Senior officials in the Palestine Liberation Organisation and Hamas were on Saturday trying to broker an end to the bloody siege of a Lebanese refugee camp, which began last week when the Lebanese army engaged members of Fatah al-Islam, an al-Qaeda-inspired group, after a bank robbery in the city of Tripoli.
The efforts came as Lebanese government officials said they were giving mediators the opportunity to persuade the militants to surrender, before ordering the army to move in.
The moves followed a warning on Friday from the leader of Lebanon’s most powerful militant movement, Hassan Nasrallah of Hezbollah, that any attempt to storm the Nahr al-Bared camp risked plunging the country into an uncontrollable cycle of violence.
As the negotiations got under way, the United States, France and their Arab allies continued an airlift of military equipment and weapons to the Lebanese army.
After losing 33 men in the first few hours of the fighting, the Lebanese army quickly turned to siege tactics, pounding the camp with artillery and tank fire with little regard for the camp’s 30 000-plus residents, who were trapped in their homes. Dozens have been reported killed and hundreds of civilians wounded, according to humanitarian groups. The army claims to have killed 60 members of Fatah al-Islam, although the group claims only 10 male casualties.
With more than half the camp’s residents still trapped after a midweek ceasefire allowed some to escape, outrage has been growing among Lebanon’s 400 000 Palestinian refugees.
By this weekend it was clear the Lebanese army’s 40 000 men were stretched close to breaking point. Under terms of last summer’s ceasefire that ended the 2006 Israel-Lebanon war, 15 000 Lebanese soldiers are required to secure the Israeli border and another 8 000 are assigned to prevent weapons smuggling from Syria.
Defence Minister Elias Murr confirmed talks were under way, but added that the military option of resuming the siege remained an option. ”We are now giving a chance for political negotiations,” Murr said. ”If the political negotiations fail, I will leave it up to the army command to carry out the required actions.”
Nahr al-Bared is more an urban maze than traditional camp. Despite the ceasefire, the army checkpoints and roads surrounding it continue to crackle with sniper and machine-gun fire, as the Lebanese move more troops and tanks and armoured vehicles into position.
Fatah al-Islam — which has since been joined by other groups of fighters defending the camp — was formed last year under mysterious circumstances.
After Syria released from prison a former associate of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, al-Qaeda’s leader in Iraq, a few weeks later a group calling itself Fatah al-Islam emerged under his leadership, announcing that it planned to put all 12 camps in Lebanon under Islamic law and would then pursue a war of liberation against Israel.
Numbering only a few hundred men, the group was dismissed as a lightweight group of al-Qaeda-inspired fanatics. Now Fatah al-Islam has warned that it will begin terrorist attacks around the country — against Christian targets — if the camp is stormed.
The group’s deputy leader, Abu Hureira, said sleeper cells in other Palestinian camps and elsewhere in Lebanon were awaiting word for a ”violent response” if the army ended the ceasefire and struck again.
But what has Lebanon on edge is the possibility that other Islamic groups, such as Jund al-Sham and Esbat al-Ansar in the southern camp of Ein el-Hilweh, could take up arms against Lebanon’s army. Both groups are far larger, better equipped and have dozens of men who are veterans of al-Zarqawi’s fight against the Americans in Iraq. — Guardian Unlimited Â