The Assyrian Democratic Organization
Beirut – AINA — On August 13, 2007, Lebanese Army General Michael Suleiman shed some light on the military situation in Naher El Bared and the fight against Fateh el Islam terrorist group. In the process, General Suleiman mentioned that such a terrorist group is definitely linked to Al-Qaeda, yet, he added, it has no connection to Syria whatsoever. Such distortion of the truth triggered this document, in which most of its intelligence information came from the same Army that General Suleiman is the commander.
Background
The Palestinians came into Lebanon in two main influxes. The majority of them came in after the establishment of Israel in 1948, while the second influx occurred after the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. Originally, they were set up in different refugee camps throughout Lebanon. However, over the years many of them moved out of the camps and resided in the main coastal cities of Lebanon especially Beirut, Sidon, Tripoli and Tyre.
Currently they number 420,508 out of which 239,736 live inside the camps, with 180,772 spread out through the cities mentioned above. This number constitutes approximately 10% of Lebanon’s population. The Palestinians lived peacefully in Lebanon until 1967. After the Arab-Israeli war of 1967, and with support from most Arab countries, especially Syria, the Palestinians started getting arms shipments into their camps in Lebanon and started training their “guerillas” inside the camps and in some other remote areas of Lebanon.
The Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) was formed and most of the armed Palestinians factions joined under its umbrella. After their clashes and their defeat by King Hussein of Jordan in 1970, (Black September) there was an enormous influx of armed Palestinians into Lebanon by way of Syria. It did not take long for the PLO to establish a state within a state and to start interfering in the Lebanese political process as well as in disrupting the daily lives of the Lebanese people.
Moreover, the Palestinian camps became training grounds and unreachable havens for most international terrorist groups. This led to several clashes between the Lebanese army and the PLO. These clashes came to an end after the 1973 Cairo agreement between Lebanon and the PLO.
Several security incidents between the Palestinian armed forces and the Lebanese army, as well as with Lebanese citizens, culminated in 1975 into a major deflagration leading to the start of the Lebanese war. During the first seven years of the war, the PLO played a major role in directing the conflict and was responsible for the massacres of thousands of Lebanese and the displacement of tens of thousands more. Their role was greatly diminished, however, after the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982. After the end of the Lebanese war in 1990, the Palestinian armed presence was limited to their refugee camps.
However, after the death of Yasser Arafat, and the Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon in 2005, the fundamentalist groups, through Syrian intelligence training, financing, and directing gained momentum and allied themselves with Lebanon’s Hezbollah, which took upon itself the role of the Syrian Mukhabarat (Intelligence.) Ever since its departure from Lebanon, Syria has been sending hundreds of armed Palestinian militants into Lebanon in order to destabilize the security situation in the country under the pretext of defeating the American-Zionist plan for the new Middle East, which is believed to be a mere “plot” to destabilize the region.
