Behind Lebanon's War on Fatah al-Islam

A Terror Group Is Born

Shortly after Shakir al-Abssi set up his Fatah al-Islam operation inside northern Lebanon’s Nahr el-Bared Palestinian camp, a few miles from the Syrian border, he went on a little PR offensive. He invited a young journalism school student, Abu al-Hassan, to drop out of college for his sake and take charge of Fatah al-Islam’s media image.

Al-Hassan did. He started up a magazine for the recruiting cause and invited journalists to see what the militant organization was up to. Like Osama bin laden, al-Abssi liked his press clips. Several journalists took the bait, among them a couple of reporters from the New York Times. "Mr. Abssis organization," The Times' Souad Mekhennet and Michael Moss wrote last March in an American scoop,

is the image of what intelligence officials have warned is the re-emergence of Al Qaeda. Shattered after 2001, the organization founded by Osama bin Laden is now reforming as an alliance of small groups around the world that share a fundamentalist interpretation of Islam but have developed their own independent terror capabilities, these officials have said. If Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who has acknowledged directing the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and a string of other terror plots, represents the previous generation of Qaeda leaders, Mr. Abssi and others like him represent the new.

That may have been overstating the case a little. Al-Qaeda’s 9/11 generation, if it was one, drew its power overwhelmingly from two sources: Osama bin Laden’s charisma, and Osama bin Laden’s money, not necessarily in that order. Without either, it’s difficult to imagine a terrorist group managing much more than localized, amateurish firebursts. That’s precisely how Abssi came across in The Times profile—less “Nex-Gen Qaeda” than a terrorist version of a beatnik.

Local Palestinians Suspicious of Fatah al-Islam

Abssi’s operation in the Palestinian refugee camp of Nahr el-Bared (“the cold river,” as it translates from the Arabic) was not quite vintage Qaeda camping a-la-Afghanistan. Abssi recruited from the poor and desperate of the camp, but his surliness and his recruits’ austere severity underscored their foreignness to the camp rather than endeared them to their neighbors.

Fatah al-Islam was vaguely inspired by al-Qaeda, probably financed by Syria and certainly intent on orchestrating terrorist attacks, as its leader, Shakir al-Abssi, made clear. On whom, however, al-Abssi never said before he ambushed his own aims by ambushing a Lebanese army post on May 20, killing 22 Lebanese soldiers and miscalculating big along the way.

A Tally of Miscalculations

Al-Abssi likely did not expect that:

• The Lebanese army would pursue him into the Palestinian camp (the so-called Cairo Accord of 1969 allowed Palestinians in Lebanon to arm themselves and forbade interference from the Lebanese government).
  
  
• The Lebanese army, an assemblage of Sunni, Shiite and Christian soldiers would stay together rather than fracture along sectarian lines, as it did during the civil war.
  
  
• Syria — whose cooperation was necessary for al-Abssi to skim across the border from Syria, illegally, and infiltrate the Nahr-el Bared camp a few miles from the Syrian border — would disavow him the moment he became more of a liability than a potential asset.
  
  
• Public opinion in Lebanon, cutting across sectarian divisions, would remain solidly behind the army: The Christian heartland, Hezbollah’s Shiite heartland in the South, and even Lebanon’s Sunnis in the north (Fatah al-Islam, like al-Qaeda, was a Sunni organization) supported the army and joined in celebrating the militants’ defeat.

More than 220 Fatah al-Islam militants and about 170 Lebanese troops were killed in the fighting, according to Lebanon's Daily Star, and more than 200 people were charged in connection with the battle. Whether Fatah al-Islam is done for is uncertain. This is the Middle East. More to the point, it’s Lebanon, where ghosts and shadows have lives real enough for a census report.

Consequences of Lebanon's Victory

Nevertheless, for Lebanon, September 2, 2007 may yet take its place among the nation’s more storied dates, and not just because of the army’s victory. The Western-backed government of Fouad Siniora is in stalemate against Hezbollah’s calls for the government’s dissolution. But predictions of Lebanon’s devolution into another civil war is proving premature.

The army’s chief, Gen. Michel Suleiman, won big militarily while positioning himself as the only political centrist in Lebanon. With a presidential election ahead, Suleiman was developing a Dwight Eisenhower-like aura about him, and selling it. But his family ties may yet haunt him: his brother-in-law, Gebran Kuriyyeh, was a spokesman for Hafez Assad, Syria’s late president and the bane of Lebanese looking for a country free of Syrian influence. And for all the army’s laurels in the rubbled wake of Nahr el-Bared, would Lebanon really be well served by de-facto military government?

Suleiman's Election, Fatah al-Islam's Revenge

On May 25, 2008, after an 18-month political crisis that had paralyzed Lebanon and brought the country close to civil war, was elected president by the Lebanese Parliament. Suleiman got 118 out of the 127 votes cast, with six blank ballots and three invalid ones (cast for individuals not eligible to run).

On May 31, 2008, a bomb planted near the Nahr el-Bared camp exploded and killed 23-year-old Oussama al-Hassan, a Lebanese Army soldier. Fatah al-Islam took responsibility. The army found three other unexploded bombs planted nearby. In faxes to news organizations, Fatah al-Islam claims to have planted the bombs to avenge the deaths of its "mujahideen" in the 15-week conflict in 2007.