Two leaders of al-Qaeda offshoot killed in Lebanon

LEBANESE SECURITY forces on Saturday killed two senior figures in Fatah al-Islam, an offshoot of al-Qaeda that fought a protracted battle against the country’s army during 2007.

Abdul-Rahman Awad, the com-mander of the group, and his deputy, Ghazi Faisal Abdullah, were slain in a gun battle in the town of Chtaura, just west of the border with Syria.

The death of Awad, Lebanon’s most wanted man, is likely to deal a bitter blow to Fatah al-Islam, a group formed in late 2006 by al- Qaeda fighters who had left Iraq. The movement, which never numbered more than a few hundred, took root in the Nahr al-Bared Palestinian refugee camp near Tripoli in northern Lebanon.

In February 2007, the group was charged with carrying out bus bombings that killed two people and wounded 21 in a Lebanese mountain village.

That May, Fatah al-Islam operatives who had robbed a bank were slain by Lebanese security men when they stormed an apartment in Tripoli. Fatah al-Islam retaliated by taking over Lebanese army posts at the entrance to Nahr al-Bared. The Lebanese army responded with artillery barrages and sniper fire that trapped Fatah al-Islam fighters and 30,000 civilians in the camp. Once the civilians had fled, the army battled Fatah al-Islam for three months before its fighters capitulated. Some 220 militants, 171 Lebanese soldiers and 47 civilians died during the siege. A large part of the UN-run camp was devastated.

Fatah al-Islam members have also been accused of killing a Lebanese army major general in late 2007, setting a bomb that killed more than a dozen Lebanese soldiers in Tripoli in 2008, and of a 2007 attack in which three UN peacekeepers patrolling near Lebanon’s Israel border were killed.

Syria accused Fatah al-Islam agents of being behind a September 2008 car bombing in Damascus, which killed 17. That December, the movement announced that its head and founder Shaker al-Abssi had been killed in Syria.

Awad, who was born and raised in the Palestinian refugee camp of Ain al-Hilweh in south Lebanon, was named as his successor.