Bad Tattoos of Bab Tabbaneh

After several days of street fighting in the northern Lebanese city of Tripoli, things cooled off a bit about a week and a ago (aside from, of course, sniper fire every hour or so but that’s a given here). A precarious ceasefire agreement was struck, the Sunni fighters from the Bab Tabbaneh neighborhood put away their assault rifles and RPGs, and on Friday, I decided it was a good time to go back up and snap some pictures of their incredibly bad tattoos.

One of the guys I met on Syria Street, the dividing line between the rival neighborhoods of Bab Tabbaneh and Jebel Mohsen, is a legendary gunman. Another recently spent a short time in prison for stabbing someone repeatedly in a vegetable market. A kid named Ehab, 22 years old with a body full of battle scars, told me he has a ying-yang tattoo on his penis. I passed on seeing it, though.

A stone-cold killer with a ying-yang permanently etched into his skin is indicative of how little sense one can make of Bab Tabbaneh. There’s also the sheikh who collects World War II-era firearms and, according to some, drinks a lot of locally brewed moonshine while managing a cadre of fighters. And of course there's the ridiculous things that can ignite a week's worth of heavy machine gun and mortar exchanges: kids setting off fireworks, or the oft-used excuse “a personal dispute,” which often results in a dozen or so deaths and many injured. As with every place where armed conflicts occur, civilians end up paying the highest price: injury and death, a total shutdown of the already paltry government services, loss of work, and a bunch of other terrible things.

Things jarringly come into perspective once you realize that these fighters are simply kids caught up in a feud they don’t fully understand, trapped in a slum with few, if any, prospects besides killing their neighbors on behalf of opportunist politicians

With that, here’s just a small sample of the bad tattoos of Bab Tabbaneh.

@Jeff_Neumann