Lebanon: Inside the new playground for Islamic militants

The Sunday Herald
May 27, 2007
http://www.sundayherald.com/international/shinternational/display.var.1429091.0.0.php

By Hugh Macleod
Nahr al-Bared, north Lebanon

When the lethal fragments of shells began to explode all around him, a terrified Yousef Abu Radi wrapped his arms around his ten-year-old sister Jinan to try and protect her.

“We were only about 50m from the Lebanese army checkpoint when the bus came under fire,” said the 12-year-old as he lay in Safad hospital in Bedawi, a refugee camp 10km from Nahr al-Bared, from where around 20,000 Palestinians have fled a brutal week of fighting between the Lebanese army and Islamist militants.

“I remember seeing the driver die from flying shrapnel in his chest and head. Then I saw that my mother had been hit and was bleeding. We were all screaming and I was trying to shelter my sister from the bullets. That’s when I felt the pain and realised I had been hit by something.”

It was not until Yousef and his father were in a family friend’s car and on the way to hospital that the young boy - who doctors say may never walk again after shrapnel tore through his back and abdomen – realised that his mother was not sleeping.

“In the car I looked at my mother and then I knew that she was dead. My little sister doesn’t know yet,” said Yousef, curling up in pain as the doctors tell us it is time to finish our interview.

A week into the stand-off between a group of several hundred Al-Qaeda-linked jihadis and a clumsy and hamstrung Lebanese army - sent by a government in crisis on a mission impossible: root out suicidal fighters from a one kilometre square, 40,000 strong civilian camp without entering it – the testimony of those who have escaped the violence paints a picture of a ‘War on Terror’ gone badly awry.

“The shells landed right beside us,” said Ibrahim Jundi, another resident of Nahr al-Bared, telling how he and neighbours had gathered on Tuesday afternoon to help unload bread from the first relief convoy to access the camp, six trucks sent by the UN’s Palestinian aid agency UNRWA. After three days without electricity, running water or supplies of fresh food, the camp’s residents were getting desperate.

“Two men were injured in their legs by shrapnel. A neighbour of mine was hit in the stomach and died soon after, while another died instantly after being hit in the neck,” said Jundi.

UNRWA has confirmed the attack, in which the Lebanese Army appeared to be targeting Fatah Islam positions close by the trucks.

“We do not believe the army directly targeted civilians, but in its use of indiscriminate shelling which have a disproportionate affect on civilians to combatants the army has failed under its obligations to humanitarian law,” said Nadim Houry, a researcher for Human Rights Watch in Beirut.

The Lebanese army issued a statement on Tuesday denying it had shot at civilians and saying it only targeted position held by Fatah Islam.

The crisis in north Lebanon, which analysts predict could spark a Palestinian uprising and further threaten an already fragile and deeply divided country which the West touts as a key beacon of democracy in a troubled region, has been visible for some time.

After the claims of victory by Lebanon’s Shia militant organisation Hezbollah in its ruinous 34-day war with Israel last summer, allegations have grown that the Sunni-led government of Fouad Siniora and its Arab and US allies have been supporting the emergence of Sunni radical groups in north Lebanon as a bulwark against the perceived threat of Hezbollah.

South of Beirut in Ein al-Helwe, the largest and most lawless of Lebanon’s 12 Palestinian camps where a majority of the 400,000 refugees live, two Fatah members were killed recently in clashes with Jund as-Sham, another Sunni militant group whose name translates as ‘Soldiers of the Levant.’

“Jund as Sham is sponsored by the pro-government group,” Nawaf Mousawi, foreign affairs spokesman for Hezbollah, which is spearheading a six-month old campaign to bring down Siniora’s government, told The Sunday Herald.

“The government and US administration have found no way to contain Hezbollah so they are provoking sectarianism to drive the Sunni population towards extremism and against the Shias.”

MP Ammar Houry, who is a member of the March 14 ruling coalition and a close advisor to parliamentary majority leader Saad Hariri, denied the government had any links to the emergence of radical Sunnis.

“Hezbollah say this only because they are opposed to our government,” he said. “The government has taken the decision to finish Fatah Islam and that is what we will do. There are no problems between the Palestinians and the Lebanese.”

The history of Fatah Islam clearly illustrates the arc of Al Qaeda’s re-emergence across the region, as it morphs from the centralised organisation targeted in the US-led war on terror after 9-11, to the loosely grouped alliance of like-minded Islamist extremists now wreaking havoc from Morocco to Iraq.

Though claiming allegiance to Al-Qaeda, Fatah Islam’s members appear to blend disaffected young natives fighting for local grievances, with veterans of foreign conflict, primarily Iraq, fighting a global campaign against what they see as Western invasion of Muslim lands.

Bangladeshis, Yemenis, Syrians, Lebanese and Palestinians were reportedly among the 25 militants killed so far, according to security sources, in a battle that has killed 33 soldiers and dozens of civilians.

