Blowback In Lebanon: Has the U.S. Helped Create Another Jihadist Monster?

Published on Saturday, June 16, 2007 by Mother Jones

Blowback In Lebanon
Has the U.S. Helped Create Another Jihadist Monster?

by Reese Erlich

The brutal fighting inside Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, which has claimed 140 lives so far, seems incomprehensible to anyone not steeped in the intricacies of Palestinian politics. But behind the killing lurks an urgent question: Is Fatah al Islam—the organization responsible for much of the fighting—a pawn of Syria, as charged by the U.S. and some Lebanese? Or is it an unintended outgrowth of a U.S.-backed plan to develop a Sunni counterweight to Hezbollah?

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Syrian officials blamed Lebanese conservatives and the United States for the rise of the Lebanese jihadists. Fatah al Intifada and other Syrian sources told me that Fatah al Islam’s funds came from the powerful Lebanese Hariri family, which aimed to create a Sunni counterbalance to the Shia-based Hezbollah. Syrian intelligence sources say the U.S. and Saudi Prince Bandar bin Sultan also financed Fatah al Islam, though they produced no proof of these allegations despite repeated requests.

Their analysis does echo the accounts of the New Yorker’s Seymour Hersh, who has reported that according to U.S. intelligence sources, the Bush administration, Prince Bandar, and Lebanese member of Parliament Saad Hariri were trying to develop a Sunni alternative to Shiite-dominated Hezbollah. Writing before the current fighting began, Hersh named Fatah al Islam as one of those groups.

Lebanese newspaper accounts also confirmed that the Hariri family had paid money to Jund al Sham, another Jihadist group, which is fighting in a Palestinian camp in southern Lebanon.

Washington has a long history of supporting Sunni fundamentalists for reasons of political expediency, from Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood to fundamentalist Mujahideen factions in Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation. In Lebanon, it appears, the U.S. began to sour on the jihadists earlier this year, realizing that they were neither reliable nor capable of becoming much of a force against Hezbollah. Unnamed U.S. intelligence sources were a key source for a New York Times article about Fatah al Islam and similar groups in March. The article suggested that these groups were part of a new generation of al Qaeda fundamentalists with no ties to the U.S.

http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/06/16/1925/

jihadist and otherwise!!!

which included people like Mullah Omar, the current leader of Taleban, and Osama bin Laden.