There may be a shortage of just about everything in Lebanon, but obviously not ammunition.
The crack of assault rifle volleys echoed in the streets of Beirut for hours, insanely loud because the exhaust-gray urban canyons act like an amplifier.
People stand together on the street corners, watching the spectacle that is common folklore here.
At the end of the school year, at weddings.
To funerals, like on this day, which is not one of the usual days.
Two men and one woman who belong to the Shiite organization Hezbollah are carried to the grave.
Christoph Ehrhardt
Correspondent for the Arab countries based in Beirut.
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They were killed when on Thursday, just a few streets away, a similar background noise was over the scene. But then the militiamen did not shoot in the air, but at people. Beirut had been rocked by battles the city had not seen for a long time. A Hezbollah protest march, intended as a show of force, turned into an orgy of violence. And, as always, when Hezbollah has to complain about losses, the question immediately arises as to how their retaliation will turn out.
The longing for retaliation is evident in the crowd in front of the "Al Hawra Zainab" cemetery, clearly dominated by men of prime fighting age.
“Don't be afraid of the bullets,” jokes one of them.
“They all go down in Ain al-Remmaneh.” The nearby district, which he speaks of as if it were a hostile country, is a bastion of the man whom the people here blame for the death of their comrades-in-arms: Samir Geagea, Christian warlord Times of civil war, leader of the "Forces Libanaises", bitter enemy of Hezbollah.
His snipers, the Hezbollah leadership also claims, fired at the demonstrators on Thursday.
Attack on television crew
The hate of the crowd is also felt by a television team that works for a channel that is loyal to Geagea. The mob attacks the reporters, and as they back away, the usual curses are heard: "Samir Geagea Zionist." For Hezbollah supporters, for whom hatred of Israel is part of the ideological core of the brand, this is possibly the ultimate insult. "Geagea is a criminal," says one of the hizbullah-loyal funeral visitors, who deliberately introduces himself with a common name. “They were peaceful demonstrators,” he adds with an indignation that seems real.
This corresponds to the story that his organization is now spreading: It is the victim of a sinister campaign and a foreign conspiracy.
The newspaper Al Akhbar has taken this to extremes by accusing several foreign ambassadors, including the German one, that they knew beforehand what would happen on Thursday.
Such propaganda does not match the video recordings from the day of the fighting, which show how armed men march and how supposedly peaceful demonstrators riot in side streets that were certainly not on the route of the protest march.