ShareThisBy MARK MACKINNON
Toronto Globe and Mail
Monday, May 28, 2007
The man leading the fundamentalist Fatah al-Islam group in its six-day-old battle with the Lebanese army is a fanatically devout former Libyan air force pilot who is almost certain to choose death over surrender in the standoff at the Nahr al-Bared refugee camp, former comrades-in-arms say.
Even before he founded Fatah al-Islam last year, Shakir al-Abssi was a well-known militant who grew up fighting in the refugee camps of Jordan and Lebanon and dreaming of "liberating" the Palestinian territories. The last place he lived before he established his base at Nahr al-Bared is testament to that: a grungy three-room building furnished only with bunk beds, uncomfortable chairs and a messy desk in Shatila, a Palestinian refugee camp near Beirut.
A single bare light bulb hangs from the ceiling, illuminating a wall decorated with a Palestinian flag, paintings of Jerusalem's al-Aqsa mosque and a rocket-propelled grenade launcher hanging by its shoulder strap from a nail.
The building's front door is plastered with pictures of Saddam Hussein and Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah.
Al-Abssi, who returned to Lebanon last summer after a prolonged absence, lived in these Spartan accommodations for several months after being assigned by Fatah Intifada chiefs in Syria to take over the local leadership of the Syrian-backed group dedicated to violent resistance against Israel.
Shortly afterward, he founded the breakaway Fatah al-Islam, the radical Salafist group now locked in the deadly showdown with government forces at Nahr al-Bared in the north of the country. The fight has already left at least 90 people dead, and many more casualties are feared with thousands of Palestinian refugees still trapped inside as sporadic fighting continues, and emergency workers are unable to reach most of the besieged camp.
The 51-year-old al-Abssi is remembered on these grimy, narrow streets as a physically fit man with greying hair who wore a mustache and, occasionally, a short beard. He was a popular and respected figure, renowned for his religiosity.
"He is modest and forgiving. You can do anything you want to him and he will forgive you, but if someone insulted God in his presence, he might kill them," said Ibrahim Abu Mohammed, the security chief for Fatah Intifada in Shatila.
He said that when al-Abssi arrived last June to take over command, he brought with him 200 battle-hardened veterans of the Iraq war hailing from countries around the region. There were some Palestinians and Lebanese among them, but locals -- judging primarily by the men's appearance and accents -- say others were from Jordan, Syria, North Africa and the Persian Gulf states.
The new men trained separately from the rest of Fatah Intifada, an arrangement that none could question because of al-Abssi's status as a senior commander. Then late last year, al-Abssi and his men made their move, heading north to take over Fatah Intifada's headquarters in Nahr al-Bared and seizing the guns and ammunition stored there.
Abu Mohammed says the arsenal that Fatah al-Islam acquired from Fatah Intifada included a store of 120-millimeter mortars and multibarrelled rocket launchers, as well as an "uncountable" number of Kalashnikov rifles and rocket-propelled grenades. The militant group has bragged that it has enough weaponry to hold out for nine months in its standoff with the Lebanese army.
"They will fight to the last drop of blood," Abu Mohammed said. "They are religious people. They want to meet God, to die as martyrs in Islam."
The seizure of the weapons and infrastructure was a grand, carefully planned heist. "Because he was the leader of Fatah Intifada in Beirut and the north, he was able to move his people from Beirut to (Nahr al-Bared) without people suspecting anything," said Abu Ayed al-Shalan, the Palestinian Liberation Organization co-ordinator in Shatila.
He said he knew al-Abssi as a "calm, religious man" who had helped prepare the camps defences for a potential assault during Israel's attack on Lebanon last summer.
He shook his head like a man who had been fooled. "We can't believe that all the things that happened this week are linked to him."
With Nahr al-Bared already under its effective control, Fatah al-Islam made its presence known to the rest of the country in February when it allegedly bombed two buses near Beirut, killing three people. The group's spokesman, Abu Salim Taha, says Fatah al-Islam still seeks to eventually liberate the Palestinian territories from Israeli control, but the group's first target is the pro-Western government of Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora. The country, he said, should be ruled by Islamic sharia law, not "atheist courts."
Al-Abssi's new group has more in common with Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda network and its global jihad than with the traditional Palestinian "resistance" movements he previously served. In an interview earlier this year with The New York Times, he said that his dream was to create a global Islamic government. He said that the U.S. invasion of Iraq made American citizens anywhere legitimate targets.
"It is our right to hit them in their homes as they hit us in our homes," he was quoted as saying. "We are not afraid of being named terrorists."
