Hezbollah displaces, and helps, the faithful

Fouad Yassin, 35, with his wife Riqa, who is holding their 7-day old baby girl Hawrat. Sleeping under a blanket is their daughter Fatima. They are refugees forced out of their homes by the Israeli bombardment of southern Beirut. They are sleeping on foam mattresses at a school in Beirut. (Newsday / Mohamad Bazzi)

BEIRUT, Lebanon - They tried to hold out as long as they could.

But after four days of intense Israeli bombardment of their south Beirut neighborhood, Fouad Yassin and his wife, Riqa, realized that their children could no longer take it. Their week-old infant, Hawrat, had a fever and their 3-year-old son, Mohammed, was constantly throwing up.

"Each new missile would shake the walls. We couldn't sleep for three nights," said Yassin, cradling his infant daughter in his arm. "I had to leave because of my children. Even if the bombing did not kill them, they would die from fear."

Yassin, 35, a book dealer, fled the Bir El-Abed district of Beirut yesterday morning. Along with his father, mother, four siblings and their families - 24 people in all - they crammed into two minivans and drove along back roads for nearly three hours looking for a school where they could take refuge.

They arrived at the Ibn Rushd School, which in normal times would be a 15-minute drive from their home. The school, a two-story building of whitewashed concrete, is named after a 12th-century Muslim philosopher better known in the West as Averroes.

Once at the school, the Yassins were divided into two small classrooms and given foam mattresses to sleep on. They were given three cans of tuna, two packages of processed cheese and a bundle of bread. That would be their food ration for the day.

At no point in their flight did the Yassins receive any assistance from the Lebanese government. Instead, they ended up at a school that has been temporarily taken over by Hezbollah, the Shia guerrilla group leading a war against Israel from Lebanese territory.

"Hezbollah makes sure that the refugees have everything they need," said Ali Shwaikani, 29, who described himself as a Hezbollah "volunteer" helping organize the displaced.

To fill the government vacuum, the group has dispatched hundreds of young men like Shwaikani to schools and community centers throughout Beirut. Armed with cell phones and walkie-talkies, they distribute mattresses, food, water and medicine to the refugees.

Since fighting between Israel and Hezbollah began last week, more than 40,000 people have fled their homes in southern Lebanon and a crowded swath of south Beirut known as the dahiya, or the suburbs. Both areas are dominated by Shia Muslims - Hezbollah's most loyal supporters.

The wave of displaced residents is creating another crisis for Lebanon, a country of 4 million, which is ill-equipped to handle a mass dislocation. Because most of the refugees are Shias who are flooding into Sunni Muslim and Christian areas, the problem also threatens to exacerbate sectarian tensions in a society that never healed from the 1975-90 civil war.

Many Sunnis and Christians blame Hezbollah for provoking a confrontation with Israel after the group abducted two Israeli soldiers on Wednesday in a daring cross-border raid and brought them back into Lebanon. Israel launched its most intense attack on Lebanon in 24 years, killing more than 200 people - nearly all civilians - and crippling the country's infrastructure. Israel has also tried to choke off Lebanon, imposing a naval blockade and bombing Beirut's international airport.

"The refugees are not among the top priorities for the Lebanese government," said Charles Adwan, former director of the Lebanese Transparency Association, a good-governance group. "In the current situation, 90 percent of the refugees are Shias and many in the political community don't feel much regret that they were displaced."

While Sunnis and Christians might fault Hezbollah, few Shia refugees are willing to blame the group for their predicament. The Yassins lived about 400 yards from a building housing a Hezbollah office. Many buildings in the neighborhood have been badly bombed or even flattened.

During the most intense bombardment at night, the Yassins remembered lessons they learned during Lebanon's civil war: They all huddled in the corridors of their apartment, where there is no glass that could shatter.

"If the bombing was very bad, we would move to the stairwell next to the elevator shaft," said Bassem Yassin, 39, a civil engineer and Fouad's older brother. "This is what we used to do during the war."

At the mention of that war, Bassem's sister, Jumana, 27, a lawyer, lamented all that has befallen Lebanese Shias. "Our life is always about suffering," she said. "What did our children do to deserve being bombed and forced out of their homes?"

In the classroom where the Yassins are staying, chalk-scrawled messages on the blackboard speak of the victory promised by Hezbollah's charismatic leader, Sayyid Hassan Nasrallah.

"We obey you Nasrallah," reads one message. "Victory is coming."

Nasrallah and his group are masterful at tapping into the Shia traditions of suffering and martyrdom. Even as south Beirut endures unprecedented bombing and destruction, Hezbollah members roam the deserted streets in cars playing martial music and blasting Nasrallah speeches pledging victory and new "surprises" in the battle against Israel.

Hezbollah has won the support and admiration of many Shias because it fought an 18-year guerrilla war that forced Israel to withdraw from a self-declared "security zone" in southern Lebanon in 2000. Hezbollah's appeal is also built on a network of social services that cater to the Shia, Lebanon's largest and most disenfranchised community. The group's rise in the 1980s and '90s reflected the empowerment of Shias in Lebanon.

Before the war, the dahiya was known as the "belt of misery," filled with poor Shias who came from southern Lebanon and the Bekaa Valley. Until this week's destruction, the dahiya had become the power center for working and middle-class Shias. Many credit Hezbollah and its leader for the transformation.

"If Sayyid Nasrallah wants all of us to live as refugees for a long, long time, we will do it," said Jumana Yassin, smiling faintly. "We will even smile, despite all of our suffering."