was inciting against Shiites. With the commander’s permission slip I was able to get past the soldiers guarding the gate and drive past the Fatah checkpoint to meet Abu Ghassan. He wore camouflage pants and a knit cap. He led me through more alleys, down rough-hewn stairs, and past a metal door into his apartment. His infant daughter was sleeping in a baby seat.
Abu Ghassan was thirty-one years old and quick to smile, but, like Abu Salih, he always reverted to a hard suspicious gaze when I wasn’t looking him in the eye. He had six children, the oldest of which was thirteen. He had a nine-millimeter Glock pistol on his belt. Its price in the camp was two thousand dollars, and it had made its way to Lebanon when some “brothers” returned from Iraq with large quantities of weapons. It was the same pistol the Americans had given to the Iraqi police; I had seen it used by Shiite militias and sold on the black market in Baghdad. An August 2007 report from the American Government Accountability Office stated that 190,000 weapons the Americans had given to Iraqis were unaccounted for. Here was one of them. On a desk was a new Toshiba laptop connected to the Internet. Abu Ghassan told me he worked in a cafe in the camp. “You must have sold a lot of coffee to pay for a two-thousand-dollar pistol and the laptop,” I said. He grinned and agreed with me.
He was first trained as a teenager outside the camp by Fatah, before the civil war ended in 1991. In 1995 he came under the sway of Islamic movements, influenced by religious leaders and the recently formed Usbat al- Ansar, listening to mosque sermons and attending lessons held after prayer. Some of the mosques, such as the Shuhada Mosque, also had their own clubs for physical training. The Oslo accords had been signed, and Palestinian refugees felt abandoned—they worried that the PLO was surrendering. Wars were being fought in Bosnia and Chechnya. The first generation of mujahideen—those who had fought in Afghanistan—sought new battlegrounds, and a new generation was galvanized. “I saw Muslims around the world oppressed by secularists,” he told me. Now the Lebanese army wanted him on charges of terrorism, “in broad terms for killing and explosions,” he said, claiming the charges were false.
He had attempted to sneak into Iraq through Syria to fight six times, but each time the Syrians were patrolling the border. In May the Syrians had killed several jihadists attempting to cross. Crossing the border from Syria had become much more difficult since the second battle of Falluja, he said. “I wanted to go to Iraq to liberate Muslim lands, to fight with the Sunnis. The road was open to Iraq. Palestine was closed.” He resented Hizballah for controlling the border with Israel and preventing other groups from conducting attacks. “After Hizballah liberated the south, they became a buffer,” he said. “They say they want to liberate Palestine, but on the ground they do nothing, they just wait for orders from Syria or Iran.” Unlike many Lebanese Sunnis, he did not feel threatened by Hizballah. “As Palestinians we feel threatened by America and Israel,” he said.
“Brothers” in the camp had established a network leading to Iraq. “Young Muslims, enthusiastic, with their own organization, they communicated through the Internet. One guy went and opened the way for others.” A guide would lead the volunteers across the border. Some guides did it for money and others because they believed in the cause.
Abu Ghassan first decided to go to Iraq when Zarqawi renamed his organization Al Qaeda, in December 2004. “Before Abu Musab [Zarqawi] appeared, nobody knew how to get people to Iraq,” he said. “I want to go fight with Al Qaeda, with the Islamic State of Iraq. The priority for me is to fight America and its allies, and if the Iraqi government opposes me I will fight them too. The Iraqi government is an apostate government.” Abu Ghassan had requested to go as a suicide bomber. “Practically speaking,” he said, “suicide operations are the best method to kill the enemy. In principle you try as hard as you can to avoid civilians, but sometimes you cannot.” He did not believe that Sunnis were targeting civilians, and instead blamed Iran, the Mahdi Army, and Israel. “Zarqawi asked Muqtada to fight the occupier, and Muqtada refused,” he said. “We target the Shiites in the government and the militias. The Mahdi Army kills mujahideen and lets the Americans arrest them. Christians have been neutral, not with the occupier, so they have been spared. Shiites are not apostates; their leaders are. Clerics have agreed that the Shiite clerics are infidels, the people are deviants. Hizballah is a Shiite apostate party. The Shiites hate Sunnis.”
