Al-Qaeda inspired Fatah al-Islam rattles jumpy Lebanon

BEIRUT,(AFP) - Fatah al-Islam, whose fighters are locked in deadly gunbattles with the Lebanese army, is a shadowy Islamist group that has rocked the already tense political and security scene in Beirut.

The radical Arab splinter group accused of Al-Qaeda links has its stronghold near the northern port city of Tripoli in the Palestinian refugee camp of Nahr al-Bared camp, which is home to about 30,000 people.

It says it is training young Palestinians in the camp near the Syrian border to fight "the Jews in Palestine."

Lebanese authorities have accused Fatah al-Islam, said to be ideologically inspired by the Al-Qaeda terror network of Osama bin Laden, of working for the Syrian intelligence services.

But secular Syria has denied any links with Islamist groups such as Fatah al-Islam, which is headed by Shaker Abssi, a Palestinian wanted by both Damascus and Amman.

Syria's UN ambassador, Bashar Jaafari, has noted that most of Fatah al-Islam's leaders had spent three to four years in Syrian jails for their links with Al-Qaeda.

"This group serves neither the Palestinian cause, nor the interests of the Palestinian people," Syria's Foreign Minister Walid Muallem said on Tuesday.

Fatah al-Islam itself, in a statement, denied any links to "parties and states outside Lebanon, and it is now time to clarify that our only relation is with God Almighty...

"Our only support comes from our brothers in jihad in Lebanon and abroad who have taken upon themselves the mission of protecting the faithful Sunnis in Lebanon," it said.

Fatah al-Islam claimed the two bomb blasts that rocked Beirut on Sunday and Monday nights, killing one woman and wounding 20 other people, and warned of more attacks to come in the capital.

"We have warned the Lebanese army, and we have now fulfilled our promise... and we will enflame the heart of Beirut again," it said, in retaliation for the army shelling of its base.

The group, which has no known significant presence in any other of Lebanon's 12 refugee camps, also stands accused of carrying out the February bus bombings in a mountainous Christian area north of Beirut that killed three people.

A security officials said Islamists killed in the fighting include Saddam Hajj Dib, who was wanted over a plot to blow up trains in Germany last July, and Abu Yazan, Fatah al-Islam's number three, accused of responsibility for the February bus bombings.

The group's military strength is unknown but they are evidently well-armed in having kept the Lebanese army besieging Nahr al-Bared camp at bay since the clashes erupted on Sunday.

Under an arrangement dating back almost four decades, the Lebanese army is not permitted to enter Palestinian camps, where security is the responsibility of Palestinian factions.

At least 65 people have been killed in the fighting around the camp and earlier in nearby Tripoli. Hospital sources said 30 soldiers, 17 Islamist fighters, 10 Palestinian civilians and a Lebanese civilian have died.

An edgy Beirut has already been in political crisis for six months since pro-Syrian ministers quit the cabinet, amid UN efforts to set up an international court to try suspects in ex-premier Rafiq Hariri's 2005 murder.

Fatah al-Islam only announced its creation last November, several days after two of its members were arrested by the Lebanese authorities.

At the end of 2006, officials of mainstream Palestinian groups in Lebanon warned that the splinter group had infiltrated 150 Arab fighters from Iraq into the country, with their base in Nahr al-Bared.

Abssi, born in the West Bank town of Jericho in 1955, is said to be linked to the former leader of Al-Qaeda in Iraq, the Jordanian-born extremist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi who was killed in a US air strike in 2006.

He served a three-year jail sentence in Syria from 2003 and is now based in Nahr al-Bared, facing a new arrest warrant issued by Damascus.

Following his release from jail in Syria, Abssi was said to have lived in Damascus where Fatah-Intifada, the Palestinian group he belonged to before the breakaway Fatah al-Islam was founded, is based.