[LCM Articles] [Leb4ever] Robert Fisk's Coverage of the North Lebanon Skirmishes in 3 Articles (May 21-23)

[Loai Naamani]

1 of 3 (May, 21): "Scores dead as Lebanese army battles Islamists in
bloodiest day since civil war"

2 of 3 (May, 22): "A front-row seat for this Lebanese tragedy"

3 of 3 (May, 23): "The road to Jerusalem (via Lebanon)"

 


Robert Fisk: Scores dead as Lebanese army battles Islamists in bloodiest day
since civil war 


Published: 21 May 2007 


Butchery was the word that came to mind. Twenty-three Lebanese soldiers and
police, 17 Sunni Muslim gunmen. How long can Lebanon endure this? Just
before he died, one of the armed men - Palestinians? Lebanese? - we still
don't know - shot a soldier right beside me. He fell down on his back,
crying with pain, and I thought he had slipped on the road until I saw the
blood pumping out of his leg and the Red Cross team dragging him desperately
out of the line of fire. Not since the war - yes, the Lebanese civil war
that we are all still trying to forget - have I heard this many bullets
cracking across the streets of a Lebanese city. 

And the dead. Five of the 17 gunmen were killed after paramilitary police
stormed an apartment block in 200 Street in the centre of Tripoli. One lay
on his back like a child, water from a broken hydrant streaming over his
corpse. Another lay crumpled in a doorway amid glass and the Kalashnikov
rifle he was still firing when he died. "How young they all were," a woman
remarked with a kind of weariness, and I noticed the dead were also bearded,
the little stubble beards al-Qaida's men like to wear.

The bloody events in Lebanon yesterday passed so swiftly - and so
dangerously for those of us on the streets - that I am still unsure what
happened. Clearly, an al-Qaida-type group tried to ambush the Lebanese army
- and succeeded all too appallingly; 23 dead soldiers and police is a
fearful figure for a tiny country such as Lebanon. But was it really a
Syrian plot, as Fouad Siniora's government suggested? Was this the long hand
of Syria stretching out once more across Lebanon's green and pleasant land?

So here are a few facts. A group of armed men tried to rob a Tripoli bank on
Saturday and got cornered in an apartment block. Others holed up in the Nahr
el-Bared Palestinian refugee camp north of the city. When I arrived
yesterday, army tank fire was bursting in the camp and black-hooded
policemen were preparing to storm, Iraqi-style, into the city-centre
building. But the robbers were said to have stolen only $1,500. Was that
worth this massacre? And is "Fatah al-Islaam" - which has existed in the
shadows of the camp for months - really a 300-strong armed group?

Certainly the dead gunmen were real. I found two more heaped together in
Tripoli, covered in spent ammunition clips, the apartment building on fire -
so hot I could not get up the stairs - but families still struggling down.
One woman carried a baby. "Only four days old, he is only four," she wailed
at me. One family I found huddling in their bathroom, 12 terrified Lebanese
who had spent 24 hours in this tiny room as bullets swept the walls of their
home. So what in God's name happened in Lebanon yesterday?

Well, Mr Siniora claimed it was an attempt to destabilise Lebanon - a good
guess, to put it mildly - and Saad Hariri, son of the former prime minister
murdered here more than two years ago, called the armed men "evil-doers who
had hijacked Islam". This is the same Saad Hariri whom at least one American
reporter - I refer to Seymour Hersh - suggested was indirectly helping to
funnel Saudi money to these same gunmen in a recent article in The New
Yorker. The Shia Muslim Hizbollah are supposed to be the bad guys in this
scenario, not a Sunni group.

But Tripoli is the most powerful Sunni city in Lebanon - so powerful that
not a drop of alcohol wets its restaurant tables - and the men and women
running in terror across Tripoli's streets yesterday were also Sunnis. So
are the Syrians really concocting an "al-Qaida" in Lebanon? And who are its
enemies? The Nato army of the UN force in southern Lebanon, perhaps? But
surely not the Lebanese army, the very same army which bravely prevented
civil war last January? Yet in 2000, an al-Qaida-type group also ambushed
the Lebanese army in northern Lebanon. Was this, too, supposed to be a
Syrian invention?

