In Gaza fight, Hamas saw religion as secret weapon

GAZA, June 20 (Reuters) Ahmed al-Halabi isn't your ordinary traffic cop.

A religious man with a light-coloured beard, Halabi traded in his life as a Gaza sweets merchant to become one of Hamas's elite Executive Force troopers.

Although outnumbered by as much as four-to-one, Halabi and his Hamas brethren routed their Fatah rivals, loyal to President Mahmoud Abbas, in less than a week of factional fighting.

Diplomats said poor planning by Fatah and Israel's delay of weapons shipments to Gaza gave Hamas's smaller but more motivated forces the edge.

''My interest was not the money. We wanted to protect the people,'' said Halabi, whose job now entails directing traffic outside of Abbas's abandoned Gaza City home.

With Fatah soundly beaten, Hamas's 6,000-man Executive Force has no serious rivals left.

Abbas responded to the violent takeover of the coastal strip by dissolving the Hamas-led government and appointed one of his own in the occupied West Bank.

Abbas then outlawed the Executive Force, which rivals refer to derisively as the ''Black Militia'' or ''Peshmerga'' -- a word that literally means ''those who face death'' but is used by Fatah for a gun-for-hire.

''We have heard similar (Abbas) decisions before,'' scoffed Executive Force spokesman Islam Shahwan from his sprawling new office inside Abbas's one-time security headquarters.

The 28-year-old's office, filled with black leather furniture, used to belong to Major-General Jamal Kayed, Abbas's veteran national security chief in Gaza.

Hamas captured Kayed along with other security chiefs. Hamas said he was ''pardoned''.

FAITH ''We had a weapon which they did not have, and that is faith.

They were armed with some money and cigarettes,'' Shahwan said.

Washington says the Executive Force and Hamas's armed wing were armed and funded by Iran and other Islamist allies.

Instead of battling Fatah, Shahwan said his men have been busy with more run-of-the-mill policing problems, combating drugs and petty crimes and reducing traffic tie-ups.

Those jobs would normally fall to the Palestinian police, but Abbas's police chief, Kamal al-Sheikh, has barred them from obeying the Hamas administration.

''Anyone who does will be fired and deprived of any rights,'' he told Abbas-run Palestine Television in the West Bank city of Ramallah where he is based.

Members of the Executive Force can now be found at major intersections directing traffic.

Others took over the Rafah border crossing between Gaza and Egypt, where on Monday they inspected bags and stamped passports. Rafah has since been closed.

Winning the street battle may have been the easy part.

Hamas now faces the problem of running an aid-dependent coastal strip cut off economically and diplomatically -- not only from Israel and major Western and Arab powers, but from the occupied West Bank, home to Abbas's rival emergency government.

Most of Shahwan's men did not seen too worried.

Outside Abbas's office, 20 members of the Executive Force, waving their rifles in the air, chanted in unison, ''Our utmost goal is God, our path is Jihad, our book is the Koran and our best wish is to die for the sake of God.'' ''We joined the force in the first place to win heaven and not money,'' explained Zeyad al-Shinbari, who gave up driving cabs and now patrols the Gaza streets for the Executive Force.

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