Another time when I visited Abu Ghassan in his home, Abu Anas was there. They were looking at Google Earth on the laptop while listening to a CD of Salafi chanting called
Abu Anas was originally from the Bedawi camp in northern Lebanon and had grown up in a conservative family. He had fled from the north to Ayn al-Hilweh in 2000 because of his involvement in clashes with the Lebanese army. On December 31, 1999, Islamist radicals battled the Lebanese army in northeastern Lebanon’s Sir al- Dinniyeh, led by a Lebanese veteran of the Afghan and Bosnian wars called Basim al-Kanj. Kanj had returned to Lebanon and established his own network, recruiting in the slums of Tripoli and Ayn al-Hilweh and establishing ties with Usbat al-Ansar. With Usbat’s help he established training camps in Dinniyeh. Kanj ordered his men to take over a radio station near the camps that had belonged to Lebanon’s leading Salafi cleric, Sheikh Dai al-Islam al-Shahal. (His father had first brought Salafism to Lebanon in 1940, but it was Dai al-Islam and his brother who really brought Salafism to northern Lebanon.)
Only months before, churches in Tripoli had been attacked, and some of the suspects had fled to Dinniyeh. Shahal and other Sunni clerics as well as local officials tried to mediate between the army and the militants. When an army patrol passed by, negotiations were suspended. Fighting broke out, and fifteen of the Islamists died along with eleven soldiers and five civilians, although Kanj had not sought such a confrontation. The Dinniyeh group was small, but dozens of Salafis were arrested in Tripoli and radicalized in prison.
The Dinniyeh incident, along with an attack on the Russian embassy and similar incidents, were the first signs that Salafi jihadism was establishing a presence in Lebanon. One lesson of the incident was that the poverty and neglect in northern Lebanon could affect the rest of the country, but this was forgotten until February 5, 2006, when rioters came down from the north in buses provided by the Sunni Endowment and rampaged through Christian neighborhoods in Beirut, seeking vengeance for the Danish cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad. Christians were shocked, as security forces were nowhere to be found despite having advance notice of the demonstration. Those rioters who were arrested were quickly released. Ahmad Fatfat, who was interior minister in 2005, had struggled to release the Dinniyeh prisoners in order to gain the support of northern Sunnis and Salafis. As a concession to Christians the government then released Samir Geagea, the notorious war criminal who had killed Palestinians as well as Christian rivals during the 1980s. Much fanfare met the release of the Dinniyeh prisoners; the episode was televised and used to demonstrate that the government was pro-Sunni. Some of them had belonged to Harakat al- Tawhid al-Islami (The Islamic Unity Movement), the main Islamist militia that fought the Syrian presence in northern Lebanon in the 1980s. In the shifting alliances of Lebanese militias, Tawhid is now considered pro- Syrian.
Abu Anas blamed the Lebanese army for the clashes. “They wanted Hizballah to control the conflict with Israel,” he said. “The Lebanese army ambushed them, and during the negotiations they surrounded them and attacked them.” Abu Anas had previously belonged to Tawhid. More than fifty Palestinians had belonged to Tawhid, he told me. Many had gone on to other Islamist movements.
In May 2007 members of a new and somewhat mysterious jihadist group, Fatah al-Islam, robbed a bank in Tripoli, provoking clashes with the army. Salafi militants also robbed banks in Sidon and other parts of the country. “Al Qaeda uses credit cards to fund themselves, and they rob banks and companies that are infidel to fund themselves,” Abu Ghassan explained. “They don’t rob in a criminal way. They don’t want to hurt anybody. There is a difference between killing people and taking money that belongs to Muslim people.” Although most of the soldiers battling Fatah al-Islam in the north were Sunnis, Abu Ghassan did not blame Sunnis. “The Lebanese army answers to the government, and even though the head of government is a Sunni, the orders come from America. They are not fighting as Sunnis but as soldiers, getting orders, and they think Fatah al-Islam are terrorists.” I asked him what he thought. “I think Fatah al-Islam are good people,” he said.
The Mystery of Fatah al-Islam
The origins of Fatah al-Islam are nebulous, but based on meetings with Palestinian faction leaders and security officials, as well as documents obtained from their interrogation of the group’s members, I pieced together
