Rival Sunni and Alawite factions fought on Saturday some of the heaviest gunbattles seen in Lebanon's second largest city since the dark days of the the civil war which ended more than two decades ago. The latest bout of fighting here in Tripoli underlines Lebanese worries that the violence that has engulfed neighboring Syria over the past year is spreading across the border, aggravating unhealed wounds from the past and stirring fresh tensions that they fear could trigger a new civil war in Lebanon.

"We cannot be soft dealing with the Alawites and the Shiites because they have decided to slaughter all the Sunnis in Lebanon and Syria," says Sheikh Bilal Masri, a militant Sunni cleric from the Bab Tebbaneh neighborhood of Tripoli. The Alawite sect is an obscure branch of Shiite Islam which forms the backbone of the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

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