Photo by: AFP

"Our standard is our faith and we do not fear their armies. It is a decisive period between us and (Hezbollah leader) Hassan Nasrallah, a "battle hardened" former soldier said, adding he would "cut off the head of anyone who touches even a hair on the head of one Sunni." The weekend fighting was part of a wider armed conflict in Beirut and other parts of the country pitting opposition fighters against government loyalists that had raised fears of a return to all-out civil war. The sounds of exploding hand grenades, mortar rounds and gunshots echoed around Tripoli's northern districts such as Sunni-dominated Bab Al-Tebbaneh and Jabal Mohsen, home to the Alawite community.

Here, the road from Syria acts as an unofficial demarcation line. Before the brutal civil war of 1975-1990, this area was the beating heart of the town where the two communities lived side by side.
The split was effectively automatic, 56-year-old Sunni Tarek Djoudi said. The Alawites arrived long before Syria took control of the Jabal Mohsen hill and the Sunnis gathered in the nearby Bab Al-Tebbaneh plain. Here and there along the road to Syria, traces of the civil war remain, with war-ravaged buildings still unrepaired, some with fresh scars from the latest conflict.