THE Bedawi refugee camp in the northern suburbs of Tripoli is a short and normally rather pleasant drive from the city centre. The coastal highway passes through orange and bamboo groves along the seashore, then turns sharp right, winding through small cinder-block houses to the camp which stands on top of a hill with a fine view of the Mediterranean.

Last week, as the camp became the site of Yasser Arafat’s last stand against the forces of the Syrian army and the rebels from the Palestinian Liberation Organisation, it was not an easy place to get to.

The coastal highway looked ominously quiet and empty. It is now peppered with shell holes and Arafat loyalists have built earth chicanes across the road. A PLO machinegunner on the back of a pickup truck had set up a position in one of the orange groves. A few fighters could be seen moving through the bamboo.

As we turned up the hill the taxi stuck in the mud and the shelling began. The first rounds whistled past and landed 150 yards away in the orange groves. Then they began to move towards us across the highway. We escaped just as a shell blew in the taxi’s back window.

It seemed better to try at night. Kassim Mohammed, a PLO ambulance driver who makes the journey several times a day, ferrying the wounded to hospital in Tripoli, said the fighting usually quietened down after dark. He offered to give me a lift.

The casualty rate among the ambulance drivers is appalling. Three of his colleagues were shot on Monday and joined their patients in the hospital. Kassim turned the lights off and drove up the hill in pitch black. “If you turn on the lights they shoot at you,” he said.

We arrived at the small bungalow that serves as PLO headquarters at about 10pm. Two of Arafat’s fighters were drinking Arabic tea from a tin kettle by candlelight. It was late for them to be up, they said. The battle, which usually stopped at around 7pm, began again at 5.30am.

The atmosphere was eerie and frightening. Under our feet, deep below the ground in large air-raid shelters, a few thousand women, children and old men were asleep. A few shells thumped into the camp but the two fighters barely noticed and none of the others woke. “It is nothing,” said one of them. “They are just saying, ‘We are here’.”

The view from Bedawi was apocalyptic. The oil refinery to the north had been hit by shells a few days before. Huge flames shot into the sky. Two pillars of smoke rose thousands of feet in the air and formed a massive black cloud.

More terrifying was what we could not see. On the ridge of Tourbol mountain, a short distance to the north, and to the east and west of us lay Syrian tank, rocket and infantry battalions, a few hundred Libyans and the ranks of the PLO dissidents led by Sandhurst-trained Abu Musa. Their guns were trained mostly at us.

A silver refrigerated truck with a blue stripe along the side stands humming in the car park opposite the Islamic hospital in Tripoli. It is a mortuary for some of the dead from this short war. About 40 bodies lie inside.

Arafat’s headquarters is in a house down a cul-de-sac in the Zariyeh district of Tripoli. His fighters are everywhere in the town centre, careering through the streets in jeeps and hanging around the amusement arcade playing the Wizard of Wor video game. They don’t act like people whose final days have come.

And, in a long interview last week, nor did Arafat. He is a small man, almost bald, and his stubble has turned grey. He was courteous, witty and almost cheerful. Although Tripoli is his last remaining base within striking distance of Israel, he denied it was essential. “My headquarters are in Tunis. I am only in Tripoli because my men are in danger,” he said.

The two fighters in Bedawi camp passionately respected Arafat. But their vision of the future is not so clear. Kassim said to the fighters: “Sometimes I am not sure what direction our revolution is going to take. What is the future for us?” The fighters shrugged, as one of them disconsolately poked an olive out of a bottle with a live, heavy machinegun bullet.

- The following month Arafat and 4,000 PLO loyalists were forced to flee Lebanon. David Blundy was shot dead by a sniper while working for The Sunday Correspondent in El Salvador in 1989

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