"Let Them Come. We Are Ready"

If there were any doubts at all about the motive of Fata al-Islam, the previously unknown Islamist jihadist group that has been embroiled in a siege inside a Palestinian refugee camp near the port city of Tripoli in Lebanon, with the Lebanese army since a fortnight ago, the declaration yesterday to the Associated Press today by Abu Hureira, who is also one of al-Islam’s leaders clears them all. Faced with imminent death in the hands of the Lebanese army, which has completely surrounded the Nahr el-Bared refugee camp where the group has holed itself in ever since the siege began, Mr. Hureira, a Lebanese whose real name is Shehab al-Qaddour, taunted the Lebanese army to “come. We are ready”. The group is clearly apocalyptic and its members are determined to martyr themselves to probably win following of some sort in the future, if not in the present in Lebanon and the larger Middle East.

This sort of die-hard determination for martyrdom is a dimension in the War Against Terror, WaT that must compel serious thought in the minds of policy makers who are involved in prosecuting the war. The world is not served well at all if pluralities of future Islamists are created whenever one or a group of them submits themselves to a gun battle to be killed by military forces anywhere in the world. This reality is the sort that makes the WaT an endless war. Wars are definitely not good, because they lead to the destruction of lives and property. The architects and prosecutors of the WaT can only be ignorant of this evident fact if they lack proper education. Else, they are guilty of deliberately exposing the world to an endless war when they could have achieved the same goal of dealing with the scourge of Islamist terror by other more pains-taking methods.

In the case of the on-going siege in the Nahr el-Bared refugee camp, the best approach could have been to encircle Fatah al-Islam and wait them out for as long as it takes for them to surrender. That tactic could have taken some time and nerve for sure, but in a situation where the civilians in the camp are reluctant to accommodate al-Islam members, it would have been a matter of time before they surrender. Violence begets violence. In a region and neighborhood where violence has hardly solved any of the long-drawn conflicts that have broken out there in the past, the resort to violence each time when new ones break out is rather counter productive.

Given the hapless performance of the Lebanese army in the current engagement with Fata al-Islam, the Lebanese authorities who talk tough ought to know that they lack what it requires to actually claim the upper under in this kind of conflict. They might be heartened by the quick gift of weapons that they received from abroad these past two weeks since the fight with al-Islam broke out. However, it is one thing to receive quick military aid, it is still another for that military aid to be used in ways that achieve decisive outcomes. Such decisive outcomes would include in their case, getting rid of trouble-making militants once and for all, and securing lasting peace. If military aid is good only for achieving blood revenge alone, then it becomes counter-productive.