Lebanon camp war fuels anti-Palestinian sentiment
Tripoli - As the list of dead soldiers grows, anger mounts in villages of north Lebanon where the army has been locked in a deadly showdown with Islamist militants for more than two months.
Black-clad women shout angrily as men in sombre mood sit in heavy silence next to portraits of the "martyred" soldiers in impoverished villages in the remote north -- a main reservoir for the country's armed forces.
Elite unit soldier Bassam Jawhar, 29, was killed on July 14 during the ongoing battles around Nahr al-Bared refugee camp where Fatah al-Islam militants have been under army siege since May 20.
He was killed when a booby-trapped building collapsed on a patrol in Nahr al-Bared and it took the army six days to retrieve his body from under the rubble due to the intensity of the battles.
Like Jawhar, six other soldiers from Bebnin fell in combat in Nahr al-Bared in two months.
At his family home in the village, his widow Mariam, wearing a black dress and an embroidered headscarf, sits near the giant portrait of the "Shahid" (martyr in Arabic) standing proudly in full combat gear and holding a rocket-launcher.
"I delivered our baby the day he left, 50 days ago exactly," said Mariam, 23. "He only saw the baby twice."
In another room, the grandfather holds his newly-born granddaughter in his arms as an endless queue of men flock in to present their condolences.
The procession takes place in silence, but anger is boiling.
"Don't say Fatah al-Islam, it is an insult to Islam. Say 'the criminal gang of Shaker al-Abssi,'" the Islamist group's commander, said Mohammed Jawhar, a cousin of the slain soldier.
Across the dusty villages of the impoverished northern province of Akkar, the men enroll in the country's armed forces by local tradition but mostly by necessity.
"There is not a single house where there is no soldier," explained 42-year-old Zeina Sufain, who lost her 19-year-old son Firas on May 22.
"There is no work here. Even for those who go to school," she said.
The list of soldiers killed in Nahr al-Bared has painfully reached 116, including 27 servicemen on the first day of the clashes when the Islamist extremists attacked most of them in their beds.
Reports of "massacres" against off-duty soldiers by Fatah al-Islam, including harrowing stories of servicemen executed at gunpoint or slaughtered with knives seemed to have at least momentarily ended decades of good relations with the Palestinian refugee camp.
"Let them go to hell," shouted Sahar, Bassam's aunt.
"We will never let the camp be rebuilt. We will never accept that the Palestinians come back. We used to buy from their shops, but they are traitors. They harbored these criminals, they helped them," Mohammed Jawhar said.
"Some of them even married their girls to the terrorists" from Fatah al-Islam, shouted another man.
But despite their grief and great losses, Akkar villages continue to back the army and its military campaign on Nahr al-Bared.
"In Akkar we love the army," said a cousin of one of the slain soldiers in Bebnin.
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Pertinent Links:
1) Lebanon camp war fuels anti-Palestinian sentiment
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