In October 2016, the online initiative Ta3a Sob El Fan (Come to Art) began to highlight the creativity of Tripoli's youth by sharing poems, drawings, songs and video clips created by children and teenagers from the northern Lebanese city. It was an occasion to encourage the youth to spread their ideas, as well as to show the rest of Lebanon that Tripoli is not only about war.

Tripoli is often considered a dangerous and conservative city in Lebanon, due to the continuous clashes between rival neighborhoods since the Lebanese civil war and the outbreak of terrorist attacks since the Syrian civil war. “A lot of Lebanese people are afraid to go to Tripoli,” said Isabelle Wakim, the Saint Joseph University student who initiated Ta3a Sob El Fan.

“Tripoli is the second [largest] city of the country and mostly a Sunni region, not far from Syria and under constant threat from groups such as Jabhat al-Nusra and Islamic State [IS] implementing [their ideologies]. People there feel left out by the state. There are very poor neighborhoods whose youth can be tempted to join radical organizations and fight,” Wakim told Al-Monitor.

Wakim and 10 other students from Saint Joseph University participated in the international Peer to Peer: Challenging Extremism competition sponsored by Facebook and the US State Department. The goal of the competition was to encourage students from all over the world to create a social media campaign to fight extremism in their society. The competition, launched in early 2015, awarded all of the students in the six top teams scholarships between $1,000 and $5,000.