	Generational Dynamics
	Forecasting America's Destiny ... and the World's

\| HOME \| WEB LOG \| COUNTRY WIKI \| COMMENT \| FORUM \| DOWNLOADS \| ABOUT \|

Generational Dynamics Web Log for 21-May-07
New al-Qaeda linked terrorist group provokes heavy gun battle in northern Lebanon

Web Log - May, 2007

New al-Qaeda linked terrorist group provokes heavy gun battle in northern Lebanon

Islamist militants in Fatah al-Islam, led by Shakir al-Abssi, battled Lebanese troops on Sunday, killing 25 soldiers and 15 militants. The fighting took place in a Palestinian refugee camp in Nahr al-Bared, near the Sunni Muslim city of Tripoli in north Lebanon.

In a separate incident, a bomb exploded in a Christian neighborhood of the capital city, Beirut. It's not known whether the two incidents are connected.

Pundits claimed that the violence, which was the worst in a long time, threatened the stability of Lebanon, and raised fears of a new Lebanese civil war.

Fatah al-Islam is a new Sunni Islamist terrorist group, led by Palestinian Shakir al-Abssi. Al-Abssi was interviewed by the NY Times in mid-March.

In that interview, he claimed not to be part of al-Qaeda, but admitted that he had worked closely with Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Al-Zarqawi was the head of al-Qaeda in Iraq before he was killed in June of last year.

According to American and Middle Eastern intelligence officials, al-Abssi is a new kind of al-Qaeda terrorist who is being seen more often. Osama bin Laden's organization was shattered by the invasion of Afghanistan after 9/11, but now it's reforming itself with small groups around the world like Fatah al-Islam.

Intelligence officials say that he's trying to establish himself as a terror leader like al-Zarqawi. They estimate that he's imported 50 militants from Saudia Arabia and other Arab countries, after training with the insurgency in Iraq.

From the point of view of Generational Dynamics, we can reach some likely conclusions about what's going on:

The terrorist group Hizbollah, led by Hassan Nasrallah, has been trying to foment a civil war in Lebanon since last year, and has failed repeatedly. In fact, the attempt caused Nasrallah to lose support among his own Lebanese supporters.
The reason, as I've said many times, is that Lebanon is in a generational Awakening era, just one generation past the Lebanese civil war of the 1980s, and a crisis civil war is impossible at this time. Lebanese people simply don't want to fight, unless they're forced to.
Thus, the pundits' feared of a renewed civil war are as groundless as ever.

Al-Abssi has probably had the same problems getting the Lebanese Palestinians to fight that al-Zarqawi had trying to get the Iraqi Sunnis to fight.
Recall that Iraq is also in a generational Awakening era, just one generation past the genocidal Iran/Iraq war of the 1980s, and al-Zarqawi could not get Iraqis to fight unless he paid them. All suicide bombers in Iraq, with almost no exceptions, are jihadists imported from Saudi Arabia or Jordan, because Iraqis refuse to be suicide bombers.
That's most likely the reason that al-Abssi found it necessary to import jihadists from Saudi Arabia. He had expected to find a ready group of jihadists in the Palestinian refugee camp, but they refused to fight, and al-Abssi had to import foreign jihadists, just as al-Zarqawi had.

As a matter of generational theory, it's worth pointing out that the Palestinians in Lebanese refugee camps are on a different generational timeline than the ones in the Palestinian territories -- the Gaza Strip and the West Bank -- and in Jordan. The last crisis war for the latter was the genocidal war between Arabs and Jews in the late 1940s; the last crisis war for those in Lebanese refugee camps was the Lebanese civil war.

Lebanese officials are accusing Syria of having sponsored and aided al-Abssi, which Syria denies. However, al-Abssi's home base is in Syria.

The emergence of the new group Fatah al-Islam and Shakir al-Abssi in Lebanon comes at a time when intelligence sources have established a new connection between Hamas and al-Qaeda on the Gaza Strip.

A connection with al-Qaeda was suspected last year when a terrorist confessed to Egyptian authorities that he had been trained in Gaza by an organization called al-Tawhid wal-Jihad, which was also an earlier name for Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's organization before it became al-Qaeda Iraq.

Two weeks ago, a new organization Jaish al-Islam ("Army of Islam") identified itself as the group that kidnapped BBC journalist Alan Johnston, and demanded the release from British jails of a major ideologue of al-Qaeda in Europe.

These two new al-Qaeda organizations indicate that al-Qaeda is gaining strength as an international terrorist organization, with known associations stretching from Jemaah Islamiah in Indonesia to the GSPC (Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat) in Northern Africa, the latter having recently renamed itself "al-Qaeda in Maghreb," and perpetrated bombings in Algiers and Casablanca last month.

This comes at a time when the level of violence in the Gaza Strip is escalating significantly, because of Israeli air strikes, responding to a barrage of missiles fired on Israeli cities. (21-May-07) Permanent Link
Receive daily World View columns by e-mail
Donate to Generational Dynamics via PayPal

Web Log Pages

Current Web Log

Generational Dynamics Web Log for 21-May-07 New al-Qaeda linked terrorist group provokes heavy gun battle in northern Lebanon

Web Log Pages

Generational Dynamics Web Log for 21-May-07
New al-Qaeda linked terrorist group provokes heavy gun battle in northern Lebanon