Lebanon is lobbing rockets into a Palestinian refugee area where 40,000 live in order to destroy members of the Fatah al Islam group. What makes this sudden attack on the organization so puzzling is the fact that just a few months ago Lebanon's government was courting the Sunni terrorist group---with the full knowledge and approval of the Bush administration.
Here is the NYT story about today's violence.
Lebanese troops shelled locations within the Nahr al Bared camp on the northern outskirts of this city, which houses about 40,000 Palestinian refugees. Militants belonging to the Islamist group Fatah al-Islam shot back with heavy machine-gun fire.
Fatah al-Islam has been a growing concern for security authorities in Lebanon and much of the region. Intelligence officials say that the group counts between 150 and 200 fighters in its ranks and that it subscribes to the fundamentalist precepts of Al Qaeda.
The group’s leader, Shakir al-Abssi, is a fugitive Palestinian and former associate of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the former leader of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia who was killed last year in Iraq. Both men were sentenced to death in absentia for the 2002 murder of an American diplomat, Lawrence Foley, in Jordan.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/21/world/middleeast/21cnd-lebanon.html?_r=1&hp&oref=sloginJust a few months ago, Sy Hersch reported on a much different relationship between the Lebanese government and Fatah al-Islam. He paints a picture of a Lebanese president so eager to fight Hezzbolah that he is willing to use Sunni-al Qaeda to so it---and a Bush administration so eager to fight Syria and Iran that it too is willing to use Lebanon as a middle man to court Al Qaeda, even though Al Qaeda was responsible for the worst mass murder on US soil, on 9-11.
The Bush Administration has publicly pledged the Siniora government a billion dollars in aid since last summer. A donors’ conference in Paris, in January, which the U.S. helped organize, yielded pledges of almost eight billion more, including a promise of more than a billion from the Saudis. The American pledge includes more than two hundred million dollars in military aid, and forty million dollars for internal security.
The United States has also given clandestine support to the Siniora government, according to the former senior intelligence official and the U.S. government consultant. “We are in a program to enhance the Sunni capability to resist Shiite influence, and we’re spreading the money around as much as we can,” the former senior intelligence official said. The problem was that such money “always gets in more pockets than you think it will,” he said. “In this process, we’re financing a lot of bad guys with some serious potential unintended consequences. We don’t have the ability to determine and get pay vouchers signed by the people we like and avoid the people we don’t like. It’s a very high-risk venture.”
American, European, and Arab officials I spoke to told me that the Siniora government and its allies had allowed some aid to end up in the hands of emerging Sunni radical groups in northern Lebanon, the Bekaa Valley, and around Palestinian refugee camps in the south. These groups, though small, are seen as a buffer to Hezbollah; at the same time, their ideological ties are with Al Qaeda.
Crooke said that one Sunni extremist group, Fatah al-Islam, had splintered from its pro-Syrian parent group, Fatah al-Intifada, in the Nahr al-Bared refugee camp, in northern Lebanon. Its membership at the time was less than two hundred. “I was told that within twenty-four hours they were being offered weapons and money by people presenting themselves as representatives of the Lebanese government’s interests—presumably to take on Hezbollah,” Crooke said.
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/03/05/070305fa_fact_hershThe article ends with a discussion of the the similarities between Iran Contra and the current Bush administration's covert funding of terrorists operations and raises the issue of Congressional oversight.
I am wondering if Lebanon's about face on its relationship with it Al Qaeda allies is purely an in-house decision. Or did someone within the Bush administration instruct them to get rid of witnesses to US covert backing of an Al Qaeda group in Lebanon? Such a program would be terribly embarassing right now, when the US is hunting for three US soldiers taken hostage by Al Qaeda in Iraq.