Investor's Business Daily, May 22nd, 2007
Mideast: The global war on terror reaches deep into the heart of the Levant as an al-Qaida affiliate strikes a Lebanon under siege. Just which part of "global" do the Democrats not understand?
The multicultural democracy that was Lebanon has long been under siege by that terrorist group and spawn of Iran, Hezbollah. Last year Hezbollah, supplied with Iranian and Syrian money and weapons, literally used Lebanon and its people as human shields in its war on Israel.
Many have criticized Lebanon's failure to deal with the Hezbollah infestation, and so have we. But those familiar with how close Lebanon came to the precipice during its civil war from 1975 to 1990 and the damage done can appreciate the delicate tightrope Beirut has long been forced to walk with little help from the West and none from the United Nations.
Last Sunday, a battle broke out between the shadowy militant group Fatah al-Islam and the Lebanese army. Fifteen Fatah members and 25 Lebanese soldiers were killed. The body count on both sides has since escalated. The Lebanese army is now engaged in a bitter fight, indicating the days of Beirut's acquiescence in its own dismemberment may be over.
The battle began when Lebanese forces entered the Palestinian refugee camp in Nahr el-Bared, near the northern Lebanese city of Tripoli. They were looking for suspects in a bank robbery the day before in the town of Amyoun. What they found was a camp that had turned into a base for a terrorist group linked to al-Qaida.
Fatah al-Islam, founded last November, is headed by Palestinian Shaker al-Absi, who's been linked to the late head of al-Qaida in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Wanted in three countries, al-Absi told the New York Times in March that he was trying to spread al-Qaida's ideology and was training fighters inside the camp for attacks on other countries.
He was sentenced to death in absentia in July 2004 by a Jordanian military court after being found guilty of involvement in a terrorist conspiracy masterminded by al-Zarqawi that led to the assassination in Jordan of U.S. diplomat Lawrence Foley.
Fatah al-Islam has been linked to a bus bombing spree in the town of Ain Alaq that killed innocent Lebanese civilians this past February. Among the militants killed in the Sunday fighting was a man suspected in a plot to bomb trains in Germany last year, Saddam El-Hajdib, No. 4 in the Fatah al-Islam chain of command, according to Lebanese officials.
Al-Qaida is turning its focus to Lebanon. In a Feb. 11, 2006, interview with the French daily Liberation, incoming Lebanese Interior Minister Ahmed Fatfat said: "For the past 45 months, al-Qaida has been trying to settle in Lebanon. The organization infiltrates combatants and recruits on the ground."
As the minister reported: "We recently dismantled two groups suspected of belonging to this network. One month ago, we stopped 13 individuals, coming from various countries of the Middle East, who were preparing attacks inside the country. We also have just stopped five people implied in attacks against military positions."
As Middle East expert Walid Phares notes, the goal of Fatah al-Islam is to establish an "emirate," or Islamist principality, on the Taliban model in the Sunni areas of Lebanon. It plans to conduct operations similar to the terrorists in the Sunni Triangle of Iraq, all with the goal of bringing down the Saniora government.
To its credit, the Lebanese army is making a determined stand for honor and country.
Al-Qaida is in Afghanistan. It is in Iraq. It is in Lebanon. Terrorism is a cancer that is metastasizing. It will not be defeated by deadlines for withdrawal or talking to its state sponsors. It will only be defeated, as the Lebanese are finding out, on the battlefield in the global -- repeat, global -- war on terror.
