Not far from the Islamic extremists holed up in northern Lebanon this weekend,
a boy called Yousef Abu Radi was lying on his side, swathed in bandages. He
had escaped the hell of Nahr al-Bared refugee camp, but only just.
“I was with my father and my mother and my little sisters and we were trying
to get out of the camp,” said the 12-year-old, his brown eyes wide and
fearful as he clung to a blue sheet. “We were about 40 metres from the army
checkpoint when there was shooting at the bus.
“The bus flipped and I was trying to shield my little sister when I felt
something hit my back. I saw my mother was hit in the head and she was dead
instantly. My little sister doesn’t know yet.”
Yousef’s mother, Montaher, 38, was six months pregnant. In the mayhem the
driver of the bus was also killed.
Yousef’s 10-year-old sister Jinan survived uninjured; a second, Jana, 2, was
hit in the hip by shrapnel from an exploding shell. Shrapnel wounded Yousef,
too, piercing his small intestine.
They were among the thousands of terrified Palestinians trying to flee Nahr
al-Bared, a ramshackle settlement in northern Lebanon that, until last week,
was home to about 40,000 Palestinian refugees.
A jumble of breeze-block buildings and narrow streets that lies between the
Mediterranean and orange groves, Nahr al-Bared is one of the most densely
populated residential areas in the world. So when fighting broke out last
week between Islamic militants who had infiltrated the camp and the Lebanese
army, civilians soon found themselves caught in the crossfire.
Rockets and shells went astray, hitting homes of those in the camp who have no
love for the militant group known as Fatah al-Islam. At the same time
extremists were said to be firing on anyone suspected of aiding the Lebanese.
Desperate civilians began streaming out of the camp with little more than the
clothes on their backs when a fragile truce took hold on Tuesday afternoon.
Yousef’s family were among those who made it, though at terrible cost. After
the attack on the bus a neigh-bour drove them, with the body of Yousef’s
mother, to a hospital in Beddawi, another Palestinian refugee camp nearby.
There Yousef’s father Radi Abu Radi said the Lebanese army had tried to help
them after they were hit, but he remained distraught and bitter.
“No one [in the camp] supports Fatah al-Islam,” he said, standing in the
corridor of the Safad hospital. “They are not Palestinians. But the Lebanese
army is killing us – innocent civilians. They are shelling the camp.”
Over and over last week Palestinians streaming out of the camp said the same
thing. There was anger at Fatah al-Islam for bringing this catastrophe on
the camp, but also at the Lebanese army for shelling and shooting into a
heavily populated area.
This weekend the Lebanese army surrounds the camp; about 20,000 civilians are
still inside; and the several hundred Fatah al-Islam extremists, their
bodies strapped with bandoliers and bombs, remain defiant.
So far the fighting has killed at least 70 people and injured many more; more
than 30 soldiers have died – and four reportedly had their heads cut off.
“They [Fatah al-Islam] will fight to the last drop of blood,” claimed one
supporter. “They are religious people who love to be martyrs for Islam.”
It is Lebanon’s worst internal violence since the civil war that ended in
1990. Is it a bloody, isolated inci-dent? Or is it part of a wider drive by
Al-Qaeda and its allies to spread death and destruction further through the
Middle East? THE leader of Fatah al-Islam is a fugitive Jordanian citizen of
Palestinian origin who denies links with Al-Qaeda but embraces similar
jihadist ideology.
Friends in Beirut say Shakir al-Abssi, 49, started his political career as a
member of Yasser Arafat’s secular Fatah movement in the Palestine Liberation
Organisation; then he broke away and joined a movement called Fatah
al-Intifada [Uprising], moving to Damascus, the Syrian capital, with other
rebels.
Later he returned to Beirut and lived in the Shatila Palestinian refugee camp
with his wife, daughter and two sons. He made little impression. Friends say
he was more religious than most, and proud, but no extremist.
At some point he became inspired by the ideology of Osama Bin Laden and made
an alliance with Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a fellow Jordanian who led Al-Qaeda
in Iraq until he was killed by US forces last year.
Abssi was charged in Jordan along with Zarqawi over the murder of Laurence
Foley, an American diplomat, who was shot in Amman in 2002. In absentia
Abssi was sentenced to death.
By then he was in prison in Syria, only to be mysteriously released and
allowed to cross into northern Lebanon where he rejoined the ranks of Fatah
al-Intifada. It wasn’t radical enough for him, so last year Abssi and other
militants split away and created Fatah al-Islam, publishing a statement of
intent on jihadist websites.
“Know that our goal is fighting the Jews and all those who support them from
the Zionist Crusaders of the West in order to liberate our sacred land,”
their open letter announced. It urged Muslims to join its ranks and training
camps.
A small group of Fatah al-Islam followers surfaced in the Beddawi refugee camp
in northern Lebanon, but was ejected by the camp authorities. They moved on
to Nahr al-Bared nearby where they seized three breeze-block buildings from
Fatah al-Intifada.
Abssi raised the group’s black flag and declared he was going to bring
religion to the Palestinians and fight in the global jihad espoused by
Al-Qaeda. He began training fighters and, camp residents say, by last week
had a group of about 250, mostly nonPalestinians. Among them were Saudis,
Syrians, Yemenis, and Algerians. “We could tell from their accents,” one
camp resident said.
They are thought to have entered Lebanon either via Beirut airport, where Gulf
residents are often waved through, or across the Syrian border, legally or
illegally.
