by Rana Fil
Murder can have unforeseen consequences. Syria's leaders ought to know that by now. A prime example is the car-bomb assassination of the billionaire Lebanese-independence champion Rafik Hariri.
Almost faster than Damascus could deny responsibility for it, his killing launched the Cedar Revolution, a massive Lebanese nationalist uprising that accomplished what Hariri had only dreamed of doing while he lived. Within weeks his death had brought down the pro-Syria puppet government in Beirut. Damascus was forced to withdraw its troops from Lebanon, after 29 years of military occupation.
And yet the killingsand Syria's denials of involvement in any of themcontinue. Since Hariri's death, seven anti-Syrian political figures have been killed in Lebanon, including three members of Parliament. The most recent was Walid Eido, 65. Late on the afternoon of June 13, a bomb ripped through his black Mercedes on a side street in Beirut, killing the legislator along with his 35-year-old son, two bodyguards and six passers-by. The death of Eido reduced the Lebanese Parliament's anti-Damascus majority to 68 seats in a total 128actually a total of 126, since there was one vacancy even before this killing created another. President Emile Lahoud, a holdover from before the Cedar Revolution, has blocked efforts to fill the seat that was held by cabinet minister Pierre Gemayel until he was gunned down in a road ambush last November. The pro-Syrian president's successor is to be chosen in September, and in Lebanon it's the Parliament that does the choosing. Now there's one fewer vote for the anti-Damascus side.
But violence against the Lebanese government has moved beyond assassinations to armed conflict. A small but heavily armed jihadist group calling itself Fatah al-Islam has been battling the Lebanese Army in and around Tripoli since the third weekend in May. The fighting, centered on Nahr el-Baredthe Palestinian refugee camp closest to Syria's bordererupted three days after the United States, France and Great Britain began circulating a draft U.N. resolution for creation of a tribunal for suspects in the Hariri assassination. As always, the Syrians deny any part in the violence, but many Lebanese say the connection is obvious. "Nahr el-Bared is the implementation of Syrian official talk of turning Lebanon into hell if the international tribunal moves ahead," says parliamentarian Elias Atallah, in a comment echoed by others in his bloc.
Fatah al-Islam has an estimated 350 jihadists from all over the Arab world, including Saudi Arabia, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Tunisia and Morocco. Lebanese police say many of the group's fighters spent time in Iraq before infiltrating into Lebanon via Syria. Hariri's son, Saad Hariri, the Parliament's majority leader, is unwavering in his conviction that Syria is behind Fatah al-Islam. "I would understand if two or three of them arrive at the Damascus Airport and slip through immigration," says Hariri. "But when we're talking of so many, including Syrians, there is a huge question mark on how and why the Syrian intelligence did not intercept them."
Many Fatah al-Islam leaders are said to have spent time in Syrian jails before arriving in Lebanon, according to Gen. Ashraf Rifi, the head of Lebanon's internal security forces. "They were released from Syrian jails by special amnesty,'' Rifi says. Lebanese officials believe the former prisoners got their freedom on condition that they begin working for Syria's intelligence services. The group's leader, a Palestinian named Shaker Absi, served three years behind bars in Syria on weapons charges. In 2004 a Jordanian military court sentenced him in absentia to death for the October 2002 murder of U.S. diplomat Laurence Foley in Amman, but Syria refused to send its prisoner to Jordan. (One of Absis codefendants was Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi, the bloodthirsty Jordanian-born jihadist who founded and led Al Qaeda in Iraq until his death in an American air strike in 2006.)
Senior Lebanese officials say Fatah al-Islam began as Fatah al-Intifada, a Syrian-aligned group established in the 1980s as an offshoot of Yasir Arafat's Fatah organization. In the summer of 2006, amid the chaos of Israel's war on Hezbollah, Absi showed up in Lebanon's Palestinian refugee camps and Fatah al-Intifada began to grow, according to Ahmad Fatfat, then-acting Interior minister. The new militants worried other camp residents, who wanted no bloodshed around their homes. Nevertheless, fighting finally broke out in September 2006 between Fatah al-Intifada and people in Beddawi, a camp outside Tripoli. After one Palestinian died, Beddawi residents apprehended two Fatah al-Intifada militants and handed them over to Lebanese authorities.
Absi and his followers soon changed their group's name to Fatah al-Islam. Lebanon's Communications minister, Marwan Hamadeh himself the target of an assassination attempt just months before Hariri was killedsays the renaming came after Lebanese authorities received intelligence that Damascus had begun sending "the same suicide bombers it sends to Iraq" to Lebanon. "They wanted to make it look as if it was a pure Al Qaeda operation," he said. "Some of the elements probably believe they work for Al Qaeda but the command is under Syrian control." Captured Fatah al-Islam fighters have allegedly confessed to receiving military training at bases run by the pro-Syrian radical Palestinian group the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command. "We have no ties with Fatah al-Islam," says Ramez Mostafa, the PFLP-GC's top man in Lebanon. "The [Lebanese] government is using those events to aim at our weapons."
Syria's parliamentary friends accuse Hariri of having his own militant connections, particularly in the south Lebanon town of Taamir, where the group Jund al-Sham ("Soldiers of Damascus") is based. Hariri says he has given money in Taamirto help the poor, not the militants. He says he built roads and clinics there to give the inhabitants an alternative to joining the militants. "We worked hard to give people dignity and responsibility in this neighborhood where people live in desperate poverty," he says. "If you give them hope, they see that there is a way out."
Meanwhile, the fighting in the north may actually be helping to bring the people of Lebanon together. Many Palestinians have distanced themselves from the militants, according to Sultan Abu al-Aynayn, the commander of Fatah in Lebanon. And Jihad Zein, opinion editor at an-Nahar newspaper, believes the violence has actually increased support for the army across the Lebanese political spectrum. "Even the nuanced position of Hezbollah does not represent the Shiite public mood, which has traditionally been with the army," he said in an interview. Many observers regard that development as a sign of major progress. "An army is the first building block of a state," says Paul Salem, director of the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut. "The reappearance of the national army means the reappearance of the cornerstone of a potential sovereign Lebanese state." Somewhere, Rafik Hariri may be smiling. |
Jordan's military court on Wednesday sentenced an al-Qaida militant to 10 years in prison for the 2002 slaying of a US diplomat in a retrial of the defendant, who had earlier been sentenced to death for the crime. 
The fugitive leader of the shadowy militant organization Fatah Islam openly embraces Osama bin Laden and has recruited Arab fighters to carry out attacks around the region. The little known about Shaker al-Absi has raised concerns that he is building an al-Qaida-style branch in the Palestinian refugee camp of Nahr el-Bared a potentially explosive new element in already volatile Lebanon.
Four Syrians held by the Lebanese authorities have confessed to bombing two buses in Lebanon last month, killing three people and wounding 23, Lebanon's interior minister said on Tuesday. The blasts, which occurred minutes apart, tore through two buses traveling on a busy commuter road, killing three people and wounding 20. A higher death toll was averted because passengers from the second bus had rushed out to help the victims of the first explosion. Hassan al-Sabaa said the men were members of Fateh al-Islam, a small Palestinian group which he linked to Syrian intelligence. Fateh al-Islam broke away last year from Fateh al-Intifada, another Palestinian group. A fifth man, also Syrian, was on the run, Sabaa said.