On a recent day, baffled motorists honked their horns and veered around the blocked entrance to a major street in Sidon. Now Lebanon’s third-largest city, Sidon was once a flourishing Phoenician city-state on the Mediterranean.
The street was closed off by Sunni cleric Sheik Ahmad Assir, who erected a small tent encampment in protest against the country’s most powerful military and political force, the militant Islamist group Hezbollah.
A once little-known cleric, Assir has risen to prominence recently with his public challenges of Hezbollah, which itself arose to resist the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon. Some observers believe it has the most powerful nonstate armed forces in the Middle East.
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