They had amassed powerful weaponry, probably smuggled in from Syria. The
crisis erupted last Sunday when the Lebanese Internal Security Forces (ISF)
mounted a dawn raid on a flat in the nearby port town of Tripoli, chasing
what they thought were bank robbers. The men inside were members of Fatah
al-Islam, and in the ensuing gun battle many security agents as well as
militants died.
Abssi’s men in Nahr al-Bared reacted brutally. They attacked Lebanese soldiers
at checkpoints guarding the roads out of the camp, killing many and seizing
their poorly protected concrete pillboxes. The ISF had given no alert; the
soldiers were mostly snoozing in the sun.
The Lebanese army regrouped and retook the posts but dared not take the fight
into the camp. Under a 1969 Arab agreement, Palestinians police themselves
inside the camps and the Lebanese army guards only the perimeter.
Intense fighting broke out. Sniper fire, heavy machinegun rounds and
rocket-propelled grenades poured out of the Fatah al-Islam bases. The
Lebanese army fired back with heavy machineguns and antiquated tanks and
artillery. Terrified civilians were caught in the middle.
On Monday a shell fired by the Lebanese army hit the roof of a mosque where
hundreds of people were sheltering. It may have been aimed at a Fatah
al-Islam fighter – the Lebanese army said the extremists were sniping from
rooftops and minarets – but the victims were innocents. Two men died
immediately, dozens were injured.
There was little help to hand. “When people called us, we took the seriously
injured to the clinic,” said Maamoun Ahmed, 22, a volunteer nurse who later
got out of the camp. “If we were fired on, we had to turn back. We left a
lot of injured in their houses. We don’t know what happened to them.
By the end of the third day, the volunteer nurses at the camp’s main medical
centre had run out of supplies. “The work was continuous. If we even tried
to sleep for a minute, there would be an explosion and we would jerk awake,”
Ahmed said. “We piled the bodies of the dead in our garage, wrapped in
blankets. It was too dangerous to bury them.”
He stored two women, two boys and eight men. He doesn’t know their names: he
was too busy trying to keep the injured alive. “I was performing surgery,
and I have no training,” he said. “I pulled bullets out. We had only local
anaesthetic.”
Then two medics were injured when the Lebanese army fired on their ambulances.
The volunteers decided, along with thousands of others, that it was time to
escape while they still could.
By this weekend, about 20,000 people had fled Nahr al-Bared and arrived in
Beddawi, which was already overcrowded. Some were taken in by families who
found themselves living 20 to a room; others slept on the floors of mosques
and schools, or in dirty courtyards under tin shelters. Everyone seemed
filthy and exhausted; few places had water or sanitation.
Even if they had no injured or dead among their relatives, the Nahr al-Bared
refugees were in dire straits. The extended al-Jundi family were typical of
about 1,500 refugees camped in a school on the floor or dirty pallets. They
had not bathed in days, and had just been delivered their first food, a
plastic bag of yoghurt, bread, and rice. But they had no means to cook it.
THE Lebanese prime minister, Fouad Siniora, claimed the fighting was part of
a plot by Syria to destabi-lise Lebanon. Syria vehemently denied it, saying
it has a warrant out for Abssi’s arrest. Others suggested the rise of Fatah
al-Islam was the unintended consequence of US efforts to combat Hezbollah,
the Ira-nian-backed militant group in southern Lebanon.
Whatever the precise backing of Fatah al-Islam, its leader speaks in the
global jihadist language of Al-Qaeda.
He told The Sunday Times recently: “Muslim people from any part of the world
will not be able to witness their people being killed and not take action in
return.”
A Palestinian source said last week that Abssi’s son-in-law, married to his
only daughter, was killed fighting in Iraq 12 days ago. He said the group
considered him a martyr who would go directly to heaven because he had died
fighting the American occupation forces.
Yesterday there was no sign to an end of the stand-off at Nahr al-Bared. The
once-bustling camp appeared devastated, with cars and shops torched,
buildings shattered and the narrow streets and alleys strewn with wreckage,
glass and dead rats. About 20,000 Palestinian civilians remained, unwilling
or unable to leave.
Lebanese soldiers had reinforced the perimeter and taken up ambush positions
in the orange groves. On Friday, five cargoes of weapons arrived for the
Lebanese army – one from the US, two from the United Arab Emirates, and two
from Jordan.
Elias Murr, the Lebanese defence minister, threw down the gauntlet. “The army
will not negotiate with a group of terrorists and criminals,” he said.
“Their fate is arrest, and if they resist the army, death.”
However, there was little sign the Fatah al-Islam fanatics would go quietly.
They had left their buildings and were living in the narrow, potholed
streets, sleeping and eating in shifts. Most were dressed in Afghan-style
clothing, with belts of bullets swaddling their bodies, according to Sophie
Amara, an Arab journalist working for France 24 in Lebanon who managed to
infiltrate the camp and get out again safely.
Amara said she met many Saudis along with Syrians, Yemenis, Algerians, and
Pakistanis among the fighters. They were using a captured United Nations
pickup truck to broadcast fiery sermons. “One bearded man yelled over the
microphone, ‘Allahu akbar [God is great]’ and gave a long, ugly prayer,
shouting for the need to follow the path of jihad,” Amara said.
“They told me they will not surrender, they said they will fight to the last
bullet.”
Additional reporting: Hugh Macleod and Sarah Baxter, Washington
