Word: palestinians
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Much remains a mystery about Fatah al-Islam, the Palestinian-led Sunni Muslim fundamentalist faction that sprang up six months ago and is at the center of Lebanon's latest fighting. What is known, however, indicates that the group, based near the northern coastal city of Tripoli, is a product of past Middle East conflict, a manifestation of present unrest in Lebanon and an ominous sign of future turmoil throughout the region...
...there is a longer-term worry that goes beyond any possible Syrian connections-that Fatah al-Islam is one of a group of armed, extremist factions that have been spawned in the triangle of political instability from Baghdad to Gaza to Tripoli. Those groups include Iraqi insurgents, the mysterious Palestinian faction holding BBC journalist Alan Johnston hostage in Gaza, and the radical Salafist cells that have multiplied in Saudi Arabia and across North Africa all the way to Morocco. Taken together, these groups threaten the entire Middle East. Exploiting the Internet, using cell phones to communicate, stealing cash and smuggling...
...called his new faction Fatah al-Islam. This time, the split appeared to be rooted in the growth of al-Qaeda and the terrorism unleashed after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, another indication of extremism's viral spread since Sept. 11, 2001. The original Fatah always espoused a secular Palestinian state, as did Fatah al-Intifada. But Fatah al-Islam not only preaches a Salafist brand of Islam, but appears to have at least logistical links with al-Qaeda. In 2004, a Jordanian court convicted al-Absi and nine others for an al-Qaeda plot that included the 2002 assassination...
...military operation in Lebanon is intended to flush out the group's fighters, including Saudis, Syrians, Tunisians, Yemenis, Moroccans as well as Palestinians. Yet the bombardment of a Palestinian refugee camp risks broadening the conflict to include other mainstream Palestinian factions such as the original Fatah group, whose Lebanon representative Sultan Abul Ainain warned "there will be uprisings in all the camps in Lebanon" if the army's indiscriminate shelling of the camp at Nahr al-Bared did not cease. Such a confrontation risks pulling in Hizballah, which, although a Shi'ite group, is closely allied with Sunni Palestinian factions...
...Gaza at the Crossroads of Civilizations" at Geneva's Musée d'Art et d'Histoire is the first ever public show of Gazan antiquities. Its 530 artifacts, drawn chiefly from the vaults of private Palestinian collector Jawdat Khoudary and the Palestinian National Authority, depict a Gaza that was once at the nexus of trade routes and a meeting point of cultures. Today, at a time when rival Palestinian factions are gunning each other down, we learn that Gaza's early inhabitants were prosperous, practiced multiculturalists. On show are objects from several empires unearthed during the past two centuries...