Lebanon's poor northern areas are fertile ground for militant groups, Lucy Fielder reports On the unlit stairs up to the Jassem family's flat in Tripoli, the names of Al-Qaeda leaders Osama Bin Laden and Abu Musaab Al-Zarqawi are scrawled on the walls. His parents say they have no idea who wrote them. The elderly couple say when the fighting between Fatah Al-Islam and the army broke out on 19 May in the centre of Tripoli, they had no idea their son was even involved in a militant group, let alone fighting soldiers at that moment. Then the telephone rang. "'Mother I'm injured', Mahmoud told me, and I could hear the bullets flying," says his mother, Um Abdul-Rahman. "And there were no more words, only bullets." In their tiny, war-scarred apartment in Bab Al-Tebbaneh, a slum-like area in this northern Lebanese city, the couple still insist their son was not a member of Fatah Al-Islam, but simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. Friends and acquaintances of Mahmoud say they were also shocked to learn -- upon his death -- that he was allegedly part of the mysterious new Islamist group fighting the Lebanese army, but they do not doubt it. The unemployed 25-year-old had grown steadily more devout and mainly hung around the mosque. Photographs show a serious-looking, heavily bearded man. The group drew a number of recruits from this warren of crowded, pot-holed streets, as well tacit sympathisers. "These groups are like mafias, they attract poor local guys with money, then kill them if they try to leave," says Ali Zamzam, a local student. At Mahmoud's funeral, residents say, many mourners walked the streets behind his coffin. Such a public demonstration of sympathy would be unthinkable elsewhere in Lebanon, where anything other than support for the army has become tantamount to treason. Tripoli has been noisy in its support for the army's siege of the Nahr Al-Bared refugee camp, where the last remnants of Fatah Al-Islam are still inflicting military casualties. At least 137 soldiers, 100 militants and 41 soldiers have been killed in the fighting, according to Reuters. Tens of thousands of Palestinian residents fled to neighbouring camps under heavy army shelling. Many sons of the north, particularly the poverty-stricken frontier-land of Akkar, join the army as a route out of poverty. But a recent article in Al-Akhbar, a leading leftist newspaper, illustrated the dilemma facing some residents of the area as a state institution under the Sunni-led government's control battles Sunni mujahideen. At the funeral of one northern soldier, it reported, mourners prayed for forgiveness for the dead man for killing one of his own. The Jassems say they were preparing to ask for the hand of a local girl for their son that day, perhaps suggesting Mahmoud had no inkling of the fight ahead. "These groups recruit people with the idea that they're going to somehow liberate Jerusalem from here in north Lebanon," says Zamzam. Fatah Al-Islam's origins and funding remain subject to speculation, with the 14 March anti-Syrian bloc that rules Lebanon accusing arch-foe Damascus of using the group to create instability in order to regain control of its smaller neighbour. The group split off from the Syrian-backed Fatah Al-Intifada last November. Others say Lebanon's most powerful Sunni leader, 14 March's Saad Hariri, funded the group with his Saudi backers, despite the earlier link with Syria. Not alone among Lebanon's leaders, Hariri has been known to play the sectarian card for political support, and, some contend, has quietly armed Sunni elements to counterbalance the powerful Shia Hizbullah. Teacher Iman Al-Sheikh believes Saudi money has poured into Salafi institutions in Tebbaneh, Tripoli's most densely populated area where rubbish clogs the streets for want of public services and laundry and black Islamic flags flutter from balconies. She recently taught at a Saudi-funded Tripoli school, but left when she found its ideology ill-informed and extreme. Even science and maths were only taught according to what is found in the Quran, she says. Al-Sheikh wears the hijab, but objected to Christian colleagues having to. "In the past year or two there have been a lot of mosques, schools and centres set up in the north to teach people Salafi thought, which is basically Wahhabi thinking," says Ahmed Moussalli, an expert on radical Islam at the American University of Beirut. Most Islamists in northern Lebanon are peaceful, he stresses. "But some of them have been mobilised against the Shia. We do not know the numbers but I'm sure there are many more than we're seeing." Poverty in the north creates a hospitable environment for recruitment, Moussalli says. "Fatah Al-Islam was a very small radical group that in a few months became more than thousand people who were ready to fight and die." A security source said it remains unclear how many Lebanese members are among the Fatah Al-Islam dead and injured. Bodies remain in the dust and rubble of the shattered refugee camp. But local residents all seem to know of someone who turned out to be with the group. Between 60 and 70 per cent of residents migrated in recent decades from the impoverished rural regions of Akkar, Dinnieh and Al-Minya, the government's Council for Development and Reconstruction says. More than half of families in Bab Al-Tebbaneh receive about $130 a month, a 2006 Lebanese Council of Development and Reconstruction report on the country's "poverty pockets" found. Rents average about $150 for a simple flat of two or three bedrooms, so most have more money going out than in. Unemployment hovers above 30 per cent for men in deprived areas and half of children play truant from school. Samir Al-Qahani, a vegetable market worker, says wasta, or connections, are needed even to secure a place at over- subscribed state schools and many families in Tebbaneh cannot pay $100, the cost to enrol one child per year. He produces a picture of his two grandsons, neither looks older than 14. "They're both working to support their father -- hopefully he'll be able to send them back to school one day." Support for Hariri and his allies in the pantheon of local zaims, or local strong-men, appears widespread, but few residents of Tebbaneh harbour illusions about leaders on either side of Lebanon's pro- and anti-US political divide. "Politicians remember we're here only at election time and Ramadan," says Abu Walid, a barber. Before the 1975-1990 civil war, Tripoli was a wealthy port serving Syria, Turkey and Iraq. Its bustling souks earned Bab Al-Tebbaneh, one of the city's seven gates, the name the Gate of Gold. Across the country, the war hit industry, trade and agriculture. Shelling ruined Tebbaneh, which still bears the scars. As Beirut and Mount Lebanon developed after the war, assassinated former prime minister Rafik Al-Hariri's reconstruction boom largely left out the outlying regions. Insurgents who rose up to establish an Islamic caliphate in the northern province of Dinniyeh in 2000 mostly hailed from Tebbaneh, local residents say. Bus-loads of Tripoli's poor left for Iraq in April 2003 to fight US troops. "We're hearing a lot about a decisive military victory in Nahr Al-Bared, but no one's talking about tackling the root causes, the poverty and desperation in areas like these," says Imad Omar, who supplies micro-credit loans to hundreds of poor families in Tebbaneh through the NGO Al-Majmoua. "Poverty and ignorance are the main factors behind militancy, here at least."
