Dickey: Deconstructing Lebanon's Newest War The ferocious battles of the last three days could open the way to wider conflicts. But there may be both more and less than meets the eye. WEB-EXCLUSIVE COMMENTARY By Christopher Dickey Newsweek Updated: 5:52 p.m. ET May 22, 2007 http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18808505/site/newsweek/ May 22, 2007 - A new war has begun in Lebanon. But what kind of war? Although two bombs already have gone off in the capital, Beirut, it could remain largely localized as a confrontation between the Lebanese Army and an obscure group of jihadis holed up in a Palestinian refugee camp near the northern city of Tripoli. Or it could be a much bigger fight, a symptom of the way Al Qaeda and groups sympathetic to it have spread not only their influence but their Iraq-hardened veterans through the Middle East. We may see Lebanese against Lebanese, Palestinians against Palestinians. This could be a replay, with a few new wrinkles, of the infinitely complicated civil war that raged from 1975 to 1990, in which the Syrians acted in Lebanon as both agents provocateurs and peacemakers, assassins and stabilizers, until they occupied the country altogether. Yes, what kind of war is this? The answer is either the first option, if Lebanon is lucky, or all of the above if it's not. But to begin to understand what's happening, no easy formulas apply. Lebanon is a house of mirrors that is also a house of cards: nothing is ever quite what it seems, and the whole structure is always on the verge of collapse. Bernard Rougier's book "Everyday Jihad: The Rise of Militant Islam Among Palestinians in Lebanon" was published just last week by Harvard University Press, so I called him this morning to get his take on this fight that began with a bank robbery on Saturday by a small group called Fatah Islam and has escalated into a battle with the government army costing dozens of lives among the combatants and thus-far uncounted civilians. Rougier, a professor at the Institute for Political Studies here in Paris, spent years on the ground in the Palestinian camps figuring out who was who and what was what. I don't think there's a better authority. But as he walked me through the convoluted political landscape that is backdrop to the fighting, I kept thinking that if the devil is in the details, then Lebanon is pure Pandemonium. As Rougier describes the situation, nobody has clear control of the 12 refugee camps in the country and many different groups find ways to exploit the vacuum. These are not tent cities, remember. According to official U. N. statistics, of roughly 400,000 Palestinians in Lebanon, some 215,000 live in camps. Nahr el-Bared, where the fighting has raged for the last three days, is just one of them, with a registered population of about 31,000. These are urban agglomerations whose alleys, through decades of accreted tragedies and frustrations, have grown into warrens of fanaticism. "The camps are really cities, but without any political or institutional control," says Rougier. As the authority of the Palestine Liberation Organization waned over the last 20 years, their residents grew ever more receptive to radical Islamic groups. The camps became "a sort of free space welcoming all the religious influences from abroad," says Rougier. The global jihad gave young people a new way of looking at their lives, not just as Palestinian victims, but as fighters for a greater cause. They were fascinated by every new front in their world war, whether Bosnia or Chechnya or Iraq. "The fact is that these camps belong to a new map, the mental map of the jihadi networks," says Rougier. But different jihadi organizations developed different priorities, and while many or most might be vaguely described as "linked to Al Qaeda," they are also hostile to each other, and can be susceptible tools for foreign powers. Consider this trail of conflict, recounted by Rougier based on his sources in the camps: During the 1980s, when Syria was still consolidating its occupation of Lebanon, it helped create a radical Sunni Islamic group called Al-Ahbash. The organization set about wresting control of mosques and other institutions away from Lebanon's traditional Sunni elite, which is closely allied to the Saudis and was represented by billionaire former prime minister Rafik Hariri. In 1995, members of a radical Islamic group from the Palestinian camps, Asbat al-Ansar, killed the leader of Al-Ahbash. Soon afterward, money from Saudi and other conservative Sunni contributors started flowing generously into the coffers of Asbat al-Ansar, which is based near Hariri's hometown of Sidon. Since then, Asbat al-Ansar has forged a close if quiet relationship with the Sunni establishment and the current anti-Syrian government of Prime Minister Fuad Siniora, which was formed after Hariri was murdered and Syrian troops withdrew in 2005. (As it happens, the U.N.-led investigation into the Hariri killing turned up <http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9785752/site/newsweek/> phone records showing the head of Al-Ahbash, Sheik Ahmed Abdel-Al, in contact with key Lebanese and Syrian suspects on the day Hariri died. Members of the Siniora government have told the press in Beirut they think the Syrians started the trouble this week as part of their ongoing effort to stop the establishment of a special internationally backed tribunal to try the suspects in the Hariri killing. The Syrians deny this.) So where is Al Qaeda in this bewildering saga? Bear with me. Some members of Asbat al-Ansar have gone off to fight in Iraq, according to Rougier, and the group does see itself with a regional role in the global jihad. But it doesn't want to shake things up on its home turf, and isn't answerable to Osama bin Laden. For the moment its leaders even cooperate with the Iranian-backed Shiite militia Hizbullah. "But underground, these organizations have a strong Sunni identity. They hate the Shiites, even though they won't say it publicly," says Rougier. "So they send people to Iraq, where they can kill Americans and Shiites." And that helps keep things calm on the home front. The group fighting the Lebanese Army at the moment, Fatah Islam, has in a sense opposite origins. Many of its foot soldiers are foreign jihadis who were allowed to move to the Nahr el-Bared camp-or were sent there-by the Syrians. According to press reports, the leader of the group, Palestinian Shaker al-Absi, is allegedly responsible for the killing of an American diplomat, Laurence Foley, in Jordan in 2002. Al-Absi was jailed in Syria, but then released, and reportedly has said he follows the ideology of Osama bin Laden. One of the jihadists killed in the fighting on Sunday was a Lebanese wanted in Germany for attempting to blow up a train there last year. Other members of the group, which numbers a few hundred, are said by various sources to come from Saudi Arabia, Syria, Yemen and Libya. Rougier points to the irony that foreign fighters associated with Al Qaeda in Iraq should be sent to Lebanon ("I don't know how and by whom exactly") to launch a jihad, while from another camp young men are directed to Iraq by Palestinian leaders who want to preserve the local status quo. The bottom line is that the Fatah Islam jihadis under fire in Nahr el-Bared appear to be isolated. The refugees who've lived there for generations are fleeing their homes waving white flags. The conservative Lebanese Sunnis of Tripoli, even ones who've said they sympathize with the holy war in Iraq, are cheering on the army as it moves to crush the jihadis in their backyard. The Lebanese house of mirrors reflects impossibly fractured images, but the house of cards still stands-for now. URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18808505/site/newsweek/ [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] -------------------------- Want to discuss this topic? 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