Up in Smoke

They were crammed into rickety old cars, vans and pickup trucks — hundreds of terrified Palestinians, some sobbing with terror and relief, streaming out of the devastated refugee camp of Nahr al-Bared 14 kilometers north of the Lebanese town of Tripoli. White sheets fluttered from car windows, trailing away from the ugly ruins of war. "It stinks of bodies under the rubble. There are many dead," said Mouein Safadi, 35, trembling with fatigue and emotion as he reached the first Lebanese army position nearly 200 meters from the edge of the camp. "There are tens of wounded, but nobody can reach them," said Nora Abdel-Wahad, a mother, 51. "There's no water, no food. We have lived three days with no electricity." A Palestinian employee of the U.N. agency responsible for the refugees said that the tiny medical clinic in the camp — home to some 40,000 people — had been completely overwhelmed. "The wounded cannot move anywhere," he said. "If they can't reach medical help, they die."

The Palestinians leaving the camp were taking advantage of a cease-fire on Tuesday afternoon in the fighting between the Lebanese army and militants from the Fatah al-Islam faction. The battle had started on Sunday, when militants stormed Lebanese army positions surrounding the camp. Shots rang out there and in Tripoli as Lebanese security forces attempted to arrest suspects who were linked to a bank robbery and were also alleged members of Fatah al-Islam. In the first day's intense gun battles on the streets of Tripoli and in the camp, some 50 people died. The violence spread south to the capital; a 10-kg bomb exploded in a car park in the Ashrafieh district of east Beirut, killing one woman and wounding 12 other people. The next day, another bomb rocked an affluent shopping district in a Sunni Muslim part of Beirut. The fighting quickly became the worst incident of internal violence in Lebanon since its long and bitter civil war ended in 1990. A cease-fire was arranged on Tuesday, allowing a convoy of six U.N. trucks to enter the camp to deliver food, water and medical supplies. But the convoy was struck by several mortar rounds while unloading its emergency provisions; although none of the crew were harmed, three vehicles were damaged and had to be abandoned. By the next morning, thousands of refugees had taken advantage of the lull in the fighting and left.

Go up to Lebanon and cry," said the Old Testament prophet Jeremiah, and as the familiar images — pillars of smoke, innocents fleeing the fighting, tough young men toting huge guns — popped up on TV screens and newspapers around the world, so the sense that fate decrees nothing but tears for Lebanon took root once again. Not even one year after a vicious war between Israel and the militants of Hizballah, which devastated whole regions of the south and Shi'ite neighborhoods of Beirut, Lebanon seemed once more to be at the mercy of the gun. The government of Prime Minister Fouad Siniora believes that the sudden surge of violence is linked to moves by members of the United Nations Security Council to appoint an international tribunal to try suspects in the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri in 2005. Though Syria has denied any involvement in Hariri's death, many believe it was behind the killing. "The pro-Syrian opposition [in Lebanon] has reached a complete political deadlock and the international tribunal is about to be passed by the United Nations. That's the reason why we are seeing this violence," Marwan Hamade, Lebanese Minister of Telecommunications and a leading anti-Syrian politician, told TIME.

Fatah al-Islam, the group battling the army, has dominated much of the news in Lebanon since it first declared its existence late last year, splitting from Fatah al-Intifadeh, a pro-Syrian Palestinian faction that is headquartered in Damascus. Lebanese authorities have accused the group of a bombing in the Christian town of Ain Alaq in February during which three people were killed. They also believe Fatah al-Islam members carried out at least three bank robberies, the latest on Saturday when $120,000 was stolen from a bank in the coastal town of Amioun, south of Tripoli.

Divining the real identity and agenda of Fatah al-Islam depends on whom you ask. The anti-Syrian March 14 coalition, which forms the backbone of the Lebanese government, believes that the group is linked to al-Qaeda but was planted in Lebanon by Syrian military intelligence to cause instability. "Syrian intelligence has been working with groups like this for 20 years. It's an old practice," says Radwan al-Sayyed, a professor of Islamic studies at the Lebanese University and a speechwriter for Siniora. But others argue that blaming Syria for all Lebanon's problems is the default position of the March 14 coalition and the government, and that Fatah al-Islam is a genuine Islamist organization dedicated to the Palestinian cause. Tripoli resident Mohsen Mohammed, 35, an adherent of the strict Salafi school of Sunni Islam and a sympathizer of Fatah al-Islam, says that the group's popularity has been steadily increasing in the Nahr al-Bared camp. "They help people by giving them food and aid. They are very disciplined and polite and never carry arms in the camp except at times of trouble," he says.

Fatah al-Islam is headed by Shaker al-Absi, a veteran Palestinian guerrilla fighter who is thought to have fought American forces in Iraq and was linked to Abu Mousab al-Zarqawi, the head of al-Qaeda in Iraq who was killed a year ago. In 2004, al-Absi was sentenced to death in absentia by a Jordanian court for the 2002 murder of U.S. diplomat Laurence Foley in Amman. His group — thought to comprise 200-500 fighters drawn from several Arab countries — has recently begun establishing a presence in other refugee camps in Beirut and south Lebanon. Islamist sources in Tripoli said that Fatah al-Islam is being funded by Salafist supporters in the city, which allows them to win popularity in the camps by providing social services. The crackdown on Fatah al-Islam, they say, is part of a broader attempt by the U.S.-backed Lebanese government to quell any sign of anti-American Sunni extremism. As many as 200 people in Tripoli and north Lebanon were rounded up by Lebanese authorities last month and accused of ties to al-Qaeda, stockpiling weapons and planning attacks. "They were all innocent people," says Sheikh Ibrahim Salih, a prominent Salafist cleric in Tripoli. "They [the government] want to keep the Sunni street under control and to convince the Americans they are fighting terrorism."

Al-Absi's fighters have proved tenacious foes. On Sunday, the army had to spend all day winkling well-armed militants out of residential buildings in the Zaharieh district of central Tripoli. The men of Fatah al-Islam fired machine guns and hurled grenades at the soldiers, who sought cover behind armored personnel carriers and battered the cramped apartment buildings with rifle and heavy machine-gun fire, ripping chunks of masonry from the walls and filling the air with dust and gun smoke.

Two days later, Lebanese soldiers surrounding Nahr al-Bared had a chance to rest during the cease-fire. "They are a very tough enemy," said one special-forces soldier, sitting in the garden of a small mosque that the army had requisitioned. "They don't surrender. They will all fight to the end." A bareheaded major sat on a stool, two constantly ringing cell phones and a walkie-talkie before him, handing out gardenia blooms plucked from the mosque's garden. Nearly 200 meters away, beyond a dense orchard of orange trees, were the smoking ruins of the camp's buildings. In Lebanon, sadly, it's not a flower's fragrance but the acrid smell of smoke that lingers.