DAR AL HARB/ISLAM - LEBANON: MOSLEM REFUGEE CAMPS, PRIME RECRUITMENT GROUNDS FOR JIHAD JIHAD JIHAD

Islamist extremists thrive in camps
By Roula Khalaf, Middle East Editor

Poor and overpopulated, some of the big Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon have become islands of lawlessness, bound to provoke new crises in a country plagued by political instability.

Although most of the 12 camps in Lebanon – housing many of the nearly 400,000 UN-
registered refugees – are largely peaceful, security officials warn that the heavily populated ones have become dangerous havens for Islamist extremists.

Off limits to the Lebanese army under a decades-old agreement, the camps are governed by Palestinian political factions, which are often at odds with each other. Of most concern to the authorities have been the camps of Ain el-Helweh in the south and Nahr el-Bared in the north, scene of the current fighting.

“The problem is that the main Palestinian factions are weak, they can’t provide enough services to people and so they can’t control them,” said an official at the Palestinian Human Rights Organisation in Beirut.

The strict restrictions imposed by Lebanese authorities on the refugees, who have no civil or social rights and are banned from many professions, have turned the youths in the camps into easy recruits for radical Islamist groups. Warnings have come from the Beirut government and UN officials that weapons are flowing into the camps, allegedly across the Syrian border.

The pro-western government believes some of the extremist groups are created and manipulated by Syrian intelligence services. Damascus denies the charge, saying that the extremists are a threat to its own security.

Disarming the camps has been a priority for the government, besieged by political assassinations and bombings since the February 2005 killing of Rafiq Hariri, the former prime minister. But initial talks with Palestinian factions were thrown off track last summer when war erupted between Lebanon’s Hizbollah, the Shia group, and Israel.

Western officials, meanwhile, have been watching for links between the Islamist groups holed up in the camps and al-Qaeda.

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