like they were stuck in the past? Civilians were caught in the crossfire and their homes, businesses and even schools were all turned into battlefields. The people, who more than anything just wanted to live a dignified, secure life, found themselves targets in the urban violence that took hold of that area.
Armed groups from both areas have been clashing for decades. Though the fighting quieted down after the end of the civil war, sporadic clashes erupted again in 2008, only to intensify and become deadlier with the start of the Syrian crisis in 2011. Although a ceasefire was agreed upon in 2015, small clashes here and there still plague the residents.
The more time I spent there, the more I realized that Bab el-Tebbaneh and Jabal Mohsen represented a small-scale Lebanon. Despite the differences between the two neighborhoods, they were mirror images of one another. Tragedy was around every corner, but people from both neighborhoods lived side by side and depended on one another for everything, including business, school and even love.
Like my parents and most people who had lived through the civil war, residents struggled to explain how they could live peacefully during the day then target one another at night. Syria Street simultaneously separates and brings together the two neighborhoods. It was once a bustling road full of business; but now it’s a former front line trying to recover.
In one of the homes on Syria Street, as we were filming with a family who was part of an ICRC project that aimed to help locals bolster their livelihoods, a mother was showing us her daughter’s bedroom. The pink and purple furniture was riddled with bullets. As she was telling us her story, her 11-year-old daughter interrupted her: “Why would anyone shoot at someone else’s home?”
