After spending hours huddled in basements and bathrooms as gunfire raged nearby, hundreds of Lebanese in this northern port city emerged to cheer on army troops who battled a shadowy Islamic militant group holed up in apartment buildings and a nearby Palestinian refugee camp.
Smoke billowed from the Nahr el-Bared camp as a steady barrage of artillery and heavy machine gunfire from army positions pounded positions of the Fatah Islam group inside.
“We strongly back the Lebanese army troops and what they are doing,” said Abed Attar, a Tripoli resident who stood watching soldiers firing tank shells into the camp, which is home to 30,000 Palestinian refugees and the base of Fatah Islam, a group suspected of links to al-Qaida.
The applause for the army’s tough response was a sign of the long-standing tensions that remain between some Lebanese and the estimated 350,000 Palestinians who have taken refuge in Lebanon since the creation of Israel in 1948.
The gunbattle killed at least 22 soldiers and 17 militants and injured dozens — including civilians — in the deadliest internal fighting in Lebanon in years.
The fighting left apartments in Tripoli blacked by rocket fire and bullet-ridden cars littered the streets. The bodies of dead Fatah Islam militants could be seen amid the debris.
More instability
The clashes added further instability to a country already mired in its worst political crisis between the Western-backed government and Hezbollah-led opposition since the end of the 1975-90 Lebanese civil war.
It was the most serious fight the army had engaged in Lebanon in more than a decade and the worst violence to hit Tripoli in two decades.
The violence began after a gunbattle raged in a neighborhood in Tripoli, a predominantly Sunni city known to have Islamic fundamentalists, witnesses said.
Fighting spread after police raided suspected Fatah Islam hideouts in several buildings in Tripoli, searching for men wanted in a recent bank robbery. A gunbattle ensued and troops were called in to help the police.
Militants then burst out of the refugee camp, seizing Lebanese army positions, capturing two armored vehicles and ambushing troops. They killed two soldiers on roads leading to the city.
At the same time, a group of militants holed up in a building in Tripoli fought off army and police units for hours before finally losing the battle.
Security officials said some of the militants killed in the building in Tripoli had worn explosive belts but did not have time to detonate them.
Militants' reach
The Lebanese Broadcasting Corp. TV station reported that among the dead militants were men from Bangladesh, Yemen and other Arab countries, underlining the group’s reach outside of Lebanon.
Abu Salim, a spokesman for Fatah Islam in Nahr el-Bared, said on television that the militants were firing in self-defense.
Security officials said 22 soldiers were killed and 19 were injured along with 14 police officers who were also hurt.
They said 10 militants were killed when in the raids on buildings in Tripoli, and seven more were killed in the refugee camp.
A senior Lebanese security official said a high-ranking member of Fatah Islam, known as Abu Yazan, was among those killed.
Security forces were able to quell the resistance in Tripoli after sundown, and troops seized all positions around the camp late Sunday, the army said.
‘Living in a state of fear’
Medical officials said 17 Palestinian civilians were wounded, with three women and four children in serious condition.
“We are living in a state of fear. The electricity was cut since 6 a.m., and the shelling is targeting civilians,” said Khaled Najm, a Palestinian who spoke by telephone from inside the camp. “Those fighters came from abroad, and we are paying the price for their actions,” he said.
Fatah Islam is an offshoot of the pro-Syrian Fatah Uprising, which broke from the mainstream Palestinian Fatah movement in the early 1980s and has headquarters in Syria, Lebanese officials say.
It is believed to be led by Shaker Youssef al-Absi, a Palestinian who was sentenced to death in absentia in July 2004 by a Jordanian military court after being convicted of conspiring terrorism in a plot that lead to the assassination in Jordan of U.S. diplomat Laurence Foley. Al-Qaida in Iraq and its former leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi were blamed for the killing.
‘A dangerous attempt’
Some Lebanese security officials consider Fatah Islam a radical Sunni Muslim group with ties to al-Qaida or at least al-Qaida-style militancy and doctrine. Others say they are a front for Syrian military intelligence aimed at destabilizing Lebanon.
Prime Minister Fuad Saniora said the fighting was a “dangerous attempt at hitting Lebanese security.” Mainstream Sunni Muslim leaders, clerics and politicians threw their support behind the army, as did the Palestine Liberation Organization representative in Lebanon.
It also underlined the difficulty authorities have in trying to defeat the country’s armed groups which control pockets across Lebanon.
The army is stretched thin, having to frequently separate Shiite and Sunni Muslims rioters as well as rival Christian factions supporting the opposing political camps in Beirut. It has thousands patrolling southern Lebanon with U.N. peacekeepers and thousands more deployed along Syria’s border to guard against illegal transfer of weapons.
