In the early morning hours of 18 June, a young man was murdered in the centre of Zawiya. On June 18 and 19, two more young men were reported murdered. As a result of the murders, several militias mobilized their troops and have set up checkpoints.
In the early evening of 20 June, the car of Muhammad Masoud Hammad, a former judge at the Zawiya Court of Appeals, parked in front of his house, was shot at with an RPG. The vehicle burned out, but Hammad was not in it. A couple of hours later fighting broke out in the al-Rukaina area (NE of the Refinery Bridge) between the 103rd Brigade (“al-Kabwat” also known as the “al-Sila’a” Brigade), allied with Mohamed al-Baroun, aka al-Far, and the local Riyadh Belhaj militia. The immediate trigger for the fighting was an assassination attempt on the brother of Riyah Belhaj, Abdul Rahman Belhaj, who survived the attempt but was seriously wounded.
On 21 June, Nasser Ammar, previoulsy the commander of the Support Force of Operation Burkan al-Ghadab, strongly condemned the attack on the former judge at the Zawiya Court of Appeal and also mentioned the name of the assassin.