Aftermath

Sunnis. In 2005, when Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora spoke of improving the conditions for the Palestinians, he was condemned for invoking tawtin. Had they been Christian, no such opposition would have occurred. As a result they had to react as Sunnis and defend themselves as Sunnis. For the clerics it was not the Syrians who were behind the move; it was the Christians. Some Palestinian clerics took advantage of this to mobilize support. If they were rejected in Lebanon as Sunnis, then they would fight as Sunnis.

Radical Sunni groups benefited from this weakened Palestinian identity. Chief among them were Salafis. Salafism is a muscular discourse, and in its most extreme form it sounds like racism when applied to Shiite Muslims. Most Salafis engaged in theology and preaching, and refrained from political or military action. A small minority believed that violence was necessary to achieve an Islamic state. In Lebanon, there were two kinds of Salafis: the traditionalists, who were fully integrated into the political system, and the jihadists, who relied on networks that were not nation-based but had become deterritorialized.

Ayn al-Hilweh, situated in the town of Sidon, a forty-five-minute drive south of Beirut, is the largest of the camps in Lebanon; it houses up to seventy-five thousand people in one square kilometer of squalor. A balance of power in the camp between the two main factions—the broadly secular Fatah, founded by the late Yasser Arafat and the historic core of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, and Usbat al-Ansar (The League of Supporters), a jihadist group particular to the Palestinian refugee camps that was formed in the mid-1980s—prevents fighting from breaking out. Jund al-Sham (Soldiers of the Levant) is another jihadist organization that split off from Usbat al- Ansar. It was named after a group established by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in Afghanistan in 1999 for militants hailing from the Levant.

In July 2006 Ayman al-Zawahiri, Al Qaeda’s second-ranking leader, warned that Al Qaeda would not stand by while Israel shelled Lebanon. Unlike Al Qaeda in Iraq and its founder, Zarqawi, who had declared war against Shiites, Zawahiri sought to establish a common front with the Shiites of Hizballah, who were successfully standing up to the Israelis, but the Shiite resistance organization wanted nothing to do with the Sunni terrorist organization. He linked the struggles in Iraq and Afghanistan with those in Lebanon and Palestine, and blamed “the crusader alliance.” Al Qaeda was concerned that the battle against Israel, and the glory, was being monopolized by Hizballah, and it hoped to establish itself in this crucial front. Zawahiri’s words were taken seriously by some. Islamist websites and Internet forums carried demands to establish a Sunni jihadist front in Lebanon. Other jihadists fled Iraq, disgusted with the sectarian fighting or pressure from the growing power of the American-backed Sunni militias in the Anbar province. Hunted in Jordan and Syria, they found Lebanon—with its failed state, lawless refugee camps, and sectarian strife—was their only safe haven. Zawahiri’s statement in July 2007 praised an attack against United Nations peacekeepers in southern Lebanon.

ONE DAY THAT MONTH, I visited Ayn al-Hilweh for a funeral in the late afternoon. Soon after I arrived calls to prayer echoed from all the mosques in the camp. First built in 1949 to house Palestinians expelled from northern Palestine, the camp had grown into a ramshackle ghetto made of concrete and cinder blocks. Low-hanging electric cables were strung from one building to another, crisscrossing like old cobwebs. Faded political posters were plastered over with newer ones, some for Hamas, others for its rival Fatah, and still others for Saddam, declaring him a martyr for the Islamic nation and a warrior leader. The camp had two main streets and a labyrinth of tight alleys connecting to smaller streets, one of them named after Falluja. At the Shuhada Mosque stood a dozen men in paramilitary uniforms, with walkie-talkies, M4 carbines, AK-47s, scopes, pistols, combat boots, tennis shoes, long beards, and sunglasses. The men had a professional and serious air to them, and they differed from the hundreds of other armed militiamen in the camp who lazily slung their older weapons and were unkempt.

The mosque’s second floor connected to the building across the street, forming a bridge. The armed men standing under the mosque were members of Usbat al-Ansar—the leading jihadist group in the camp—and they joined about two hundred other men on the second floor for a special prayer. They were burying one of their comrades, Daghagh Rifai, who had been shot at 9:30 that morning by men belonging to the rival faction Fatah. The armed men lined up with the others in orderly rows, placing their weapons on the floor between their legs. Some of them wore the salwar kameez typical in Pakistan and Afghanistan, a jihadist fashion.

