Poor Tripoli district becomes hotbed for extremists
Mankoubin is one of the impoverished neighborhoods of Tripoli, producing youths who have joined such extremist groups as Jabhat al-Nusra and the Islamic State and have carried out attacks in Syria and Iraq, as well as in Lebanon.
TRIPOLI, Lebanon — The Lebanese government initiated a widespread security crackdown in the wake of a twin suicide bombing on Jan. 10 in Tripoli's Jabal Mohsen district, killing nine people and injuring 37 others. Several people have been detained in Mankoubin, the poor neighborhood from which the two bombers hailed that has been at the heart of jihadi activity since the beginning of the Syrian civil war.
One week after the bombing, another Mankoubin resident, Bassam Hussam al-Naboush, was arrested for attempting to carry out terrorist operations against army posts and residential areas alongside a Christian Tripoli resident, Tony Warrak, who had converted to Islam. Since the Syrian uprising, Mankoubin residents, most of whom are Sunnis and appear to support the Syrian revolution, have been at odds with their Alawite neighbors in Jabal Mohsen, who support the regime of President Bashar al-Assad.
Relations between the two communities had taken a turn for the worse after the August 2013 bombings of the Sunni Taqwa and Salam mosques, which were blamed on members of the Arab Democratic Party, the main Alawite movement. With the new wave of arrests, Mankoubin residents have adopted a noticeably lower profile. Pictures of local youth killed in “martyrdom” operations in Syria have been removed from the gray walls lining the area's potholed streets.
“I was shocked when I discovered my son had been involved in the bombing,” said Ghada Khayal, the mother of Taha Samir al-Khayal, who died along with Bilal Mohammed Taha al-Mariyan in the twin suicide attack. “My son was kind and did not have radical ideas. He just vanished more than three months ago, and I did not hear of him until the day of the suicide bombing,” she told al-Monitor. Despite the Khayal family's surprise, the paths taken by the twin suicide bombers seems not to be uncommon in Mankoubin.