While impossible to confirm the nationality of the dead fighters, many camp residents interviewed by The Sunday Herald during the week said they believed the majority of the group were foreigners.

“They used to be very quiet and just pass by our houses saying, ‘Peace upon you’,” said 18-year-old Ahmed Saleh as he lay in hospital in Badawi recovering from the shrapnel that had torn into his foot when artillery shells landed near his home in Nahr al-Bared. “We didn’t like them but we didn’t hate them at that time. We just ignored them.”

Though pledged to the destruction of Israel, Fatah Islam - which splintered last November from the Damascus-based Palestinian Fatah Intifada group - recently reported four of its members, including two senior commanders, were killed by Syrian forces as they attempted to enter Iraq, in a clash that left five Syrian soldiers dead.

The group’s leader Shakir al-Abssi, who is wanted on terrorism charges in Jordan and the US, was convicted on terrorism charges in Syria in the late 1990s but was released after serving just three years jail time for a crime that normally carries the death penalty or life imprisonment. Abssi crossed into north Lebanon from Syria and established himself in Nahr al-Bared, where he is shielded from Lebanese authorities.

Under a 1969 Arab agreement, the Lebanese army does not enter any Palestinian camps, leaving security to the Palestinians themselves.

But on Wednesday a source inside the Lebanese Ministry of Defence told The Sunday Herald the army was planning a possible attack to flush out remaining fighters after receiving a green light to go into the camp from Fatah’s chief in Lebanon Sultan Abul Aynain.

The claim has not been officially confirmed, but if Lebanese forces do enter the camp it will raise the possibility of the army exerting security control inside Lebanon’s 11 other refugee camps.

The US and Lebanon’s Arab allies are backing the country’s attack on the militants, sending military supply planes on Friday to Beirut airport carrying ammunition and other light equipment.

“Lebanon will get whatever it takes to boost its internal defense capability to control its territory and comply with 1701,” an official at the US embassy in Antelias, north of Beirut, speaking on condition of anonymity, told The Sunday Herald.
The official – interviewed shortly prior to the outbreak of violence in north Lebanon - was referring to the UN resolution that brought an end to last summer’s war and that demands the extension of Lebanese government authority across all its territory.
As civilian casualties continue, however, analysts are warning not just of a humanitarian crisis inside the camp – where an estimated 20,000 people remain trapped - but of a widespread Palestinian uprising.

“If this situation continues and the army continue to shell civilian areas in the camp then we could see a domino effect across all of Lebanon’s refugee camps and we could start a war between the Palestinians and the Lebanese,” said Amal Saad-Ghorayeb, visiting scholar at the Carnegie Middle East Centre in Beirut.

Siniora has accused Syria of sponsoring Fatah Islam in a bid to destabilise Lebanon as the country’s divided leaders bicker over the formation of an international tribunal to try suspects in the 2005 assassination of former premiere Rafik Hariri.

A UN investigation has already implicated senior Syrian security officials and their Lebanese allies in the murder. Damascus denies any link to Hariri’s murder or Fatah Islam.

In March, four Syrian members of Fatah Islam were arrested by Lebanese authorities over the February bombing of a commuter bus that killed three people and injured 20. The group denies involvement.

When The Sunday Herald interviewed Fatah Islam last month in their cinder-block base inside the squalid Palestinian refugee camp of Nahr al-Bared in north Lebanon, the young fighters seemed unsure of their mission.

“Our numbers are not important. Whenever we see the time and the land are ready we will go to fight the enemies of God,” said spokesman Abu Saleem Taher, arguing despite the group’s location in far north Lebanon, it’s aim was “to liberate Palestine from the Jews” of Israel, 200 km to the south.

Reached on the telephone two days into the army’s bombardment, Abu Saleem remained defiant.

“God is testing us and we will serve his cause,” he said as artillery fire rang out all around him. “We are ready to continue our fight against the Lebanese army and we know that our brothers in the other camps will not stand still if the situation continues.”

The group has already claimed responsibility for two bomb blasts that struck Christian and Sunni heartland neighbourhoods of Beirut late on Monday and Tuesday nights.

In the Hezbollah-controlled southern suburbs of Beirut meanwhile, The Sunday Herald found further evidence that Lebanon is fast becoming a playground for Islamist militants.

“I came to Lebanon because I know it is a free and open country so I can enter easily,” said a Shiite fighter from Iraq’s Mehdi Army – a militia that is widely accused of brutal sectarian killings against Sunnis.

“But it is also a sectarian country so I feel safe here in the suburbs,” said the fighter, who agreed to speak on condition of anonymity.

After a month lying low in the dingy flat praying, reading and watching DVDs of fire-brand Shiite clerics, the young man – who said he had made no contact with Hezbollah – was due to travel back to the civil war tearing his country apart, to re-join what he called “the fight against occupation” for “the creation of an Islamic Iraq.”