Showers of bullets were still tracing their way over Tripoli last night and
the army was said to be preparing to move into the camps. Fatah, Yasser
Arafat's clapped-out organisation, announced it was on the side of the army,
a wise decision after yesterday's bloodbath. "A dangerous attempt to
undermine Lebanon's security," was the response of a government whose Shia
cabinet ministers abandoned it last year in the hope of bringing the whole
Siniora administration down. But where do we go from here?

And who were the dead men I saw yesterday, perforated by bullets, partly
torn open by grenades? Silent testimony is all we receive from the dead. One
of them had big eyes above his fluffy beard, eyes which stared at us and at
the police who jeered at his corpse. I wonder if they will not come to haunt
us soon. And if we will discover what lies behind this terrible day in
Lebanon.

 


 


Robert Fisk: A front-row seat for this Lebanese tragedy 


Published: 22 May 2007 


There is something obscene about watching the siege of Nahr el-Bared. The
old Palestinian camp - home to 30,000 lost souls who will never go "home" -
basks in the Mediterranean sunlight beyond a cluster of orange orchards.
Soldiers of the Lebanese army, having retaken their positions on the main
road north, idle their time aboard their old personnel carriers. And we - we
representatives of the world's press - sit equally idly atop a half-built
apartment block, basking in the little garden or sipping cups of scalding
tea beside the satellite dishes where the titans of television stride by in
their blue space suits and helmets. 

And then comes the crackle-crackle of rifle fire and a shoal of bullets
drifts out of the camp. A Lebanese army tank fires a shell in return and we
feel the faint shock wave from the camp. How many are dead? We don't know.
How many are wounded? The Red Cross cannot yet enter to find out. We are
back at another of those tragic Lebanese stage shows: the siege of
Palestinians.

Only this time, of course, we have Sunni Muslim fighters in the camp, in
many cases shooting at Sunni Muslim soldiers who are standing in a Sunni
Muslim village. It was a Lebanese colleague who seemed to put his finger on
it all. "Syria is showing that Lebanon doesn't have to be Christians versus
Muslims or Shia versus Sunnis," he said. "It can be Sunnis versus Sunnis.
And the Lebanese army can't storm into Nahr el-Bared. That would be a step
far greater than this government can take."

And there is the rub. To get at the Sunni Fatah al-Islam, the army has to
enter the camp. So the group remains, as potent as it was on Sunday when it
staged its mini-revolution in Tripoli and ended up with its dead fighters
burning in blazing apartment blocks and 23 dead soldiers and policemen on
the streets.

And yes, it is difficult not to feel Syria's hands these days. Fouad
Siniora's government, surrounded in its little "green zone" in central
Beirut, is being drained of power. The army is more and more running
Lebanon, ever more tested because it, too, of course, contains Lebanon's
Sunnis and Shia and Maronites and Druze. What fractures, what greater
strains can be put on this little country as Siniora still pleads for a UN
tribunal to try those who murdered ex-prime minister Rafik Hariri in 2005?

We read through the list of army dead. Most of the names appear to be Sunni.
And we glance up to the fleecy clouds and across the mountain range to where
the Syrian border lies scarcely 10 miles away. Not difficult to reach Nahr
el-Barad from the frontier. Not difficult to resupply. The geography makes a
kind of political sense up here. And just up the road is the Syrian frontier
post.

The soldiers are polite, courteous with journalists. This must be one of the
few countries in the world where soldiers treat journalists as old friends,
where they blithely allow them to broadcast from in front of their
positions, borrowing their newspapers, sharing cigarettes, chatting,
believing that we have our job to do. But more and more we are wondering if
we are not cataloguing the sad disintegration of this country. The Lebanese
army is on the streets of Beirut to defend Siniora, on the streets of Sidon
to prevent sectarian disturbances, on the roads of southern Lebanon watching
the Israeli frontier and now, up here in the far north, besieging the poor
and the beaten Palestinians of Nahr el-Bared and the dangerous little
groupuscule which may - or may not - be taking its orders from Damascus.

The journey back to Beirut is now littered with checkpoints and even the
capital has become dangerous once more. In Ashrafieh in the early hours, a
bomb explosion - we could hear it all over the city - killed a Christian
woman. No suspects, of course. There never are. Posters still demand the
truth of Hariri's murder. Other posters demand the truth of an earlier prime
ministerial murder, that of Rashid Karami. Several, just the down the road
from our little roof proudly carry the portrait of Saddam Hussein. "Martyr
of 'Al-Adha'," they proclaim, marking the date of his execution. So even
Iraq's collapse now touches us all here in our Sunni village where the Sunni
dictator of Iraq is honoured rather than loathed.

