By SCHEHEREZADE FARAMARZI,  Aley, Lebanon — A bomb exploded in one of Lebanon’s most important mountain resorts late Wednesday, wounding at least five people, police said.

The blast rocked the Druze town of Aley around 9 p.m. and was heard as far as Beirut’s Mediterranean coastline about 12 miles to the west.Police said the bomb was hidden in a bag and placed at the entrance of a building in a narrow street about 200 yards from the main government building in town. Ambulances and police rushed to the area minutes after the blast, which had also caused considerable material damage.

The explosion sheared off walls of apartments, tore down electrical cables and wrecked parked vehicles. It also blew off shutters on the many shops in the street. Aley is popular with Arab tourists from the oil-rich Gulf who usually begin arriving in June to spend the summer in Lebanon.

Residents of the area are known to be loyal to Druse anti-Syrian leader Walid Jumblatt who had warned Tuesday of stepped-up violence and explosions across Lebanon.Two explosions on Sunday and Monday killed a woman and injured a dozen people in two neighborhoods of Beirut, as the Lebanese army battled militants holed up in a refugee camp near the northern port city of Tripoli.

Beirut and surrounding suburbs have been hit by a series of explosions in the last two years, particularly targeting Christian areas. The U.S.-backed government has blamed the attacks on Syria.Sunday’s explosion occurred across from a major shopping center shortly before midnight in Ashrafieh, an upscale neighborhood of the Christian sector of the Lebanese capital. A 63-year-old woman was killed and 12 others injured.

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DAY 4 – May 23rd

BEIRUT (AFP) by Nayla Razzouk – Lebanon told Islamic militants holed up in a Palestinian refugee camp on Wednesday to surrender or else, as a bomb wounded five people outside the capital and a militant was shot dead in the northern city of Tripoli.

The ultimatum followed three days of fierce fighting between the army and terrorist groups. "The army will not negotiate with Fatah al-Islam, which has two choices: either surrender or the army will take the military option," Defence Minister Elias Murr said in an interview on Arabic satellite channel Al-Arabiya.

"The army has made its military preparations, which I will not disclose," said the minister without mentioning any deadline.He spoke as thousands of refugees streamed out of the battered Nahr al-Bared camp near Tripoli.Wednesday night’s explosion rocked the predominantly Druze town of Aley east of the capital, wounding five people, a security official said.It was the third blast in the Beirut area in four days. The first in the Christian district of Ashrafiyeh on Sunday night killed one woman. The second was in Verdun, a predominately Sunni Muslim quarter, and wounded 10 people.

Wednesday, 23 May 2007

 A shaky truce in the Nahr al-Bared refugee camp that began on 4:30 p.m. Tuesday was still in place late in the day, following a morning of sporadic shelling of militant positions by the Lebanese army. The army insisted that it had not targeted civilians in its fight with Fatah al-Islam militants inside the camp and had only responded to hostile fire.

Civilians evacuated from the camp said that  Fatah al islam fighters had fired at army positions from the rooftops buildings in the camp.

The army reported no casualties in its ranks on Tuesday, after 31 soldiers were killed in the first two days of fighting and 55 were wounded.

While no verifiable tally of civilian casualties inside the camp was available, various sources within Nahr al-Bared said that dozens had died and at least 100 had been wounded.

The army reported Monday that 25 militants had been killed in the fighting. United Nations workers said that three residents were killed while attempting to collect supplies from relief trucks early Tuesday afternoon.

Soldiers are thoroughly searching all cars moving in the vicinity of the camp, a commander at the site said

النائب الخازن اسف ل"بقاء لبنان مشرع الابواب للارهاب وللارهابيين"           رأى عضو كتلة التغيير والاصلاح النائب فريد الخازن، في حديث الى اذاعة "صوت لبنان"، "ان يد الارهاب تضرب لبنان من جديد وتضرب الجيش اللبناني في الشمال والمواطنين الآمنين في الاشرفية"، معربا عن أسفه ل"بقاء لبنان مشرع الابواب للارهاب وللارهابيين الآتين من […]

DAY 3 – MAY 22nd

By SCHEHEREZADE FARAMARZI, Associated Press Writer, TRIPOLI, Lebanon –

AP reporters at the Nahr el-Bared refugee camp said the massive exodus began at about 9 p.m. during the lull in the fighting between the Lebanese army and the Fatah el Islam militant group of Sunni Muslims. U.N. relief officials in another camp located a few miles to the south of Tripoli said they expected 10,000 Palestinian refugees from Nahr el-Bared to arrive through the night. AP Television News video from Nahr el-Bared earlier in the afternoon showed women clutching children and piling up in pickup trucks, some waving white flags, as they tried to leave the partially destroyed camp. Others fled on foot, and ambulances could be seen evacuating the wounded.

Artillery and machine gun fire echoed around a crowded Palestinian refugee camp Tuesday for a third straight day as the Lebanese government ordered the army to finish off Islamic militants holed up inside. Angry Palestinians burned car tires in two other refugee camps in an ominous sign that the trouble could spread across Lebanon. The fighting between the Lebanese army and the al-Qaida inspired group Fatah Islam has raised fears of a backlash among the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in Lebanon’s other refugee camps, where Islamic extremists have been growing in influence.

