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Lebanon Islamist group seeks militants' surrender
Lebanese Islamists on Thursday sought the surrender of al Qaeda-inspired militants locked in deadly battles with troops at a Palestinian refugee camp but the group said it would not give itself up. Two members of Lebanon's Islamic Action Front, which includes Sunni politicians and clerics, went to the Nahr al-Bared camp for talks with Fatah al-Islam's military commander Shahin Shahin, the front's leader Fathi Yakan said. "They (Fatah al-Islam) have reached a dead end. They can only surrender," Yakan told Reuters in the city of Tripoli, just south of Nahr al-Bared. "The only thing that will convince them is sharia (Islamic law), and religious reason."Yakan, head of the group which is close to Lebanon's opposition, said the delegation had not yet met a negotiator from Fatah al-Islam and did not expect a result immediately. Another Fatah al-Islam military commander, Abu Hurayra, reiterated the group would not surrender. "We are with any solution that halts the attacks and the bloodshed... but we will not accept any surrendering of weapons or ourselves," he told Reuters from inside the camp. Previous efforts by Palestinian leaders to broker a solution have failed to end the fighting, which began on May 20. The battles are Lebanon's deadliest internal violence since the 1975-1990 civil war. Security sources said a Lebanese soldier was killed on Thursday, bringing to 115 the total death toll, including 47 soldiers and 38 militants. Three soldiers were also wounded. In the squalid Nahr al-Bared camp, abandoned by most of its 40,000 residents, soldiers used artillery and machineguns against Fatah al-Islam's positions in sporadic fighting. A Reuters witness said Lebanese soldiers took about 20 men, blindfolded and handcuffed, away from the southern entrance of the camp. There was no immediate information on their identities. The army and the government say Fatah al-Islam started the conflict and have repeatedly called for its men to lay down their arms and surrender, demands the group has rejected. "The army is continuing to put pressure on the militants. They are surrounded and there is no option for them but to surrender," a military source said. The authorities charged three more members of Fatah al-Islam with terrorism on Thursday, bringing to 30 the total indicted, judicial sources said. The charges carry the death penalty. The violence is the latest jolt to stability in Lebanon, already in the midst of a 7-month-old political crisis. Four bombs have also exploded in the Beirut area, killing one person and wounding dozens, since the Nahr al-Bared fighting began. Security forces also found a car bomb in eastern Lebanon and two other vehicles containing weapons and explosives, including four Katyusha rockets. The cars were found in Bar Elias village just west of the border with Syria in the Bekaa valley, a day after the forces arrested, in the same area, three suspected al Qaeda members in possession of weapons and explosives. In Ain al-Hilweh, Lebanon's largest refugee camp, a 40-member force made of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah group and three Islamist factions remained deployed at the camp's northern entrance, after clashes broke out between the army and the militant Jund al-Sham group earlier this week. Two soldiers and two militants were killed in fire fights that erupted on Sunday in Ein al-Helweh, raising fears the fighting in Nahr al-Bared, could further spread to other camps. Palestinian factions, including Fatah and the Islamist Hamas group, oppose Fatah al-Islam, which shares al Qaeda's ideology of global jihad and recruits fighters from other Arab countries. Posted by: Fred 2007-06-08 |
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