Violence Flares in Beirut Amid Opposition Protests

Hezbollah Angered by Land-Line Decision

BEIRUT, May 7 -- Political tensions once again disrupted the Lebanese capital Wednesday, with the outbreak of armed clashes and the closure of major roads by supporters of the Hezbollah-led opposition.

Hundreds of masked teenage backers of the Shiite Hezbollah movement and its ally Amal burned tires along roads leading to Beirut's international airport, while trucks and bulldozers were used to erect barricades around the facility. At least five civilians and two soldiers were wounded in mixed areas of the capital as army and police patrols attempted to bring the violence under control, local news media reported.

The state of civil disobedience is expected to continue until the government reverses its decision this week to remove a private land-line telephone network that Hezbollah has set up across Lebanon, according to an opposition source who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter.

The standoff between Lebanon's Western-backed government and the Hezbollah-led opposition backed by Syria and Iran has left the country without a president since November and paralyzed the work of its parliament.

In a cabinet meeting Monday evening that lasted until early Tuesday and that participants described as a "confrontation," Prime Minister Fouad Siniora's government condemned Hezbollah's phone network as "illegal and compromising to the state's sovereignty."

The cabinet also decided to remove army Brig. Gen. Wafiq Shoukair, a Shiite, as head of security at Beirut's international airport, following reports that Hezbollah had illegally installed cameras near the airport.

"We will not negotiate, and we will not make a bargain," said Marwan Hamadeh, the telecommunications minister. "We will not withdraw any of those decisions."

Hamadeh said the phone network, which was previously limited to Beirut's southern suburbs, had recently been extended to most regions of the country, adding that the Iranian Committee to Rebuild Southern Lebanon was supervising the work.

"Not taking those decisions was not an option. They keep threatening us and intimidating us, and now we decided to stand up to them," said Ahmad Fatfat, minister of youth and sports.

Fatfat said that the cameras set up around the airport were monitoring the movement of private jets and that the government feared assassination attempts

Hezbollah denied the accusations and said it would not accept the cabinet's moves.

"Our arms and our phone networks are twins," said Naim Qassem, Hezbollah's deputy secretary general.

In a statement issued by his Amal movement, Nabih Berri, the speaker of parliament, said that the "amputated government bears full responsibility" for Wednesday's events.

Political tension has been on the rise since Shiite ministers resigned from the Siniora government in 2006 and has culminated in the failure to elect a successor to former president Emile Lahoud, who stepped down Nov. 23. For months, opposition supporters have staged a sit-in that has shut down an important part of downtown Beirut.

Concerns about full-scale Shiite-Sunni strife across the country is growing, fueled by the escalating clashes between opposition and government supporters in Beirut's mixed areas.

"The Sunnis of Lebanon have had enough of this," said the Sunni grand mufti, Mohammed Rashid Qabbani.