Motorbike Mayhem

When Lebanon's political crisis erupted in an open gun battle in Beirut on Thursday, I was stuck in traffic. The Lebanese army was blocking the road ahead, leaving my driver and myself in a highway tunnel on the way south from the center of town towards where the skirmishes were taking place. After abandoning the car to get closer to the action on foot, I accepted a ride on the back of a motor scooter belonging to a total stranger. "This is Lebanese hospitality," I said by way of thanking him for the ride. "No matter how bad things are, someone always does you a favor."

In retrospect, I probably should have asked my new scooter buddy -- a man of about my age -- if he had any particular dog in this sectarian fight. At the time it seemed impolite, and in the rush of the moment, we didn't even properly introduce ourselves. But it soon became clear that he wanted to get a lot closer to the action than I did. We breezed through army blockades and back up onto the elevated highway that suddenly became the dividing line between two warring tribes.

On our right, young Shi'ite men, mostly dressed in black for the Ashura holiday, streamed in from their neighborhoods alongside the city's southern coastline. Many of them seemed prepared for a confrontation, having been bused in from mosques where members of the Amal Movement, a Shi'ite political party, had supplied them with construction helmets, broomsticks, small bats, and other makeshift clubs.

On the higher ground to our left amid a dense neighborhood of apartment blocks was Beirut Arab University, a largely Sunni school. Today's riots had apparently started there as a lunchroom quarrel between student members of the Sunni political parties that support the Lebanese government and the Shi'ite parties (Amal and Hizballah) which make up the bulk of the opposition that paralyzed Beirut the day before yesterday with a general strike that turned violent.

The student street skirmishes had by now spiraled into low-level urban warfare with the arrival of armed fighters from both pro-government and opposition political parties. Gunfire was coming from the BAU parking lot, which was filled with the smoke of burning cars. My companion looked down at the camera I was holding by his side. "Do you want to go take pictures?" But before I could answer in the vehement negative, I noticed that we were zooming towards a bristling bunch of men in black, one of whom raised an AK-47 assault riffle and fired it towards BAU. "Turn around!" I yelled, afraid not so much of this shooter but of the ones who would undoubtedly shoot back. When I jumped off the back of the motorbike and tried to run away, the Amal guys started throwing their sticks at me and were about to give chase until my friend shouted something to them and then to me: "Don't worry! I know everyone here. I am Amal."

Which at anther time or another place might have made for an interesting interview. But when, as expected, bullets began hitting a retaining wall on our side of the highway, I found my way to a side street near the Egyptian embassy and hid in the concrete entrance to a subterranean parking garage listening to the crack of high velocity bullets breaking the sound barrier overhead and bursts of heavy machine guns fired by the Lebanese army, which was now moving up the highway to quash the riot. Please forgive the rush to judgment, but at that moment it seemed that a new civil war was on its way to Lebanon. "Don't you want to take pictures?" asked my scooter friend, whose name I now learned was Abbas (a classically Shi'ite name) when he finally found me. "No $#@%# way," I replied. "I'm just a writer!" Abbas gave me a disappointed look then left.

By Andrew Lee Butters/Beirut