I wasn't surprised to hear that the foreign fighters were treated with fearful respect by many in Nahr el-Bared. Like icons that clutter the walls of a cathedral to whom the faithful plead for intercession, posters of Yasser Arafat, Saddam Hussein and the leaders of Hamas and Hezbollah are plastered on nearly every building in Lebanon's Palestinian camps. Anyone with a legitimate claim to be fighting the United States or Israel will quickly become popular. One young boy that I met in Nahr el-Bared carried with him at all times a red butane lighter, which, besides producing a flame, also beamed an image of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in multicolored light.
"There is no Hezbollah in this camp," I was told by one man in Nahr el-Bared. "But people respect them because they fight Israel and the USA. The Palestinians would protect them in this fight."
In lieu of Hezbollah or Hamas, the Sunni Fatah al-Islam militants became the camp's patron jihadists, carrying an additional currency of prestige as veterans of Iraq. The group's leader, Shaker al-Absi, was a close associate of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's there. Born in 1955, al-Absi was an elder extremist, having fought the Israelis in the 1980s in southern Lebanon. Arrested in Syria in 2002, al-Absi was released after three years and is believed to have gone to Iraq to fight shortly thereafter. After returning to Lebanon, he established a training center in Ein al-Hilweh to send fighters back to the Iraqi insurgency, then became the head of the nascent Fatah al-Islam and moved it north. His group, once ensconced within Nahr el-Bared, soon became the power brokers of the camp, replacing the more mainstream Fatah al-Intifada -- a group that had splintered from Arafat's Fatah in the 1980s and had until then been the most powerful faction in Nahr el-Bared -- and brazenly seized the prior ruling group's offices and weapons.
Not everyone in Nahr el-Bared was happy with the new group's attempts to control the camp, however, and tensions between Fatah al-Islam and the residents of Nahr el-Bared began to increase. Accordingly, the group began to threaten the camp's residents with death if they opposed it. Still, the group's Islamist credentials -- including its members' Iraq war experience -- continued to inspire the respect of many, and given the separation of the camp from Lebanese society, its activities were largely overlooked by authorities outside Nahr el-Bared.
A string of violent encounters between Fatah al-Islam and Lebanese forces in Tripoli in May 2007, incited by a bank robbery by members of the group, forced Fatah al-Islam to refocus its attention from international jihad to fending off the Lebanese military that threatened to drive them from Nahr el-Bared. The terrible toll of the urban conflict that ensued became apparent only after the fighting ended and the camp's residents, the majority of whom had fled to surrounding camps during the fighting, began slowly to return home in October. Almost all lost their homes, which had been blown to bits by mortar fire or riddled nearly beyond recognition with bullet holes. Many rooftops lay littered with nails, which, I was told, had come from nail-filled mortar shells launched into the camp by the army.
"In 1948 we left everything," one resident of the camp told me. "We built a camp, which became a huge city and a huge market. Now we are doing the same thing. We left again, left everything, and we are starting again."
But while the residents of Nahr el-Bared await the reconstruction of their shattered camp, militant Sunni jihadist groups like Fatah al-Islam continue to operate freely in other parts of Lebanon. In March, fighting between Jund al-Sham and the mainstream Fatah group in Ein al-Hilweh led some to fear that a repeat of the Nahr el-Bared devastation could be right around the corner.
Whether or not Ein al-Hilweh erupts in violence, Fatah al-Islam's success in taking over its sister camp to the north and turning it into an active militant jihadist outpost sets a dangerous precedent, as scores of militants cycle through Iraq seeking to continue their fight against the West, its regional allies and Israel, and even their Shiite co-religionists.
"The fate of Islamic militancy throughout the region is largely a function of the ability of the Americans to pacify Iraq," Khashan says. "If Iraq is not won, al-Qaida militants like Fatah al-Islam will sweep throughout the Middle East."
"As long as Iraq is a failed state, the militant Salafi movement will continue to pose a serious security threat to Middle Eastern countries," agrees Bilal Y. Saab, a terrorism expert at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution in Washington. "Fatah al-Islam was one clear example of how the problem of al-Qaida in Iraq could spill over to neighboring countries."
Lebanon, with its disenfranchised populations, swaths of lawless territory and simmering sectarian tensions, may continue to prove a prime destination for veterans of the Iraqi insurgency seeking to expand the conflict outward. If so, Fatah al-Islam may only be the vanguard of a new era of Islamist violence in the region.
About the writer
James Martin, a writer based in England, is a Paul Mellon Fellow at Cambridge University.
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