Shi’ites with Iron Bars Come After Lebanese Anti-government Protesters

Members of two of Lebanon’s main Shi’ite groups, Hizbullah and Amal, brandished iron bars and rocks overnight between Sunday and Monday in an attempt to disperse anti-government protesters blocking a road bridge in the capital Beirut. The country’s civil defense organization said it treated several protesters for injuries before security forces could move in to separate the two sides. The bridge blockage was just the latest act in a five-week-long popular protest against the cost of living and perceptions of widespread government corruption that led Prime Minister Saad al-Hariri to tender his resignation and that of his government. Both Hizbullah and Amal are part of the government and have expressed their displeasure over Hariri’s move. Members of Hizbullah, which in particular has drawn the protesters’ ire for involving the entire country in its ongoing belligerence with Israel, Lebanon’s neighbor to the south, say some of the demonstrators on the bridge were hurling insults not only at them, but at their leader, Hassan Nasrallah. Nasrallah has lived in hiding since the last time the group fought Israel in open warfare in 2006, laying waste to a large part of Lebanon’s South.