Following the prayer, men gathered to gaze briefly at Daghagh’s corpse, which was wrapped in the green flag of Islam. A thick man with a large dark beard, he bore fresh wounds on his face. His former comrades carried him down the stairs on an olive-colored military gurney. A procession of hundreds followed them silently around the corner, off the main street, and up an incline. Residents of the camp watched from their doors or from windows and balconies above. As the silent marchers approached the camp’s gate, the armed men stayed behind and let relatives take Daghagh’s body past the Lebanese soldiers guarding the entrance and on to the cemetery.

One of those paying their respects that afternoon was a cheerful man called Abu Anas, who led me through a maze of dark alleys up to his unlit apartment. We were joined by his friends Abu Salih and Abu Ghassan, wiry, fit men with taut faces and long beards. The power came back on and with it the television, tuned to Al Manar, Hizballah’s television station. Abu Anas’s wife and children had left the camp to go to the nearby beach, and he was enjoying the quiet, he said, as he served us melons.

Daghagh had been shot outside his home in what they described as an “old story, a chain.” A few months earlier Fatah men had attacked members of Jund al-Sham, a rival jihadist group to Usbat al-Ansar. Daghagh was part of a group of Jund al-Sham men who retaliated, killing two Fatah men. “Friends of Daghagh will take revenge on Fatah,” they assured me. Two months earlier Fatah had also tried to kill the local Hamas leader but had only succeeded in wounding his youngest son. “Fatah has a bad reputation here,” one of the men said. “Fatah was good in the 1970s. They had principles. Now they are dealing drugs, they are opening Internet places with pornography, they just want money and power.” The men told me that Fatah men had recently stabbed a member of Usbat al- Ansar as he guarded a school, but he had fought back and they fled. Fatah had also thrown grenades at a mosque, they told me. Fatah and Usbat al-Ansar were the two dominant factions in the camp, they said, but Usbat was stronger. Like many Palestinians, they worried that Fatah intended to abandon the Palestinian refugees who lived outside Israel and the occupied territories, and they insisted that Fatah supported tawtin in Lebanon, which they feared would abnegate their right to return to their homes.

Abu Anas and his comrades did not belong to any of the factions. “We have some differences with Jund al- Sham,” one told me. “They are a little ignorant. They think with their hearts and not their minds. You need principles, not emotion. Usbat al-Ansar is more open, more educated. They have military expertise.”

Abu Salih had tattoos, meaning he had not always been devout. He said he had fought in Falluja in the fall of 2004, staying for about fifty days and taking part in four successful operations against the Americans. “The Americans were cowards,” he told me. There had been between 250 and 300 men in his group, he said. I asked why he had chosen Iraq and not tried to liberate Palestine. “It’s impossible to go fight in Palestine,” said Abu Anas. “The Arabs closed the borders—Jordan, Syria. Here if they open the way to fight Israel, many people would go fight.” Hizballah, he said, prevented them from fighting Israel.

I asked the men what they thought of Hizballah, since they supported groups in Iraq that targeted Shiites. “We differ in our beliefs, but we agree on fighting Israel,” one said. “Israel is the enemy. We can settle our differences later.” Many Lebanese Sunnis resented Hizballah for provoking the last war. “Sunnis who disapprove of Hizballah’s war do so because they are allied with America,” one of the men told me. They reminded me that a group of Palestinians from the camp who had fought with Zarqawi in Iraq had launched missiles at Israel and that in his final statement, Zarqawi had declared that “we fight in Iraq, but our eyes are on our home in Jerusalem.”

Abu Salih met Zarqawi once. I asked him what he was like. “He was a lion,” Abu Ghassan interjected. Zarqawi had been very nice to “the brothers” and had cooked for them, Abu Salih explained. It was night when they met in Falluja’s Askari neighborhood, and it was very dark. “The earth was burned,” he said. “Planes were bombing, but we had cold water, appetizers, grilled chicken.” Up to fifty men from the camp had gone to fight in Iraq.

“Usbat al-Ansar is a travel agency and YMCA for jihad,” explained Bernard Rougier, an expert on Lebanon’s Salafis and author of the book Everyday Jihad, “but they are a jihadi group, they must act, so the way of solving the contradiction of being in Lebanon but not fighting Israel or anybody else is by sending jihadists to Iraq and secretly helping other jihadist groups.”

I returned a few times to visit Abu Ghassan. Foreigners entering the camp must get permission from Sidon’s local military intelligence commander. As I sat in his office I overheard his phone calls. One sheikh called him about releasing a Jund al-Sham suspect from prison. The commander opened the man’s file and read the accusations. The man was an extremist: he had helped dispatch fighters to Iraq, was suspected of involvement in explosions, and