At the Nahr el-Bared camp on the outskirts of the northern port of Tripoli, black smoke billowed from the area after artillery and machine gun exchanges between troops and militants.A cease-fire declared in the afternoon collapsed whithin an hour, when the terrorist group striked at the civilians cars and the amry. As a result fighting resumed between Lebanese troops and militants holed up in the camp.It was the third failed attempt at a truce. A convoy of U.N. relief supplies was hit in a third day of fighting Tuesday between Lebanese troops and an Islamic militant group holed up in a crowded Palestinian refugee camp.

Inside the city of Tripoli, security forces moved in against a suspected Fatah Islam hide-out in an apartment building, witnesses said. After receiving a tip about armed men in an apartment, shots rang out at midmorning as security forces raided the building using tear gas. The apartment was gutted when the army threw in hand grenades, but apparently no one was caught.

DAY 2 – MAY 21 NAHR AL-BARED, Lebanon (Reuters)  21 May- Lebanese tanks shelled Islamist militants in a Palestinian refugee camp on Monday and at least eight civilians were killed, raising the death toll in two days of fighting to 65, security sources said. Lebanese officials said one of the men killed in Sunday’s fighting […]

DAY 1 – May 20

TRIPOLI, Lebanon (AP) 20 May — Lebanese tanks pounded the headquarters of a group with suspected links to al Qaeda in a Palestinian refugee camp near Tripoli Sunday after the northern city’s worst clashes in two decades killed 22 soldiers and 17 militants.The clashes between troops surrounding the Nahr el-Bared camp and Fatah Islam fighters began early in the morning shortly after police raided a militant-occupied apartment on a major thoroughfare in Tripoli and a gunbattle erupted, witnesses said. A senior security official said a high-ranking member of Fatah Islam, known as Abu Yazan, was among those killed. He spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue.

Hundreds of Lebanese applauded as army tanks shelled the camp — a sign of the long-standing tensions between some Lebanese and the tens of thousands of Palestinians who took refuge from fighting in Israel over the past decades.

"We strongly back the Lebanese army troops and what they are doing," said Abed Attar, a resident of Tripoli who stood watching the tanks fire into the camp while others cheered.

The violence adds one more destabilizing factor to conflict-ridden Lebanon, in the midst of its worst political crisis between the Western-backed government and pro-Syrian opposition since the end of the 1975-90 Lebanese civil war. It underlines the difficulties facing authorities in dealing with pockets of insecurity across the country that are havens for militants. The clash between army troops surrounding the Palestinian refugee camp and fighters from the Fatah Islam militant group began after a gunbattle raged in a neighborhood of nearby Tripoli, witnesses said.

The militant group is an offshoot of the pro-Syrian Fatah Uprising, which broke from the mainstream Palestinian Fatah movement in the early 1980s and has headquarters in Syria. As many other small factions in Lebanon, Fatah Islam’s allegiance is sometimes questionable in this deeply polarized country.

Some Lebanese security officials consider that Fatah Islam is now a radical Sunni Muslim group with ties to al Qaeda, or at least al Qaeda-style militancy and doctrine. But some anti-Syrian government officials say they are a front for Syrian military intelligence aimed at destabilizing Lebanon. Syria has been fighting its own Sunni militancy, and has frequently battled with radicals striking in Damascus neighborhoods. Major Palestinian factions have dissociated themselves from Fatah Islam

In Rabieh, Free Patriotic Movement leader MP Michel Aoun held the Siniora government responsible for the fighting between the army and Fatah al-Islam. "A clear-cut decision ought to be taken so that violence does not spread to other parts of Lebanon or else terrorist attacks will start targeting innocent Lebanese civilians," he said.  In a […]

BEIRUT, Lebanon (CNN) — Lebanon’s economy minister on Monday asked for money and resources to help Lebanese forces battling members of an Islamic militant group in a Palestinian refugee camp near Tripoli. "I take this opportunity to ask our friends all over the world — Arab governments and friendly Western governments — to help us both logistically and with military equipment," Minister Sami Haddad told CNN.

The militant group Fatah al-Islam, he said, is well-financed and heavily armed, but the army’s morale is high, and the government has public opinion on its side. "We can hold out, but the help I’m requesting will be very important in speeding up our eventual victory," he said. Haddad said "it’s no secret" that the Lebanese army could be in a better position to do battle, but he insisted Lebanese forces would ultimately win their fight at the Nahr al bared refugee camp.Militants from Fatah al-Islam began shooting at the forces, who returned fire, triggering clashes in the vicinity of the camp. Fighting continued into Monday, and according to Lebanese officials, at least 15 militants and 30 Lebanese soldiers were dead, and dozens more wounded.

President Bush on Monday expressed support for Lebanon’s democratically-elected government and its efforts to shut out the militant group. "Extremists that are trying to topple that young democracy need to be reined in. Certainly we abhor the violence where innocents die. And it’s a sad state of affairs when you’ve got this young democracy in Lebanon being pressured by outside forces," Bush told Reuters in an interview aboard Air Force One.

Bush, who has previously criticized Syria’s influence in Lebanon, stopped short of saying they were involved in the current violence.I don’t know about this particular incident. I’ll be guarded on making accusations until I get better information, but I will tell you there’s no doubt that Syria was deeply involved in Lebanon. There’s no question they’re still involved in Lebanon," he told Reuters.Syria denies instigating the violence in Lebanon.