Word: sunnis
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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...
...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 such as Hamas. With Lebanon balanced on a knife-edge, many fear that unrest could cause the country to stumble back into the civil war that ravaged it between 1975-90, itself ignited amid friction involving armed Palestinian groups...
...camp, some 50 people died. The violence spread south to the capital; a 10-kg bomb exploded in a car park in the Ashrafieh district of east Beirut, killing one woman and wounding 12 other people. The next day, another bomb rocked an affluent shopping district in a Sunni Muslim part of Beirut. The fighting quickly became the worst incident of internal violence in Lebanon since its long and bitter civil war ended in 1990. A cease-fire was arranged on Tuesday, allowing a convoy of six U.N. trucks to enter the camp to deliver food, water and medical supplies...
...hope they know better. Whether Syria is providing tactical help or not, at the end of the day Fatah Islam is the Syrian regime's mortal enemy. If the fighting were to somehow lead to an all-out civil war, Syrian stability will be undermined. Lebanon has had a Sunni fundamentalist element in the north for more than 25 years. As I've written before in this column, the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood used northern Lebanon as a rear base to seize the Syrian city of Hama in 1982. Lebanese Sunni, including fundamentalist Palestinians, were instrumental in the attack...
...Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon and you quickly understand that Osama bin Laden is a symbol of resistance. In the run-up to the Iraq war, TIME Beirut correspondent Nick Blanford and I visited 'Ayn al-Hilweh, a Palestinian camp outside of Sidon. Two things struck me. A fundamentalist Sunni group, Usbat al-Islam, occupied half the camp, which we didn't enter because we probably wouldn't have made it back out. And, two, the Fatah commander was already recruiting fighters to go to Iraq to fight the occupation. Both sides were signed up for the jihad...