Report: AMAL Says Ain el-Rummaneh-Shiyyah Incidents Not Partisan
The AMAL Movement of Speaker Nabih Berri asserted on Thursday that the latest clashes in Beirut suburbs of Ain el-Rummaneh and Shiyyah did not erupt between partisans of AMAL and the Lebanese Forces, asserting that “coexistence” is a red line, Saudi Asharq al-Awsat reported on Thursday.
“Incidents in Ain el-Rummaneh and Shiyyah were immediately contained and things returned to normalcy quickly,” an AMAL source told the daily on condition of anonymity. Adding that the part had played a role to “extinguish” the unrest because “coexistence is a red line.”
“What happened in Ain el-Rummaneh and Shiyyah was not at all a clash between AMAL and Lebanese Forces (partisans). It was a clash between two streets that had been addressed with wisdom and dialogue,” the source told the daily.
In a move to assert solidarity between the two neighborhoods, Mothers and residents of Ain el-Rummaneh and Shiyyah on Wednesday marched together in a solidarity rally, following overnight unrest in the area.
The gathering came at the invitation of Lebanese mothers and women who called for rejecting “all the scenes that the streets witnessed over the past two days” and denouncing “segregation and the return to the rhetoric of frontlines and war.”
Overnight confrontations in several Lebanese regions, mostly fistfights and stone throwing, injured dozens of people.
Stone-throwing clashes took place between young men from Shiyyah and the adjacent Ain el-Rummaneh and were quickly contained by the army.
The trouble began after a video circulated on WhatsApp showing Ain el-Rummaneh residents insulting Hizbullah chief Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah. The clip was later shown to be several years old.
Tensions regularly erupt in this area which saw the first clashes of the 1975-1990 civil war. A shooting in Ain el-Rummaneh in April 1975 triggered the 15-year war that killed nearly 150,000 people.
Source: Naharnet, Agence France Presse
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