Lebanese army battles militants, 9 civilians dead

NAHR AL-BARED, Lebanon, May 21 (Reuters) Lebanese tanks shelled Islamist militants in a Palestinian refugee camp today and at least nine civilians were killed, raising the death toll in two days of fighting to 66, security sources said.

Fighting died down briefly in the afternoon amid efforts to allow a waiting aid convoy into the Nahr al-Bared camp in north Lebanon, but heavy clashes resumed before the UN and Red Cross convoy could move. Thick smoke billowed from the coastal camp.

A military source had said the army would hold its fire unless it was attacked, without agreeing to a formal truce.

Tanks battered the camp, home to 40,000 refugees, as fighters of the al Qaeda-inspired Fatah al-Islam group fired grenades and machineguns at army posts on the perimeter.

The Sunni Muslim faction, which emerged late last year, has only a few hundred fighters and scant political support in Lebanon. Based in Nahr al-Bared, it is thought to have links with militant groups in other Palestinian camps.

Palestinian sources in Nahr al-Bared said the bombardment had killed nine civilians and wounded 20. They feared the toll would rise. Aid workers, who earlier evacuated nine civilians, waited on the edge of the camp for a lull in the fighting.

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.

The cabinet, itself embroiled in a long-running political crisis, was to discuss the fighting later on Monday.

Palestine Liberation Organisation representative Abbas Zaki said after talks with Prime Minister Fouad Siniora that the camps housing 400,000 refugees, a legacy of the Arab-Israeli war of 1948, should not be ''the spark that starts a civil war''.

Mosque loudspeakers in Nahr al-Bared broadcast appeals for the army to stop shelling. The International Committee of the Red Cross asked for a truce. Richard Cook, head of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, voiced concern about ''the developing humanitarian crisis'' in the camp.

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

Syrian Foreign Minister Walid Moualem reiterated that his country opposed Fatah al-Islam and wanted to arrest its leaders.

''Our forces have been after them, even through Interpol,'' he said in a lecture at Damascus University. ''We reject this organisation. It does not serve the Palestinian cause and it is not after liberating Palestine.'' Under a 1969 Arab accord, Lebanon's army may not enter the refugee camps, leaving a security vacuum filled by Palestinian factions. They have not obeyed a 2004 U.N. Security Council resolution calling for all militias in Lebanon to be disarmed.

Hezbollah, Lebanon's biggest armed group, whose Shi'ite fighters are backed by Iran and Syria, also rejects that demand.

Nahr al-Bared's Lebanese neighbours said they supported the efforts by the already stretched army to rein in the militants.

''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 US 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.

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