Popular Nasserite Organization Chief Warns of Sectarian Strife in Sidon
Popular Nasserite Organization head Osama Saad stressed on Wednesday that the security deterioration in the southern city of Sidon endangers the civil peace and aims at creating a sectarian civil war.
He expressed regret in a press conference over the security, stability and economy losses in the city, a day after clashes erupted between Salafist cleric Sheikh Ahmed al-Asir and the Hizbullah-affiliated Resistance Brigades in the suburb of Abra.
“The attack launched by al-Asir supporters forced people to evacuate their homes,” Saad said.
The official reject attempts to involve Sidon in “sectarian sedition.”
Saad slammed “those who intervened to protect people who aim at destabilizing the situation in the city,” accusing al-Mustaqbal movement and other Islamists of participating in Tuesday's incidents.
Clashes erupted on Tuesday afternoon between supporters of Asir, the imam of Sidon's Bilal bin Rabah Mosque, and the Resistance Brigades in the Sidon neighborhood of Abra, leaving at least one person dead and four others wounded.
The Lebanese army deployed in Sidon as the violence comes amid soaring sectarian tensions in Lebanon that have escalated because of the raging war in neighboring Syria.
The army said several people were wounded by the gunfire.
Asir, who espouses an austere form of Sunni Islam, is known for his opposition to Hizbullah.
He has alleged several times that the group uses several apartments in Abra to stockpile weapons and house fighters.
According to the army, the violence broke out after a car accident in the southern city, when "armed men took to the streets in Abra and opened fire... and wounded several people."
Sectarian tensions pitting Sunnis against Shiites have soared in fragile Lebanon as the spillover from Syria's war has escalated.
Though Lebanon has officially adopted a position of neutrality in Syria's war, Hizbullah and its allies back the Damascus regime of President Bashar Assad.
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