Militants strike Lebanese Army from camp

EIN AL-HILWEH, Lebanon -- Islamic militants attacked Lebanon's A rmy from a second Palestinian refugee camp yesterday, sending residents fleeing through bullet and rocket fire and heightening fears that the country faces a gravely destabilizing campaign by the radical groups that hide out in the country's 12 crowded camps.

Yesterday's clash occurred near the southern city of Sidon on the outskirts of Ein al-Hilweh, the country's largest camp, with at least 45,000 inhabitants.

"It's time the army comes into the camps and cleans these people out," said Abu Rani, 36, a driver who was among hundreds of Palestinian men, women, and children streaming into a mosque on Ein al-Hilweh's edge for shelter as night fell. "It would be a relief to everyone, the Palestinians and the Lebanese."

Fighting at the camp broke out as Lebanese forces pressed a third week of siege against another militant band in a camp to the north, Nahr al-Bared, outside the city of Tripoli.

Unlike past days of heavy shelling, much of yesterday's fighting at Nahr al-Bared appeared at close range, with heavy machine guns and automatic weapons firing for hours.

The fighting at Nahr al-Bared involves Fatah al-Islam, a group believed to be largely made up of fighters who are neither Palestinian nor Lebanese, but are from other Arab and Islamic countries as far away as Bangladesh, according to Lebanese leaders. The group says its inspiration comes from Al Qaeda and that it aims to bring Islamic law to the Palestinian camps and then to take on Israel.

The militants at Ein al-Hilweh, by contrast, are considered by many to be more ragtag outlaws than Islamic fighters driven by ideology. The group, Jund al-Sham, or Soldiers of Damascus, is mostly Lebanese but has strong links to neighboring Syria.

The two armed groups have in common their choice of havens inside Lebanon's refugee camps. About 400,000 Palestinian refugees live in Lebanon, the majority in the camps. Lebanon's Army mostly has stayed out of the camps, in accord with a 1969 agreement. That autonomy has left the Palestinian Liberation Organization and other Palestinian groups controlling the camps to deal with the growing number of outside Islamic militant groups that have found shelter there.

Ein al-Hilweh has long been considered one of the roughest of the Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon.