Since July and the accreditation of the Ministry of Tourism, a handful of tourists have tried the “Love War Tour” excursion which allows them to discover poor and disreputable neighborhoods of Tripoli. Personal collection
REPORT – An NGO organizes excursions to change the way people look at the neighborhoods of this Lebanese city long torn apart by fighting.
Tripoli
“Do you have any questions before we go to the scene of the fights?” Ali, 23, with a hipster beard and long boxing shorts, is a surprising guide. Like his alter ego, Zafer, 38, with a cap on his head, a tapered goatee and black cargo pants. They have made a specialty of organizing guided tours of the poor and disreputable neighborhoods of Tripoli, the big city in northern Lebanon from which they come. Ali is from Jabal Mohsen, an Alawite retreat loyal to the ruling family in Syria; Zafer is from Bab Tebbané, a Sunni bastion, by definition hostile to Hafez el-Assad, whose heart, after having long been inflamed for the revolutionary left, swung into religious fundamentalism at the turn of the 1980s.
These two neighborhoods were separated by a fifty-year war that neither political affiliations nor community rivalries can explain on their own. The marginalization and growing poverty of its approximately 100,000 inhabitants…
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