Lebanese army battles militants, 8 civilians dead

NAHR AL-BARED, Lebanon, May 21 (Reuters) Lebanese tanks shelled Islamist militants in a Palestinian refugee camp today and at least eight civilians were killed, raising the death toll in two days of fighting to 65, security sources said.

Tanks pounded the coastal camp of Nahr al-Bared, home to some 40,000 refugees in north Lebanon, as fighters of the al Qaeda-inspired Fatah al-Islam group fired grenades and machineguns at army posts on the perimeter, witnesses said.

Palestinian sources in the camp said the bombardment had killed eight civilians and wounded 20. They feared the toll would rise because rescue workers could not reach some areas.

Yesterday's battles at Nahr al-Bared and in the nearby city of Tripoli killed 27 soldiers, 15 militants and 15 civilians -- Lebanon's worst internal fighting since the 1975-1990 civil war.

The violence showed how fragile security remains in Lebanon, racked by political and sectarian tensions since last year's Israeli-Hezbollah war in the south and by a series of unsolved assassinations before and after Syria's 2005 troop pullout.

Tripoli, Lebanon's second biggest city, was quiet but schools and universities were closed following the previous day's street battles with militants holed up in buildings.

Schools also shut in the sprawling Ain al-Hilweh camp near the southern city of Sidon in protest at the fighting in the north. Militants of Jund al-Sham, another pro-Qaeda group, went on alert in the camp, Palestinian security sources said.

Lebanese Red Cross ambulances evacuated 20 wounded from Nahr al-Bared overnight, following an appeal for humanitarian access.

Witnesses said mosque imams called by loudspeakers for the army to stop shelling the camp, one of a dozen across Lebanon.

They host about 400,000 Palestinian refugees, part of an exodus prompted by the 1948 war that followed Israel's creation.

In Beirut, an explosion near a popular shopping mall in the mainly Christian east of the capital killed a woman and wounded 10 people yesterday, a security source said.

No group has claimed the attack and it was not clear if it was linked to the fighting in the north. Four Fatah al-Islam members were charged with bombings near Beirut earlier this year.

SYRIAN HAND? Lebanese government ministers say Fatah al-Islam is a tool used by Syria to stir instability in an effort to derail U N moves to set up an international court that would try suspects in the 2005 killing of former Prime Minister Rafik al-Hariri.

Fatah al-Islam, a Sunni group, is thought to have only a few hundred fighters, but suppressing it is no easy task for Lebanon's over-stretched army of 40,000.

The army may not enter the country's Palestinian refugee camps under a 1969 Arab accord. Palestinian factions still carry weapons inside the camps, despite a 2004 U.N. Security Council resolution calling for all militias in Lebanon to be disarmed.

The resolution is rejected by Lebanon's biggest armed group, Hezbollah, whose Shi'ite Muslim guerrillas fought a 34-day war with Israel in July and August. Some 15,000 army troops moved to south Lebanon under a U N resolution that halted hostilities, while another 8,000 were sent to control the border with Syria.

Media on both sides of Lebanon's political divide criticised the authorities for not tackling Fatah al-Islam before but rallied behind the army.

''Who is responsible for the army's massacre in the Fatah al-Islam ambush?'' asked as-Safir, a pro-opposition daily, referring to a militant attack on an army patrol yesterday.

Using the army against armed groups in Lebanon has long been a sensitive issue, given the country's sectarian divisions, but Nahr al-Bared's Lebanese neighbours have had enough.

''We're not sleeping at night. Our children are terrified,'' said Ahmed Frousheh, 55, a farmer who lives nearby. ''...The camp has to respect the state. They are destroying Lebanon, inciting strife all because of the tribunal and Syria.'' Fatah al-Islam's leader, Shaker al-Abssi, was sentenced to death in Jordan in absentia for the 2002 killing of a U.S.

diplomat. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the slain chief of al Qaeda in Iraq, received a death sentence for the same crime.

Abssi, a Palestinian guerrilla in his 50s, was jailed in Syria and fled to Lebanon after he was released last year.

Palestinian guerrillas established bases in Lebanon in the late 1960s and took part in the civil war that erupted in 1975.

REUTERS RJ HT1542