Ein El-Hilweh refugee camp, Lebanon – Three months after battle erupted between Lebanese soldiers and an unknown group of radicals in a Palestinian refugee camp, army commander Gen. Michel Suleiman says he now knows whom he is fighting.
Fatah Islam, he says, “is a branch of the al-Qaeda organization that was planning to make Lebanon and Palestinian camps a safe haven,” he told a gathering of his officers recently. Al-Qaeda wants to launch operations in Lebanon and outside through Fatah Islam, he asserted.
But his opinion is only one of many.
Police officials and some experts say the group that fought in the Nahr el-Bared camp has no direct tie to Osama bin Laden’s movement.
The U.S. State Department says it’s an offshoot of a Syrian-backed militia, Fatah al-Intifada. Some Lebanese officials also say Syria backs the group to try to destabilize Lebanon’s Western- backed government.
But pro-Syrian opposition groups say the Lebanese government’s allies initially funded the fundamentalist Sunni Muslim group to counter the influence of the Shiites’ Hezbollah.
There have also been reports of Saudi money financing Fatah Islam and other Sunni jihad groups.
Whichever theory is true, they all converge on one central point: Fatah Islam and others operate because, despite having a Western-leaning government, Lebanon remains a marketplace for extremism. It is a trading post for radical ideas, guerrilla fighters and armaments that has fostered chaos elsewhere in the Middle East.
The Palestinian refugee camp of Ein el-Hilweh on the edge of the southern city of Sidon is where most of the Palestinian radical groups are based. It’s the largest of the 12 camps in Lebanon, housing about 45,000 of the 400,000 Palestinians whose exile dates from Israel’s creation in 1948.
Timur Goksel, who has observed Lebanon for decades as a U.N. peacekeeping officer and later as a professor, believes the groups are wooing al-Qaeda, rather than the other way around.
“I don’t think there is this big drive by al-Qaeda to establish as a base (for) themselves in Lebanon, but there are so many willing parties trying to do their bidding here and trying to get into the good grace of al- Qaeda,” Goksel said.
