الصلة
ما بين لبنان وغزة
بقلم:
روبرت بير
مجلة
التايم الأمريكية - 23/5/2007
ان
السؤال المهم هنا هو : هل تمثل
هذه الانفجارات التي نراها في
كل من غزة ولبنان انبعاثاً
لتنظيم القاعدة المخيف في
هذه المنطقة؟
The
Link Between
Lebanon
and
Gaza
Wednesday,
May. 23, 2007 By ROBERT
BAER
Talk
about the heart of darkness: The Israeli army shelling
the Palestinians in
Gaza
, the Lebanese army
bombarding the Palestinians in a refugee camp outside of
Tripoli
. It may take a while for
the smoke to clear, but one thing is for certain:
neither
Lebanon
nor
Israel
fully understands their enemy and the nature of the
relationship between the Palestinians and al-Qaeda,
which is strengthening. The hope is that overwhelming
military firepower will defeat unbendable faith, and,
for our part, let's hope they have better success than
we've had in
Iraq
Lebanon
's
government would like us to believe Fatah Islam started
the fighting there on Sunday on the orders of
Damascus
.
I hope they know better. Whether
Syria
is providing tactical help or not, at the end of the day
Fatah Islam is the Syrian regime's mortal enemy. If the
fighting were to somehow lead to an all-out civil war,
Syrian stability will be undermined.
Lebanon
has had a Sunni fundamentalist element in the north for
more than 25 years. As I've written before in
this column, the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood
used northern
Lebanon
as a rear base to seize the Syrian city of
Hama
in 1982. Lebanese Sunni,
including fundamentalist Palestinians, were instrumental
in the attack. In 2000, a Qaeda-affiliated group in
northern
Lebanon
attacked the Lebanese army.
Iraq
and
Afghanistan
have only exacerbated the problem.
Spend
time in any Palestinian refugee camp in
Lebanon
and you quickly understand that Osama bin Laden is a
symbol of resistance. In the run-up to the
Iraq
war TIME
Beirut
correspondent Nick Blanford and I visited 'Ayn
al-Hilweh, a Palestinian camp outside of
Sidon
.
Two things struck me. A fundamentalist Sunni group,
Usbat al-Islam, occupied half the camp, which we didn't
enter because we probably wouldn't have made it back
out. And, two, the Fatah commander was already
recruiting fighters to go to
Iraq
to fight the occupation. Both sides were signed up for
the jihad.
Gaza
is a mirror image of what
is happening in
Lebanon
.
Last year, Israelis have told me, Qaeda was growing like
a fungus there, with both mainline Fatah and Hamas
losing followers to it. In
Gaza
you could see the place was
seething. But frankly the notion of bin Laden taking
over sounded like propaganda to me. Now, though,
watching the growing chaos, and with the kidnapping of a
BBC journalist, I think the Israelis were right.
And
it's not just in
Lebanon
and
Gaza
where Qaeda is poking its head up. In a startling
interview with the Financial Times, John Negroponte,
deputy U.S. Secretary of State, said Qaeda is on the
move in
North Africa
, as well as in the
Sahel
region, in such countries as
Chad
,
Mali
and
Niger
.
Negroponte also said we should brace ourselves for a
merger between Qaeda and the Algerian fundamentalists.I
heard the same thing from a Libyan official, who said
that one day in the near future Qaeda-associated groups
could pose a threat to
Libya
's
stability.
Ethiopia
's
invasion of
Somalia
left a vacuum Qaeda is quickly filling.
All
of this begs the question; are the explosions we are
seeing in
Gaza
and
Lebanon
a sign that the long-feared Qaeda resurgence is here?
Robert
Baer, a former CIA field officer assigned to the
Middle East
and Time.com's intelligence
columnist, is the author of See No Evil and, most
recently, the novel Blow the House Down.
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1624621,00.html
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