Put it together, and it's almost like the Grand Unified Theory of Everything. A bank robbery. An obscure terrorist group with pretensions of al-Qaida affiliation. A Palestinian refugee camp. A two-year-old political assassination. The war in Iraq. Last summer's war with Hizbullah, and possibly another one on the horizon. Even - how could there not be? - a convoluted conspiracy theory.

A Palestinian demonstrator urges others at the Bedawi refugee camp to march towards the besieged Nahr el-Bared refugee camp near the city of Tripoli in Lebanon, Tuesday.
Photo: AP

In Lebanon, where so little is simple, the standoff at Nahr el-Bared is much more than meets the eye.

At first glance, the battle between the army and Fatah al-Islam fighters in the squalid Palestinian refugee camp north of Tripoli is just like the skirmishes that periodically erupt all over Lebanon.

Street battles between militants armed with assault rifles and shoulder-fired missiles and soldiers who attacked the group's apartment hideouts with tanks and mortar shells are par for the course in Lebanon. The dozens of killed and wounded on both sides, and thousands of refugees sent scurrying to safety in the past two weeks, are nothing compared to the atrocities of the civil war that racked Lebanon from 1975 to 1990, or to the cumulative effects of fighting among the country's numerous sectarian groups since then.

To judge by Lebanese reaction, though, this is different. It isn't just the way the situation erupted, after some of the group's several hundred gunmen allegedly robbed a bank and, during ensuing exchanges of fire with security forces, killed (some say beheaded) off-duty police officers. Hundreds of soldiers have surrounded Nahr el-Bared, with popular support to liquidate the renegade group. A 1969 agreement with the Palestinians prohibits soldiers from entering refugee camps, but the army is prepared to break that deal to ensure Fatah al-Islam's total surrender.

"We cannot afford to bargain. We cannot compromise on the issue of terrorism," Prime Minister Fuad Saniora said Tuesday night, as heavy clashes ended several days of relative calm.

Lebanese soldiers, take up positions next to their APC armored personnel carrier during clashes with fighters from an Islamic militant group in Tripoli.
Photo: AP [file]

"The weapons of radical Islamists are now part of the Lebanese equation," a Beirut-based political analyst told The Los Angeles Times. "There is no real choice. If we reach a point where Fatah al-Islam's existence in the camp is accepted, the situation will be very dangerous."

Ostensibly, Lebanon fears an al-Qaida cell sprouting in the land of the cedars. And this concern springs from the fact that Fatah al-Islam's self-proclaimed leader, Shaker Youssef al-Absi, is a vocal supporter of al-Qaida No. 2 Ayman al-Zawahiri, who has fought alongside al-Qaida insurgents in Iraq. Most of the gunmen under Absi's command are not local Palestinians but, as in other al-Qaida groups, a mix of Muslims from around the Arab world and even southern Asia.

This, however, is where the Nahr el-Bared incident starts to morph into something stranger... and more significant.

"TO LOOK at this from an al-Qaida perspective is completely mistaken," says Tony Badran, a research fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies who specializes in Syria and his home country of Lebanon. Badran says Fatah al-Islam is much more closely tied to Syrian President Bashar Assad than to Osama bin Laden.

Absi was convicted in absentia by a Jordanian security court for participating in the murder of an American diplomat in Amman in 2002. At the time of his conviction, Absi was living in Syria. "Not only did Syria not extradite him," Badran says, "it only jailed him for three years. Then, all of a sudden, he appeared in Lebanon."

As for the group Fatah al-Islam, Badran notes that it is a break-off from Fatah al-Intifada, "which is purely Syrian."

"Where do you think they are getting their weapons from?" he asks. "From caches belonging to Fatah al-Intifada and the PFLP-GC, which is another purely Syrian organization. It s just way too suspicious."

Most Lebanese have been quick to blame the bloodshed at Nahr el-Bared, like so many other violent incidents in their country, on Syria. Hizbullah, however, has tried to deflect that notion. In criticizing last week's shipment of US weapons and aid to the Lebanese army, Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah said that Lebanon was being dragged into an American war against al-Qaida that would destabilize the country.

Saniora - whom Nasrallah has spent seven months trying to remove from office - angrily defended his choice to accept the weapons with an unmistakable dig at Hizbullah.

"Don't we want to protect Lebanon? Who defends Lebanon?" Saniora said, claiming that Nasrallah's criticism exposed a desire to "keep the army weak in order to justify the presence of other armies" - an easily recognizable reference to Syria, Hizbullah's close ally.

For Saniora to point to Syria, Badran says, is not a mere knee-jerk reaction.

"Look, there was a specific time line involved," he says. "On May 16, there was a report in Al-Hayat that European diplomats in Lebanon were very concerned that Syria or 'regional actors' would use Fatah al-Islam against UNIFIL in the south, or possibly some other targets. This was just before the introduction of the draft in the UN pushing for an international tribunal [on the February 2005 assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri]. Two days after this discussion in the UN, this whole thing in Nahr el-Bared blew up."

Other things blew up, too: bombs in Beirut's Verdun and Ashrafieh neighborhoods - one Sunni and the other Christian, both important tourism hubs - as well as a third in Aley, a largely Druse mountain resort just outside Beirut.

(A purported al-Qaida official warned the Lebanese government to halt its offensive against Fatah al-Islam, or else "we will tear out your hearts with traps and surround your places with explosive canisters, and target all your businesses, beginning with tourism and ending with other rotten industries... We warn you for the last time, and after it there will only be rivers of blood.")

It is no coincidence that these bombs targeted the populations that are now loosely aligned against Syria and Hizbullah, according to Badran. Particularly interesting, he adds, is that Syrian Foreign Minister Walid Muallem and Vice President Farouk a-Shara responded to the bombings by saying that they wouldn't have happened if Saniora's coalition had acquiesced to Hizbullah's demand for a national unity government.