TRIPOLI (Lebanon), May 20: Fierce gun-battles raged in Lebanon on Sunday between soldiers and shadowy Islamic extremist fighters accused of links to Al Qaeda, leaving 40 dead in the bloodiest such clashes in seven years.
Lebanese troops staged a broad daylight assault on a building in Tripoli where militants from Fatah al-Islam were holed up after deadly shootouts in the northern port city and a nearby Palestinian refugee camp.
The army said 22 soldiers lost their lives in the deadliest fighting between security forces and Islamists since 2000, while 14 gunmen were killed, most of them in Tripoli.
A civilian also died after being caught in the crossfire when troops stormed the building in a residential neighbourhood of Lebanon’s second largest city.
Lebanon sent in heavy troop reinforcements to contain the battles involving anti-tank rockets and cannons which erupted at dawn in Tripoli and around the nearby Palestinian refugee camp of Nahr al-Bared, a Fatah al-Islam stronghold.
“We are now in control of the situation in Tripoli,” Lebanese security chief General Ashraf Rifi said, after 12 hours of fighting.
But the sound of gunfire continued to rattle through the streets shortly before sunset, where soldiers in jeeps and at least one tank were seen rolling through the streets earlier in the day as plumes of smoke billowed into the sky.
The army said two of its soldiers were killed in renewed fighting around the refugee camp in the early evening.
The International Committee of the Red Cross appealed for a truce to allow any wounded from the artillery exchanges between the army and the militants to be evacuated from the camp.
The bodies of seven soldiers, including one officer, were also discovered after darkness fell at an army post which had been occupied by the militants during the day, an army spokesman said.
“The blows dealt by Fatah al-Islam against the Lebanese army are a premeditated crime and a dangerous attempt to destabilise (Lebanon),” charged Prime Minister Fuad Siniora, whose Western-backed government has been paralysed for months by an acute political crisis.
The clashes drew expressions of concern at home and abroad for the stability of Lebanon, where feuding leaders showed rare unanimity in appealing for public support for the security services in their efforts to take on the Islamists.
According to various sources, 27 Lebanese soldiers, 16 police, seven civilians and about 40 refugees were also wounded in the violence.
“We warn the army against continuing its provocations against our Mujahedeen or risk us opening fire against it and all of Lebanon,” read a statement said to have been issued by Fatah al-Islam.
By longstanding convention, the police and army do not enter Lebanon’s 12 refugee camps, leaving security there to Palestinian militant groups.
The army said the fighting was triggered when the militants staged an attack on a military post outside Nahr al-Bared, home to about 22,000 refugees.
Syria, the former power broker in Lebanon, announced it had closed two border posts into its smaller neighbour because of the violence.
Lebanese authorities have accused Fatah al-Islam, a splinter group said to be ideologically close to Osama bin Laden’s network, of working for the Syrian intelligence services.
Lebanese MP Mustafa Hashem renewed the accusation on Sunday, charging that Damascus was seeking to stir trouble at a time when the UN Security Council was preparing to consider imposing an international court to try suspects in the 2005