A flurry of rockets rumbled over the camp before dusk. The soldiers scarcely
bothered to look. And across the orange orchards and the deserted tenement
streets of Nahr el-Bared, the sea froths and sparkles as if we were all on
holiday, as this nation trembles beneath our feet.

 

 


Robert Fisk: The road to Jerusalem (via Lebanon) 


Inspired by al-Qa'ida, a hitherto little-known militant group is behind the
outbreak of bloody violence which has left scores dead 


Published: 23 May 2007 


They came into Lebanon last summer when the world was watching Israel smash
this small nation in a vain attempt to destroy the Hizbollah. But the men
who set up their grubby little office in the Nahr el-Bared refugee camp,
some of them fighters from the Iraq war, others from Yemen, Syria or Lebanon
itself, were far more dangerous than America and Israel believed the
Hizbollah to be. They had come, they told the few journalists who bothered
to seek them out "to liberate" Jerusalem because "to free our territory is a
sacred duty inscribed in the Koran". 

That the men of Fatah al-Islam should believe that the road to Jerusalem lay
through the Lebanese city of Tripoli and might be gained by killing almost
30 Lebanese soldiers - many of them Sunni Muslims like themselves, four of
whom it now emerges had their heads cut off - was one of the weirder
manifestations of an organisation which, while it denies being part of
al-Qa'ida, is clearly sympathetic to the "brothers" who serve the ideas of
Osama bin Laden.

Last night their gunmen in Nahr el-Bared offered a ceasefire to the Lebanese
troops surrounding them after doctors had pleaded for a truce in which the
dead and wounded could be cleared from the streets. It was an equally odd
idea from a group which only 24 hours earlier had promised to open the
"gates of hell" all over Lebanon and "shoot to the last bullet" if the army
did not halt its fire. The nature of their politics, however, is less
sinister than their savagery. At least two, it now transpires, blew
themselves up with explosive belts in Tripoli on Sunday after taking
civilians hostage.

One survivor recalled that a dying member of Fatah-al-Islam spent his last
moments reading to him from the Koran.

The organisation - we still do not know if they have 300 armed men at their
disposal - clearly took some inspiration from the famous declaration of
al-Qa'ida's Ayman al-Zawahiri that Palestine was close to Iraq and that thus
"warriors should take their holy war to the frontiers of Palestine". One of
those frontiers, of course, is the Lebanese-Israeli border. Chaker al-Absi
told Lebanese journalists last year that his movement "was founded on the
Koran and holy law" and that it was a "reformist movement created to bring
an end to corruption and to brandish in the sky over Jerusalem the banner
which says 'There is only one God but God'."

And he added that "we are neither allied to a regime or any group existing
on this earth." Absi, it should be added, is wanted in Jordan for the murder
of an American diplomat. No less a figure than Omar al-Bakri - deported from
Britain more than a year ago - has described Fatah al-Islam as "well and
truly Syria's winning card".

If it is, then Syria will have some work explaining how the group also
announced its responsibility for two bombings in Beirut at the weekend, one
of which killed a middle-aged Christian woman. The Lebanese army suspect
that it also placed bombs on buses in the Christian district of Ain Alak
earlier this year.

But why Tripoli? And why now? Well, of course there's the imminent United
Nations tribunal into who killed ex-prime minister Rafik Hariri.

Was it Syria? But reports in Lebanon become more dramatic the more they are
repeated; that Fatah al-Islam is funded by Bin Laden's two sons, Saad and
Mohamed; that two of the gunmen killed in Tripoli were brothers of a
Lebanese man from Akkar - also in the north of Lebanon - who was arrested in
Germany last year for allegedly plotting to put bombs on railway trains;
that the Tripoli dead also included a Bangladeshi and a Yemeni.

Certainly, we know that one of the dead - possibly two - are sons of a
60-year-old Lebanese man from Sidon, Darwish Haity. He is aware that his son
Ahmad is dead and fears that Mahmoud Haity was also among those who fought
to the death in the Tripoli apartment blocks. "My children are not like
that," the father was quoted as saying. "Fatah al-Islam fooled them and
turned them into criminals." Ahmad Haity was a married father of three.

