In case you’ve been living under a rock, which is most likely true but it’s okay – no one’s judging, Tripoli has been having its most vicious rounds of fights in the past several months, for the past day. Its inhabitants didn’t sleep the night. The rhetoric is no longer about periods of calm broken by gunshots heard, but the entire opposite.

Of course, those inhabitants are, as far as we care, used to sleepless nights away from windows and to the sound of bullets that they tell their children is thunder.

What prompted the Tripoli fights is not just those militant terrorists being bored after such a long period of hibernation. These aren’t people with a functioning head above their skulls for them to make plans or act according to their own free will. These people always need a mastermind to orchestrate what they do. For that purpose, yet another of these masterminds popped out of the blue in Tripoli yesterday. His name is Khaled Hoblos, a local sheikh at one the Haroun el Rashid mosque in Tripoli.

Has anyone wondered how such creatures keep popping up out of the blue in Tripoli and immediately making a name for themselves?

Yesterday, as part of his Friday sermon at his mosque, Khaled Hoblos made fiery statements to the goons attending his service about how the army is, in typical Sunni-targeted rhetoric, is enforcing a security plan only against the Sunnis in Tripoli and that the plan in question, as well as other army actions, were hitting Sunni pride in its core and that such things were not to be tolerated anymore.

Of course, news of such actions – be it due to Hoblos or some other low-life creature, have been going around for a month. News of upcoming breaks in the security plan over Tripoli are not new. It’s just that nobody, including governmental bodies involved, cared.

Soon enough, about 200 of those militants gathered in Bab el Tebbane and spread across the old city, starting the fights in question across portions that Tripoli hadn’t seen fights in before.

Khaled Hoblos, however, wouldn’t accept not having the last word. So he made another statement, which I received thanks to one of my friends in Tripoli:

What that Hoblos creature fails to understand is that the security plan in question is what was keeping the city he calls home at bay, at least when it worked, from the rising madness sweeping across the region, be it with ISIS or the deterioration in Lebanese politics or other forms of extremism that people don’t like to discuss.

That security plan, and the sacrifices of the army personnel to make it work, was what was getting the thousands upon thousands of people in Tripoli to feel safe at their own homes again. For once in this god-forsaken country, such a plan was working. It doesn’t matter that they can’t enforce such plans in other areas in the country; those areas in question are not filled with filth who have guns and who are covered by Lebanese MPs providing them with all kinds of weapons and material and who act on sporadic whims, igniting a whole city in the process.

Soon enough, news of a ceasefire between the militants and the army will surface, as is always the case. The army is never allowed to kill or arrest every single last one of these militants, starting with those masterminds who make sure the goons still act, still kill, still terrorize innocent people and do what they do.

Today, ignore Nicolas Fattouch and his soap opera-like situation. That has become a distraction, and Tripoli is coming back to remind us all that there are more dangerous people in this country who deserve our attention. There are MPs who are, from behind the scenes, orchestrating figurative slaps and knock-downs to hundreds of thousands of people.

And there are sheikhs like Khaled Hoblos who are igniting an entire city with sectarian hate. Mr. Hoblos will come out of this unscathed. He’s a Sunni sheikh after all, he’s protected by some form of Allah-induced immunity. It shouldn’t be like this. Arrest Khaled Hoblos now. Put him in the darkest pits of dungeon hell you can find. The time for drastic measures is yesterday.

He said it best: