BEIRUT, Lebanon, July 6 — Minutes before Islamic militants and government troops began killing each other in northern Lebanon six weeks ago, a flurry of cellphone calls set the tone for the contagion of violence.
The calls began at 2:55 a.m. on May 20 when Lebanese security forces surrounded a Tripoli apartment building used as a safe house by Fatah al Islam, a newly formed militant group with Qaeda aspirations.
“Stop it or I will go out and attack,” the group’s military commander, Abu Hureira, said from his headquarters in the Palestinian refugee camp Nahr al Bared, north of Tripoli, according to a recording of the conversations that was played for reporters with The New York Times.
A sheik acting as an intermediary relayed the warning to Maj. Gen. Achraf Rifi, head of Lebanon’s Internal Security Forces, who replied, “You will surrender and go to prison, or you will die.”
Seconds later, General Rifi’s men stormed the safe house, killing 12 suspected militants. In response, Fatah al Islam rushed an army checkpoint at the camp’s entrance, killing 23 soldiers sleeping in tents. The continuing battle, which has claimed more than 200 lives, has ruined the camp, now the scene of daily artillery barrages as the Lebanese Army tries to flush out Fatah al Islam.
The fight has drawn scrutiny here and abroad because the militants are foreigners and veterans of the war in Iraq. As Lebanon falls increasingly into a state of political paralysis, the risk of militants setting up base here is raising alarms, especially among European intelligence officials.
One year ago, this country found itself in the middle of a war between Israel and the Lebanese militia Hezbollah after Hezbollah fighters crossed the border and seized two Israeli soldiers. Although the war’s catastrophic damage drew Lebanese together, they quickly turned on one another politically. Killings, bombings and political protests have become routine.
Political forces find themselves stalemated, with no one firmly in charge. Neighborhoods of rubble from last year’s war remain uncleared, and politicians on each side accuse those on the other of blocking reconstruction to prevent them from getting credit.
Parliament has to select a new president in September, but with the governing coalition and the opposition hostile to each other, that could set off an unraveling of what remains of the system of governance.
“If you are in a hole, at least stop digging,” said Ali Hamdan, foreign affairs adviser to Nabih Berri, speaker of Parliament, leader of the Shiite Amal movement and a close ally of Hezbollah. “Unfortunately, the Lebanese keep digging.”
While Lebanon’s troubles are not principally about Islamic militancy, some fear it could become the kind of place that attracts more of it, especially from the Iraq war.
General Rifi, the internal security chief, estimates that 50 to 60 fighters are still in the camp and they include skilled and determined militants from Saudi Arabia, Syria, Yemen and Algeria who fought with the insurgency in Iraq.
The group’s leader, Shakir al-Abssi, was an associate of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia killed last summer. He has been sentenced to death in Jordan for helping Mr. Zarqawi organize the 2002 slaying of an American diplomat in Amman, Jordan.
“One reason we attacked Abssi was to get a message to those people that you don’t have to come to Lebanon after your mission in Iraq,” General Rifi said.
But Mr. Abssi has been drawing support from Europe as well, according to a Western European intelligence official who spoke on condition of anonymity. There is some evidence that Islamic militants in Western European countries traveled to Lebanon and joined Mr. Abssi’s group, the official said, citing recent reports from intelligence agencies of countries other than Lebanon.
Meanwhile, Lebanon has been hit with a rash of car bombings and other violence since the fighting with Fatah al Islam began, including a car bomb in the south that killed six United Nations peacekeepers.
Today, the Lebanese are increasingly divided by rolls of razor wire spread across roads and wrapped around buildings and homes. They are separated by military checkpoints that tie up traffic. Nearly a dozen members of Parliament have left the country, fearful they will be killed. Some United Nations officials have moved from their heavily guarded offices in the center of Beirut to smaller, less obvious space deep behind a sea of razor wire.
Given Lebanon’s fractured politics — and the backing of Hezbollah by both Iran and Syria and of the government by Western powers — it is too soon to know who has been behind the many incidents. General Rifi said the F.B.I. director, Robert Mueller, paid him a surprise visit last week and offered forensic assistance in analyzing the bombings.
But Lebanese officials say they have had shootouts with several clusters of foreign Islamic militants, some of whom had clear ties with Mr. Abssi’s group. On June 7 a car-bomb factory was discovered in the Bekaa Valley in which two Mercedeses and a Jeep were being prepared for explosives. The operation was run by a Saudi and two Syrians who had fought in Iraq and their technique had some sophistication, including the use of fiberglass shields in a possible attempt to hide the explosives from detection devices, two Lebanese Army officials said.
“We have no sleeper cells in Lebanon,” said a Lebanese Army official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “They are all waking up.”
If there is one unifying element to the national psyche, it seems to be that the leadership — both of the government and of the opposition — has failed by paralyzing the country and failing to find a governing consensus.
Hezbollah came out of the war against Israel highly popular. But today its leaders are accused by some of focusing too much on domestic politics and failing to achieve their stated goals, which has prompted unusually heated debate within Hezbollah over its direction.
“They were not expecting the results of instigating against the government to be transformed into sectarian tensions between Sunnis and Shiites in the street, which was about to become an even bigger problem,” said Talal Atrissi, a political sociology professor at Lebanese University and an expert on Hezbollah. “The other party was able to use the sectarian tension to face Hezbollah and to transform the battle to its benefit.”
Omar Nasra, 26, a barber in the southern Beirut suburbs, the Hezbollah stronghold, carefully pulled a razor across a customer’s beard as he expressed his own frustration with the government and the opposition, saying, “We wish all these politicians would be replaced by people who can sit together on the same table, talk, and agree on how to govern this country.”
On the street, there remains great admiration for Hezbollah’s social and military effort, but dissatisfaction with its political management.
Central Beirut remains paralyzed since the Hezbollah-led opposition — which includes the Shiite party Amal and the followers of the Christian general Michel Aoun — began a sit-in on Dec. 1. The goal was to force the government to resign. But the government has hunkered down, the prime minister and others living in their office on a hill overlooking hundreds of pitched tents.
The majority coalition, known as March 14, has not become more powerful but has found itself less on the defensive and has defiantly projected an image of still functioning.
But its detractors say the coalition has hamstrung the country and has not dealt in good faith with the opposition.
“We are trying to lead the country to unity and they don’t want unity,” said a Hezbollah representative at the tent city, who identified himself as Shumran.
Opposition leaders are pessimistic about a deal being reached that could end the political impasse. “If we don’t form a national unity government from now until September, I think we are heading to chaos,” said Trad Hamadeh, who stepped down as labor minister last fall and is associated with Hezbollah. “The Constitution will no longer be implemented. There will be no cabinet able to control and run the country. This means the country will be in a state of no laws, the loss of the system.”
That is just the kind of state in which militant groups could thrive.
Fatah al Islam, which Mr. Abssi formed late last year, has already been getting vocal support from groups with more established ties to Al Qaeda. On May 25, a group calling itself Al Qaeda in Bilad al Sham posted a video titled “Return of the Crusader War,” on the Islamic militant Web site al Hesbah.
“We will tear out your hearts with traps and surround your places with explosive canisters, and target all your businesses, beginning with tourism and ending with other rotten industries,” a leader of the group says in the video. “We warn you for the last time, and after it there will only be rivers of blood.”
The stalemated politics have posed a huge obstacle to reining in the violence. The Arab League came to Lebanon to try to work out the mechanics of the political struggle, and failed, prompting the secretary general, Amr Moussa, to say that Lebanon was running out of time.
The opposition has threatened to form a parallel government, a move that Moody’s Investors Service said would be like turning it into a country in bankruptcy.
More ominous is the fear that the one institution that has so far held firm in the face of political turmoil, the army, may not be able to withstand a split government and might fracture along sectarian lines. All the army factions, including Sunni Muslims, have fought the extremists.
The problem in the north is not just that there is suddenly a group of Qaeda-minded extremists looking to pursue a political agenda through violence, but that the conflict has also disturbed a delicate balance between Lebanon and the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who have lived for generations in squalid refugee camps.
In a sign of how sour the environment has become, many Lebanese say the only good news lately has been that the army fought against the extremists in the Nahr al Bared refugee camp. The optimism stems in part from the notion that Sunnis in the army have agreed to fight and kill Sunni extremists in the camp.
But the destruction has created a humanitarian crisis, with thousands of residents of the camp fleeing. Most now live in the Beddawi refugee camp a few miles away. They are crowded into classrooms, often as many as seven families sharing a space divided by blue tarps hanging from ropes strung between the walls.
So even before Lebanon has figured out how to rebuild and provide homes for the thousands displaced last summer, it has thousands more now without homes in the north.
Nada Bakri contributed reporting
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/07/world/middleeast/07lebanon.html?_r=1&th&emc=th&oref=slogin