Sidon itself is home to the largest camp in Lebanon, Ein el-Helweh, from
where at least 20 Palestinians set off to be suicide bombers against US
troops in Iraq. One Tripoli Sunni Muslim movement boasts that it sent "at
least" 300. And Ein el-Helweh boasts a set of tiny Islamic groups like
Issbat al-Anssar which broke apart when its leadership founded Issbat
al-Noor - "The Community of Illumination" - whose chief was assassinated,
supposedly by a PLO faction.

If these internecine Palestinian disputes appear tiresome, it should be
remembered that many have their origins in the Lebanese civil war, when
Arafat's PLO fought on the Muslim side against Christian Maronite militia.

When Lebanese troops arrested Moamar Abdullah al-Awami, a Yemeni, in Sidon
in 2003 and accused him of plotting to blow up a McDonald's restaurant,
Awami - who used the nom de guerre "Ibn al-Shaheed" (son of the martyr) -
claimed to have met three al-Qa'ida operatives in Ein el-Helweh. Several
Lebanese fundamentalists involved in a battle against the Lebanese army in
2000 at Sir el-Dinniye, joined a Palestinian group known as Jund al-Shams
(Soldier of Damascus) whose leader, Mohamed Sharqiye, arrived in Sidon 10
years ago - and here the story comes full circle - from the same Nahr
el-Bared camp where Fatah el-Islam was established in the summer of last
year.

It is too simple to claim that this is Syria's work. Syria may have an
interest is watching this destabilisation, even - through its security
networks - assisting these groups with logistics. But other organisations
might have found common interest; the Iraqi insurgents, for example, even
the Taliban, perhaps equally small groups in the Palestinian occupied
territories. That's how these things work in the Middle East, where there is
no such thing as responsibility - only a commonality of interests. Perhaps
the Americans might have learnt something about this if they had not two
years ago insulted the Syrians for allowing fighters into Iraq - at which
point, the Syrians halted all military and intelligence co-operation with
the US.

Interviewed earlier this year, another of Fatah al-Islam's leaders who
called himself "Abu Mouayed", insisted that "we are not in contact with
other Islamists... we are not at the point of recruiting fighters, but those
who want to work with us and struggle against the Jews are welcome". He also
threatened to attack the enlarged UN force in southern Lebanon which is run
by four Nato generals. At the time, the PLO's officials in Nahr el-Bared
claimed that they were "keeping their eye" on Fatah al-Islam. But sometime
in the last two months, their gaze clearly wandered.

The army and the Internal Security Force - a mild version of a paramilitary
police unit - appear to have caught 11 of the gunmen before they could kill
themselves and they are now under interrogation (a process that is
definitely not going to be mild, although one of the men was seriously
wounded). Photographers managed to catch pictures of one of the captured men
as he was grabbed by soldiers after one of their comrades had been killed.
But is it likely that these fierce - vicious - warriors are going to talk
when they were all prepared to die?

The army, too, has its feelings. About half of their dead appear to be Sunni
Muslims, and many of them come from northern Lebanon.

This is a part of the country where revenge killings have often been a
feature of social anger and once the battles at Nahr al-Bared are over,
there will be families desperate to make up for the loss of husbands and
sons, especially those who were done to death so cruelly. Back at Sir
el-Dinniye in 2000, there were no revenge deaths after 11 soldiers were
killed. But some of the gunmen who killed them seven years ago are now
themselves - and here we go full circle again - in the Ein el-Helweh camp in
Sidon.

The PLO's Fatah movement has called its namesake "a gang of criminals" - a
wise precaution given the suppressed fury of the Lebanese that the
Palestinians allowed the group to be created in the northern refugee camp.
In Ein el-Helweh, the PLO are on the streets, ensuring that there is no
recurrence, although one Palestinian Islamist did open fire into the air on
Monday in anger at the death of his "brothers" who are fighting the army.

If the siege of Nahr el-Bared continues, however, it may not be so easy to
control the Palestinian groups in Beirut and in the south of Lebanon. And
then the Lebanese army - which is all that stands between peace and anarchy
here - will be even further stretched.

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