NAHR Al-BARED, Lebanon, 16 July 2007 — A soldier was killed yesterday as the Lebanese Army battled for the eighth week to crush Islamist extremists who fired more rockets from inside a battered and besieged refugee camp.
The soldier was killed in the confrontations with diehard militiamen of Fatah Al-Islam entrenched in the Nahr Al-Bared Palestinian camp in northern Lebanon, a military spokesman told AFP. “The army continues to work in Nahr Al-Bared and tighten the noose on the gunmen in order to force them to surrender,” he said.
Soldiers exchanged machine-gun fire with militants making a last stand in the seafront camp, which came under sporadic bombardment yesterday. The militiamen also fired four rockets which hit a field in the tiny village of Qaabrine about seven kilometers northeast of Nahr Al-Bared, causing no casualties, police said.
While artillery and tanks blasted the camp, the military said elite troops had seized control of a number of buildings and Islamist positions, while army engineers cleared mines and demolished barriers.
Explosives planted by Islamists in a building blew up as an army patrol was inside on Saturday, an army spokesman said. “We retrieved two soldiers alive and we are still searching the rubble of the building,” parts of which collapsed in the explosion, he said yesterday.
The army closed in on Fatah Al-Islam positions in the camp on Saturday following two days of heavy fighting in which 11 soldiers were killed.
An army spokesman said the Al-Qaeda-inspired Islamist militiamen now only controlled an area 300 meters by 600 meters on a small hill inside the camp, left in ruins by the bloodiest internal battles since the civil war.
Fatah Al-Islam fired eight Katyusha rockets which struck outside the camp on Saturday, a day after launching 18 others. The attacks did not cause casualties, according to the army.
At least 185 people have been killed since the fighting erupted on May 20. The dead include 96 soldiers and at least 68 Islamists. The clashes began when the militants killed 27 soldiers around Nahr Al-Bared and in the nearby Mediterranean port city of Tripoli.
The government has vowed to eradicate Fatah Al-Islam, a shadowy band which first surfaced in the camp late last year and includes extremists of various Arab nationalities. About 80 remaining Fatah Al-Islam fighters are being supported by dozens of pro-Syrian Palestinian militants, according to one Palestinian source, citing evacuated activists.
Apart from the fighters and their families, only a small number of civilians are believed to remain in the camp, whose 31,000 residents have fled in several waves since the fighting began.
Four days after a major evacuation of civilians and militants of various Palestinian factions, an ambulance of the Palestine Red Crescent entered Nahr Al-Bared yesterday to evacuate the head of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command in the camp, Abu Nabil.
In another Palestinian refugee camp in southern Lebanon, an Islamist militant suspected of involvement in the May 7 killing of two members of the mainstream Fatah movement was shot dead yesterday, Palestinian sources said.
The violence continued as Lebanon’s political factions including the powerful opposition group Hezbollah entered a second day of talks in France to try to ease the deadlock that has paralyzed the nation for nearly eight months.
The talks in the state-owned chateau of La Celle Saint Cloud west of Paris brought together representatives of 14 factions including members of the pro-Western government of Prime Minister Fouad Siniora.
French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner has said the participants had been asked to shun all external contact during the talks to pre-empt “interference.”
France hopes to encourage Lebanese leaders to renew a dialogue that was shattered during the conflict with Israel last year and the resignation in November of opposition ministers.
