"Return of the Jihadi": Case of Lebanon

Andrew Exum (Excerpts):

".....Lebanon is a prototypical weak, democratic state and as such provides an excellent case study for how returning jihadists can upset an already fragile domestic security situation. Less than a year after the 2006 war between Hezbollah and Israel, the people of Lebanon were again held hostage to violence, this time sparked not by Shia militants but rather by Sunni groups based in the Palestinian refugee camps. As in the 2006 conflict, the weak central government in Beirut deserved part of the blame. Since the 1960s, the camps have been no-go zones for the government, a strategy that avoided immediate conflict but allowed the construction of, essentially, safe havens for not only Palestinian militants, but also other militant groups and criminal elements. The office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees estimates that between 20,000 and 40,000 Iraqis have taken refuge in Lebanon, with another 1.2 to 1.4 million refugees in neighboring Syria.

No reliable estimates exist to show how many foreign fighters might have traveled from Iraq to Lebanon. But given their prominence in the 2007 fighting, the number is significant. The militants from Fatah al-Islam were not majority Palestinian; rather they were both Lebanese and citizens from a number of other Arab nations, especially Saudi Arabia. As Nir Rosen reported for the Boston Review, some of these militants had fought in Iraq with Ahmed Zarqawi’s Al Qaeda-allied organization, while others were lured to Lebanon in the hopes of training in the camps and then fighting in Iraq or the Palestinian territories. Rosen, interviewing jihadists in other Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon who had fought in Iraq, explained that in Nahr al-Bared, "The new men in the camps were largely foreign jihadists, with the same weapons, tactics, and sectarian goals of Iraqi resistance fighters." These men brought a deadly new mentality to the camps of Lebanon. They fought without regard to collateral damage or civilian casualties. When the shooting stopped, Nahr al-Bared–previously home to 30,000 luckless refugees–had been reduced to rubble. One hundred sixty-three Lebanese soldiers lay dead along with more than 200 militants and 42 civilians.

On a visit to Beirut last summer, I was struck by the prevailing fear–from secular Maronite Christians to even Hezbollah supporters–that the latest round of fighting with Sunni militants is only the beginning. Everyone agrees that it is not a question of whether more militants will return from Iraq, but rather how many. What happens, they asked, when two or three Sunni militants, fresh from Iraq, decide to continue that country’s war in Lebanon and blow themselves up in a Shia mosque on a Friday afternoon? Hezbollah, the Shiite guerrilla group-cum-political party that is the de facto ruler of large parts of Lebanon, might respond forcefully (of course, that fear may have a silver lining, driving the country toward firm action against an untenable situation in the camps). The Lebanese border with Syria continues to be porous, which has both allowed Hezbollah to re-arm and Sunni militants to cross back and forth through Syria on their way to Iraq. The result will be, at the very least, a heightened political tension, if not a more brutal and explosive war in the near future......"