BEIRUT — For the past several years I and others have been warning that the growing number of conflicts in the Middle East is pushing this region towards new forms of radicalism and trouble. The clashes between the Lebanese army and the Fateh al-Islam extremist militants that have rocked the northern Lebanese town of Tripoli since Sunday are the latest face of that phenomenon.
The fighting in Tripoli represents the local convergence of four separate conflicts that attest to the complex matrix of violence that plagues the Middle East today.
The four are:
• the uneasy legacy of tensions between various Lebanese forces and armed Palestinian refugee groups in the country, going back to the 1960s;
• the continued tensions between Syria and Lebanon since a popular uprising forced the withdrawal of Syrian troops from Lebanon two years ago;
• the regional spin-offs from the US-led war in Iraq; and,
• the expanding clashes of George W. Bush’s “global war on terror” which both battles and breeds assorted Islamist terror groups that pursue Al-Qaeda-like goals and tactics.
The convergence of these four distinct conflicts in the clashes in Tripoli this week is no surprise. The Fateh al-Islam group has been slowly building up its band of several hundred heavily armed fighters in the Nahr el-Barid refugee camp for nearly a year, while other militant Islamists have been expanding their small constituencies in north and south Lebanon. Lebanese, Palestinian and foreign officials alike have all expressed concerns about the potential for such extremists to gain a foothold in Lebanon.
The fighting in Tripoli erupted after Lebanese army forces pursued a band of Fateh al-Islam fighters who had robbed a bank, but the confrontation was inevitable in view of the steadily rising threat that such militants represented. Many Lebanese blame Syria for instigating the Fateh al-Islam threat as one of the ways that Damascus allegedly seeks to keep Lebanon in a state of turmoil. Syria vehemently denies the charge. Lebanese accusers insist Syria is trying to deflect attention from the international tribunal being established to try the killers of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri and half a dozen other prominent Lebanese in the past two years. Two bombs that exploded in central Beirut Sunday and Monday night are also widely blamed on Syria as part of this alleged campaign of destabilization. An ongoing UN investigation of the Hariri and other murders has pointed the finger in the direction of Syria, but its final conclusions — and the all-important evidence it is expected to reveal — will not be made public until at least later this year.
It is difficult to say precisely what Fateh al-Islam represents. It is a small breakaway faction of the Syrian-based and-backed Fateh al-Intifada group that has long opposed Yasser Arafat’s main Fateh guerrilla organization. Yet Fateh al-Islam is less of a traditional Palestinian group and is very much in line with the bevy of small militant Islamist organizations that have sprung up around the Middle East since the advent of Osama Bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda group. Though it is led by former Palestinian guerrillas, Fateh al-Islam’s fighters come from half a dozen Arab countries with a sprinkling of Asians as well.
Mainstream Palestinian groups in Lebanon such as Fateh, Hamas and the umbrella Palestine Liberation Organization all openly oppose Fateh al-Islam and see it as a threat to themselves and also to the stability of Lebanon. The group’s several hundred fighters are concentrated in the Nahr el-Barid camp but have also established small toe-holds in adjacent Tripoli and also in a few other places in Lebanon, including other refugee camps in the south.
This latest eruption of urban violence should remind us of several basic facts that seem to get lost amidst the dramatic television pictures of yet another Arab city rocked by explosions and enveloped in smoke.
The first is that any legitimate political grievance that is left to simmer for decades on end — like the Palestine refugee issue — will eventually boil over and cause new problems.
The second is that using brute force to achieve unilateral political goals — as the United States has tried to do in Iraq — will inevitably spark a backlash. Some Fateh al-Islam fighters boast of fighting the US in Iraq, suggesting that Iraq is breeding new and more virulent terrorists.
The third is that a region bedeviled by multiple conflicts will inevitably see them link up with one another, as seems to be the case here with the Palestine, Iraq and Syrian-Lebanese conflicts converging into a single battle, at least for this week.
Where this convergent militarism rears its head next month is not clear — but you can bet your bottom dollar or dinar that it will, as long as local tyrants run Arab countries, foreign armies invade other Arab countries, and Israel continues to refuse reasonable Arab offers to resolve the Palestine refugee issue peacefully.
Rami G. Khouri is an internationally syndicated columnist, the director of the Issam Fares Institute at the American University of Beirut, editor-at-large of the Beirut-based Daily Star, and co-laureate of the 2006 Pax Christi International Peace Award.
Copyright ©2007 Rami G. Khouri / Agence Global
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Released: 22 May 2007
Word Count: 808
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