Notes
Moustapha Saad, whose father was the first casualty of the Lebanese civil war in 1975, was seriously wounded on
Monday in an explosion which wounded as many as 50 other people and destroyed the block of flats in which the Saad family lived. Saad was flown to Paris for emergen- cy treatment, but friends fear he may be permanently blind. The young man inher- ited his father's position as populist leader of the Sunni Muslims of Sidon after the ited his father's position as populist leader of the Sunni Muslims of Sidon after the Lebanese Army killed the elder Saad as he led a parade of fishermen to protest at the government's award of a fishing monopoly to a Christian former president. The young Saad was an outspoken critic of the Israeli occupation and was well known to foreign correspondents. The attack on his life_ has raised concern for the other leading anti- Israeli in Sidon, the MP Dr Nazih Bizri. The Lebanese government accused Israel of blowing up the building. The Israeli army meanwhile began its withdrawal this week from Sidon and the remainder of the territory between the Awali and Zahrani Rivers along Lebanon's coast. This first of three phases (the second is in the Bekaa Valley, and the third along the Israeli border) is scheduled for completion on 18 February. Several likely consequences of the partial withdrawal are: that resistance units will assassinate suspected collabor- ators; that Christian villages in the hills near Sidon will be attacked by Shi'ite and Sunni Muslims; that Sunnis and Shi'ites will themselves vie for dominance of the Sidon region; that Palestinians in Sidon's large Ain Helouie refugee camp will suffer from fighting among rival factions (some armed by Israel, others by the PLO); and, finally, that Lebanese insurgents will use Sidon as a staging post from which to launch their hit and run attacks on the Israeli occupation forces in the rest of the south. Moustapha Saad may well prove to be the first casualty of the post-occupation war for south Lebanon.
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