Why Lebanon is Erupting Again

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h remains a mystery about Fatah al-Islam, the Palestinian-led Sunni Muslim fundamentalist faction that sprang up six months ago and is at the center of Lebanon's latest fighting. What is known, however, indicates that the group, based near the northern coastal city of Tripoli, is a product of past Middle East conflict, a manifestation of present unrest in Lebanon and an ominous sign of future turmoil throughout the region.

As the fighting continued, it was common to link Fatah al-Islam to the Syrian regime, and to see the group as a tool in the hands of Damascus to foment chaos in Lebanon and head off a U.N. tribunal that may prosecute Syrian officials for the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. But there is a longer-term worry that goes beyond any possible Syrian connections—that Fatah al-Islam is one of a group of armed, extremist factions that have been spawned in the triangle of political instability from Baghdad to Gaza to Tripoli. Those groups include Iraqi insurgents, the mysterious Palestinian faction holding BBC journalist Alan Johnston hostage in Gaza, and the radical Salafist cells that have multiplied in Saudi Arabia and across North Africa all the way to Morocco. Taken together, these groups threaten the entire Middle East. Exploiting the Internet, using cell phones to communicate, stealing cash and smuggling drugs to finance operations, they constitute an amorphous enemy that makes a war on terrorism difficult to fight, much less win.

Fatah al-Islam's roots can loosely be traced to Israel's 1948 war of independence, when thousands of Palestinians fled their homes for a dozen refugee camps in Lebanon. The squalid, overcrowded camps became breeding grounds for the Palestine Liberation Organization's guerrilla groups. After Israel's invasion in 1982, designed to evict the P.L.O. from Lebanon, the Syrian regime launched a campaign of its own against Yasser Arafat's Fatah organization, sponsoring a splinter group that called itself Fatah al-Intifada. That faction, backed by Syrian artillery, drove Arafat out of Tripoli in 1983.

In late 2006, a fighter named Shaker al-Absi broke away from Fatah al-Intifada and called his new faction Fatah al-Islam. This time, the split appeared to be rooted in the growth of al-Qaeda and the terrorism unleashed after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, another indication of extremism's viral spread since Sept. 11, 2001. The original Fatah always espoused a secular Palestinian state, as did Fatah al-Intifada. But Fatah al-Islam not only preaches a Salafist brand of Islam, but appears to have at least logistical links with al-Qaeda. In 2004, a Jordanian court convicted al-Absi and nine others for an al-Qaeda plot that included the 2002 assassination of U.S. diplomat Laurence Foley in Amman. Although Fatah al-Islam appears to have its origins in conflicts related to Palestine, Iraq and al-Qaeda's global jihad, the group's activities now risk destabilizing Lebanon. The nation is still reeling from last summer's war between Israel and Hizballah and Hizballah's attempts to topple the pro-American Lebanese government headed by Prime Minister Fouad Siniora. Now it faces a new threat; the Lebanese army launched its attacks in Tripoli following indications that Fatah al-Islam was setting up an al-Qaeda base in Lebanon similar to the one founded by Abu Mousab al-Zarqawi's al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia.

The military operation in Lebanon is intended to flush out the group's fighters, including Saudis, Syrians, Tunisians, Yemenis, Moroccans as well as Palestinians. Yet the bombardment of a Palestinian refugee camp risks broadening the conflict to include other mainstream Palestinian factions such as the original Fatah group, whose Lebanon representative Sultan Abul Ainain warned "there will be uprisings in all the camps in Lebanon" if the army's indiscriminate shelling of the camp at Nahr al-Bared did not cease. Such a confrontation risks pulling in Hizballah, which, although a Shi'ite group, is closely allied with Sunni Palestinian factions such as Hamas. With Lebanon balanced on a knife-edge, many fear that unrest could cause the country to stumble back into the civil war that ravaged it between 1975-90, itself ignited amid friction involving armed Palestinian groups.

Siniora's government believes that Fatah al-Islam is a Syrian proxy, though Syrian officials angrily reject the accusations. But whatever the truth about Fatah al-Islam, its sudden, violent birth amounts to a warning about dangers ahead for a Middle East where political conflicts have for too long remained unsolved. It is conventional wisdom that Lebanon is the stage where Middle East factions act out their disputes. In the eruption of killings in Tripoli, however, Lebanon is just another player in a larger, unfolding drama.