‘Al-Qaida franchises’ — ticking time bombs

Richard Engel NBC News Chief Foreign Correspondent • Profile

BEIRUT, Lebanon — One Palestinian refugee camp here in northern Lebanon is today a smoldering, sniper-infested, booby-trapped battlefield where a few hundred al-Qaida inspired fighters have been making an Alamo-like last stand against the Lebanese army. 

Another refugee camp in the south seems to be heading in the same direction, and there are more, many more, al-Qaida-inspired time bombs like these slowly ticking away in Lebanon and throughout the Middle East. 

The jihad-inspired militants fighting Lebanese troops today in what’s left of the shelled, scorched and bullet-strafed Nahr al-Barid camp are from a small cell called Fatah al-Islam, “Islamic victory,” but the name isn’t important. There are other groups here too, Jund al-Sham, “Soldiers of the Levant,” Esbat al-Ansar, “League of Partisans,” and Al-Qaeda fi Bilad al-Sham, “al-Qaida in the Levant.”  

While the names are unimportant (they change as the factions split off and meld into each other), don’t ignore the groups. It didn’t work for Lebanon, and won’t work for the rest of the Middle East and the United States.

‘Al-Qaida franchises’
Fatah al-Islam and the others are part of a new generation of al-Qaida. Like other reporters, I have struggled to find a good name for them. It feels like the start of something new. I had the same dilemma in Iraq four years ago when the car bombings started. We didn’t know what to call the militants there either, and eventually settled on the awkward and somewhat misleading terms “insurgent” to describe the Sunni fighters and “militias” for the Shiites.  

For the fighters here, and spreading across the region, reporters have come up with the even clumsier “al-Qaida inspired groups.’ I prefer “al-Qaida franchises” because it implies the loose affiliation among the groups and the business of the modern jihad industry, with active media, finance and money laundering wings. 

Like a franchise of McDonald’s, or my childhood favorite Carvel, these al-Qaida cells are locally owned and operated. They are fully responsible for picking targets, training, smuggling and all of the day-to-day business of jihad. The franchise home office, Carvel, McDonald’s, or in this case Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida, only provides the overall flavor, guidance and a few secret ingredients. 

The groups benefit from the al-Qaida brand and experience. Al-Qaida central benefits from the distribution. It’s win-win, but not for Lebanon, the people of the Middle East or the United States.

Camps culture of martyrdom
Lebanon ignored the militants in its camps until they literally bit the nation in the throat.  For years, Lebanese have known that Palestinian camps like Nahr al-Barid and Ain al-Helwe — hopeless slums crowded with generations of disenfranchised Palestinian refugees who can’t go home because of Israel, and can’t work because of Lebanese laws — are awash with gunmen, criminals and, since the war in Iraq, al-Qaida inspired jihadists. Under a decades old agreement, Palestinian refugee camps are supposed to administer and police themselves. Lebanese troops are technically not allowed to enter them.

In the camps there has long been a culture of martyrdom. This week I spent several days in the Bedawi refugee camp near Nahr al-Barid, interviewing some of the 25,000 refugees who escaped the gun battles between the Lebanese army and Fatah al-Islam. 

I was struck by a mural spray painted on the wall of the Nazareth school. The painting was a series of quotes from the philosophers revered here: Imam Hassan al-Banna, the Egyptian founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, Ezzedin al-Qassam, the inspiration for Hamas’s military wing, and Abdul Aziz al-Rantisi, a Hamas leader in the Gaza Strip.

Rantisi’s quote was my favorite: “I’d prefer by apache!”

Rantisi got his wish. In April 2004, an Israeli apache attack helicopter fired rockets at his car in Gaza City, killing him and two bodyguards.

“I’d prefer by apache!”

It sounded to me like a bumper sticker with a wishful slogan, “I’d rather be skiing!” or “I’d rather be rock-climbing!” Instead the message at Bedawi, on a school no less, was I’d rather be blown from the world by an apache’s wire guided hellfire missile, made in the U.S.A.

Al-Qaida thrives on the grievances in places like Bedawi, and there are many. Lebanon has long known it.

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