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Please complete the process by verifying your email address. If you can't find the email you can resend it here. Some features on this site require a subscription. The poorest neighborhoods of Tripoli have become famous for all the wrong reasons. Car bombs and sectarian violence have scarred the area.
For Tripolix92s young people, one consequence of the poverty and danger is life in a religious, repressive environment which allows child prostitution to flourish. Among drug and alcohol abuse, with many members of the community in prison, boys are growing up on the streets and being preyed on by men who head sex rings.
NOW Lebanon met one of these street boys and heard an extraordinary story where teenage pursuits like Emo music and friends are mixed too much, too young with knives, sex and money. His father died, and his mother raised him and his four brothers on her own in Khan al-Aaskar, a poverty-stricken quarter in the Tripoli neighborhood of al-Zahiriyah. The buildings look like stacks of matchboxes stacked and are built so close together they overlap, he says, noting that this density means neighbors know everything about each other.
Most of the inhabitants of his neighborhood are x93poor, crushed families,x94 he says, x93whose origins are unknown, especially Bedouins or nawarx85or families fleeing the law. But despite the ubiquity of illicit activity, what seems to upset him most is the predominantly religious character of the neighborhood. Hypocrites, he says. The boy and his friends did not go to school, preferring instead to wreak havoc in al-Zahiriyah and the adjacent neighborhood of Bab al-Tabbaneh.
