After
The Spaniards, Who Will Be
Next To Die In Lebanon?
By Robert Fisk
26 June, 2007
The
Independent
Which United Nations contingent
in southern Lebanon will be next? It is a ghoulish, terrible question
after the car bomb attack that killed six Spanish soldiers of the 13,000-strong
international army on Sunday evening, but one which the officers of
the UN Interim Force - Unifil - are asking at their intelligence meetings.
For the UN army from 30 countries under the command of four Nato generals
- the Spanish contributed 1,100 soldiers - is clearly going to be attacked
again. The usual expressions of determination of Western leaders who
are not going to "cut and run" - so reminiscent of the Iraq
war - are not going to change that.
Will it be the French, who
appear to have the highest blast walls around their base? Or the Italians
with their heavy armour - little protection, it would seem, after Sunday's
bomb blew one of the Spanish armoured personnel carriers into the air?
Or one of the smaller, more
vulnerable contingents? Qatar has a small unit here. So does China.
Would Lebanon's bombers dare to touch the People's Army? Even the UN's
Beirut headquarters now has a 13ft wall around it.
Either way, the UN - and
thousands of Western troops - are now in the firing line in another
Arab country, and the Lebanese government's appeal not to be left to
fight off its enemies alone reflects the concern of Fouad Siniora's
fractured cabinet that it may be abandoned as violence continues to
grow in intensity and geographical area.
Sunday's battles in Tripoli
between the Lebanese army and Islamist militants who took over an apartment
block in the city clearly proved that the brutal guerrilla fighting
around the city has by no means ended. The army, without showing evidence,
claimed the dead included three Saudis, two Lebanese and a Chechen.
And it now transpires that a woman was among those killed by the army
- apparently the wife of one of the militiamen, Bassem el-Sayyed, who
is reported to hold Australian citizenship.
What is incontestable is
that the innocent dead included a Lebanese police officer, Khaled Khodr,
who lived in the apartment block in the Abu Samra district, along with
his two daughters - one aged four and the other eight - and his father-in-law.
Neighbours claimed they were used as human shields by the armed men
and were then coldly executed as the army closed in on the building.
The gunmen were variously said to be members of Fatah al-Islam - the
same group fighting the Lebanese army in the Palestinian Nahr el-Bared
refugee camp to the north - or from a group called Ahl al-Hadith whose
leader, Nabil Rahim, is on the run.
In the UN, all the usual
suspects are being considered for the attack on the Spanish troops;
the Syrians, whose foreign minister vigorously condemned the bombing;
or Hizbollah, which had been trying to protect UN personnel from al-Qa'ida-type
fighters; or al-Qa'ida itself, whose supporters in Lebanon were encouraged
to "resist" the United Nations army by al-Qa'ida's deputy,
Ayman al-Zawahiri himself. The UN has noted that Fatah al-Islam claimed
only a few days ago that it was the UN which was shelling its fighters
in Nahr el-Bared from the sea. The UN has German warships patrolling
the coast - on the ridiculous assumption that Syria might supply Hizbollah
with weapons by sea - but the Lebanese army has already shown tape of
its own antiquated British-built gunboats firing at the camp.
The sensitivity of France's
current refusal to talk to Syria was emphasised when President Nicolas
Sarkozy's wife, Cécilia, denied to a Lebanese newspaper the contents
of a French report that she had met with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's
sister, Bouchra - whose husband, Assef Chawkat, just happens to be head
of the Syrian intelligence services.
© 2007 Independent News
and Media Limited
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