HEZBOLLAH, THE
Iranian-backed Lebanese Shia militant group, is arming, training and financing a Palestinian Sunni militia inside Lebanon's most violent refugee camp, tasked with controlling the rise of al-Qaeda fighters, many of them veterans of the sectarian war in Iraq.
In an interview with the Sunday Herald inside Ain al-Hilweh camp near the southern port city of Sidon, Sheikh Abu Ayoub, a commander of Ansar Allah (Followers of God), said his Palestinian group was leading a security force to expel foreign jihadis and prevent a repeat of the devastating summer conflict between Sunni extremists and the Lebanese army in the northern Nahr al-Bared refugee camp.
"Lebanon is now the new front for al-Qaeda," said Ayoub. "Al-Qaeda sees Lebanon as weak because of the split in decision-making, and weak security. Over the past year there were many foreigners in the camp. They spoke about wanting to get back into Iraq. There were Saudis among them and they were closely monitored before being expelled. They all moved to Nahr al-Bared."
In a 15-week siege of Nahr al-Bared that reduced large swathes of the camp just north of Tripoli to rubble, the army lost 168 soldiers and killed or captured more than 400 militants, while at least 40 civilians died in the worst internal violence since the end of the civil war in 1990. The first trickle of Palestinian families displaced by the conflict began returning to Nahr al-Bared last week, many to find their homes charred ruins.
Ayoub said his group, which numbers 300 armed fighters and 1000 supporters, are an extension of Hezbollah, who he claimed wish to quell the rise of Sunni al-Qaeda extremists in Lebanon after witnessing the murderous sectarian war against the Shia in Iraq.
"We are part of Hezbollah. Everything comes from Hezbollah: financial support, weapons, training," said Ayoub. "Palestine is an Islamic issue. Hezbollah are Islamic. We are Islamic. There is no conflict between Sunnis and Shias here. We are Muslims."
Ayoub said a number of his Ansar Allah militants had fought alongside Hezbollah in the July 2006 war with Israel. His group now heads an Islamist security force controlling two of Ain al-Hilweh's key checkpoints.
In early June, Jund as-Sham, an al-Qaeda-linked "takfiri" group, launched an attack on the army from one of the checkpoints now controlled by Ansar Allah. In Arabic the word takfiri refers to a person or group who professes the disbelief of others within Islam. In the factionalised world of rival Islamic groups, such labelling has powerful religious and political implications.
Ayoub's claim that his Sunni militants are part of Hezbollah - funded and armed by Iran's Ayatollah Khamenei, the leader of the world's Shia Muslims, and listed as a terrorist organisation by the US - is the clearest indication to date that parallels of the conflict in Iraq between Sunni al-Qaeda fanatics and Iranian-backed Shia militias are being played out in Lebanon.
The arming of Sunni militants across the sectarian divide is also evidence that despite being embroiled in a year-long political stand-off with the Western-backed government over power sharing and, most recently, the election of a new president, Hezbollah remains a powerful, unilateral player in Lebanon's security arena.
However, Lebanon's governing coalition - known as the March 14 forces - have been under considerable pressure by their Western backers to disarm Hezbollah in the wake of the militant group's ruinous month-long war against Israel last summer.
"Before the July war Hezbollah had called for a national unity government," said Amal Saad Ghorayeb, an expert on Hezbollah at the Carnegie Endowment's Middle East Centre in Beirut. "But after the war they became much more vocal and hardline because they saw that there was a clear US policy to utilise March 14 forces to disarm Hezbollah and weaken Iran and Syria in the process."
Following the end of the 1975-1990 civil war, Hezbollah were the only militia to retain their arms by Lebanese consensus, forming the "national resistance" to Israel's continued occupation of south Lebanon, which ended in 2000. Intelligence experts widely believe the majority of Hezbollah's weapons are smuggled across the Syrian border with the approval of Damascus.
Hezbollah's media office ignored several requests to comment on its support for Ansar Allah. However, in an earlier interview with the Sunday Herald, Hezbollah's foreign affairs spokesman Nawaf Mousawi was explicit that the rise of Sunni extremism in Lebanon, supported, he claimed, by the government and its US backers, represents a serious threat to his group.
"The pro-government forces are instigating sectarian provocation and driving the Sunni population into the lap of extremism," said Mousawi.
"Takfiri rhetoric is the most capable of instigating against Shias. The government coalition wants to use takfiris as a reserve force in order to strike at the power of Hezbollah, and this is the same agenda as the US administration."
