Lebanese commandos have blown up the home of the Islamist militia chief in a besieged refugee camp where fighting flared again on Tuesday in the fourth week of a deadly stand-off.
Clouds of white smoke billowed into the sky as the army shelled Fatah al-Islam positions in the Nahr al-Bared camp, the epicentre of the deadliest fighting in decades that has ignited United Nations fears about wider civil strife in the deeply divided country.
A special forces unit on Monday destroyed the house of Shaker al-Abssi, leader of the al-Qaeda inspired militia, which has been battling troops from its stronghold in the north Lebanon camp since May 20.
”They destroyed the house after seizing important documents,” a military spokesperson said.
A Palestinian source inside Nahr al-Bared confirmed the house on the Mediterranean shores of the impoverished shantytown was destroyed by a navy commando force that clashed with militants before blowing up the building.
For more than three weeks, the army has been struggling to crush Fatah al-Islam despite its superior firepower and has lost three dozen men in the gun battles.
The Palestinian-born Abssi and his Sunni extremist group first surfaced in November when Lebanese authorities arrested two militants. Abssi made his base in Nahr al-Bared after being freed from a Syrian jail last year but is wanted by both Damascus and Amman.
On Monday, three soldiers and two Red Cross workers were killed and a mediator attempting to find a peaceful solution to the crisis was wounded in separate incidents around the camp.
The deaths raised to 128 the number killed, including 61 soldiers and 50 Fatah al-Islam gunmen, since the fighting erupted in Nahr al-Bared and the nearby port city of Tripoli.
About 3 000 civilians are still marooned by the fighting in increasingly desperate conditions in the camp, one of 12 that are home to more than half of the estimated 400 000 Palestinian refugees in Lebanon.
As violence raged on the ground, the UN Security Council voiced deep concern at reports of arms smuggling across the Lebanese-Syrian border amid fears of escalating strife in a country battling deep sectarian and political divisions.
UN Middle East envoy Terje Roed-Larsen drew an ”alarming and deeply disturbing picture” of the situation, citing Lebanese army reports of ”a steady flow of weapons and armed elements across the border from Syria.”
”What we have seen in Nahr al-Bared, in Ain al-Helweh and in Beirut and its surroundings, may well have been only an opening salvo,” Roed-Larsen warned.
He said militias such as Fatah al-Islam or the Damascus-based Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command and Fatah-Intifada appeared to be growing stronger with higher quality arms.
UN chief Ban Ki-moon recently sent an independent mission to fully assess monitoring of the Syria-Lebanon border and a report is expected at the end of the month.
Members of Lebanon’s ruling majority have pointed the finger at Syria over the fighting, which briefly spread to the refugee camp of Ain al-Helweh in southern Lebanon, and a series of bombings in and around the capital.
Syria was forced to end 29 years of military domination in Lebanon after it was widely accused of the 2005 murder of former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq Hariri. Damascus denies the claims.
But it continues to wield considerable clout in Lebanon, where a stand-off between the Damascus-backed opposition and the Western-backed government of Prime Minister Fuad Siniora has caused political paralysis for seven months. — AFP
