Word: hilweh
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Fire Next Time Ein el Hilweh is the largest Palestinian camp in Lebanon, with 70,000 inhabitants. Built just outside the southern city of Sidon, it is surrounded by walls and watchtowers and looks like a postapocalyptic penal colony from a Mad Max movie - albeit one decorated with posters of Saddam Hussein, Osama Bin Laden and Yasser Arafat. The main Palestinian political parties Hamas and Fatah have carved the camp up like gang turf, leaving a no-man's-land as a haven for dangerous jihadist groups...
Chehadeh Jawhar, the Palestinian military commander of Jund al-Sham (Soldiers of Greater Syria), trained al-Qaeda militants in Iraq before moving to Ein el Hilweh. When Jawhar spoke with TIME in March last year, he said that the jihadist factions in the camp were supported by intelligence agencies from the countries that have turned Lebanon into a battlefield. "Anyone who has a project in Lebanon can use the Palestinians to create chaos," he said. Four months later, Jawhar died in a street fight...
Munir Makdah, the commander of Fatah militias in Lebanon and the head of security in Ein el Hilweh, keeps busy trying to survive the regular jihadist attempts on his life - there were five last year alone. Makdah is all that stands between Ein el Hilweh and chaos. When he's not out on patrol he serves as a patron of social programs for children. One of his favorites is the troupe that performs dabka, an Arab circle dance, at festivals around the world. The other is a school for Fatah fighters...
...could disrupt the tense stability along the frontier. Some of Lebanon's Palestinian refugee camps are home to al-Qaeda-inspired militant groups who are suspected of having launched rockets into Israel on two occasions since the end of the 2006 war. On Sunday, the mood in Ain al-Hilweh, the largest and most lawless of the camps, located outside the southern port city of Sidon, was one of fury and mourning. "All that the Israelis are doing, these massacres, killings and bombings, is creating a new generation of suicide bombers," says Mounir Moqdah, a veteran warlord with the Fatah...
...other members of his cell while plotting to carry out bombings. Last month, an indictment against Mughamis stated that he was al-Qaeda's coordinator for Lebanon, Jordan and Syria and that his cell had been trained by Esbat al-Ansar, a jihadist faction based in the Ain al-Hilweh Palestinian refugee camp in south Lebanon...