NAHR EL-BARED, Lebanon — Was­sim al-Hagehussein was wor­ried. The Lebanese sol­dier was twitchy, sus­pi­cious as he stalked through the dark and pow­er­less gro­cery store where Was­sim worked. It was a day after Prime Min­is­ter Fuad Sin­iora had declared an end to the war over the Pales­tin­ian camp Nahr el-Bared, dur­ing which fanat­i­cal jihadists had fought off an Army onslaught for 106 days. And now, today, the fight­ing had started up again and the gro­cery store was in the cross­fire. A com­pany of sol­diers was pinned down by an unknown num­ber of Fatah al-Islam fugi­tive fighters.

“Are there any Pales­tini­ans in here?” the sol­dier asked the owner, Rabieh al-Masri, who was a boss and a friend to Was­sim. The sol­diers had just arrested another Pales­tin­ian in front of the store and taken him in for questioning.

Al-Masri delib­er­ately didn’t look at Was­sim. “No,” he said. “There are no Pales­tini­ans here.”

He was lying. Was­sim was a Pales­tin­ian from Nahr el-Bared.

For three and a half months, this wretched Pales­tin­ian camp just north of Tripoli has been under siege by Lebanese troops against Fatah al-Islam mil­i­tants, a jihadi group that shares an ide­ol­ogy with al Qaeda and which some Lebanese offi­cials say is sup­ported by Syr­ian mil­i­tary intel­li­gence. The bat­tle started on May 20 when mil­i­tants attacked Army units nor­mally posted out­side the camp, killing more than a dozen troops. The Army responded with a mas­sive cam­paign of shelling and ground assaults that killed 163 sol­diers, at least 131 mil­i­tants and 42 civil­ians. The camp itself, a war­ren of cin­derblock build­ings built up over almost 60 years now looks like piles of melted wed­ding cake, with almost every build­ing hon­ey­combed from shell blasts and entire floors slid­ing off into the streets.

On Sun­day, it seemed that after a long grind, the fight had come to an end. After a last-ditch escape attempt that left its leader dead, Fatah al-Islam posi­tions were over­run by Lebanese troops, who sent up a cel­e­bra­tory flare from the cen­ter of the camp, which has been in place since the 1948 cre­ation of Israel forced thou­sands of Pales­tin­ian fam­i­lies to flee to Lebanon as refugees. Since then, the camp has swelled to more than 30,000 peo­ple cramped into a 1 square kilo­me­ter space, and a breed­ing ground for extreme ide­olo­gies that feed on hope­less­ness and resentment.

Just an hour before the sol­dier stomped into the store, Was­sim, a Pales­tin­ian, and Rabieh, a Lebanese, were hap­pily chat­ting with West­ern reporters just a few hun­dred meters from the camp’s entrance. Al-Masri rents the store from Wassim’s par­ents, some of the more well-off mem­bers of the Nahr el-Bared com­mu­nity. Was­sim, 30, has worked for al-Masri for seven years and the two are close despite the often strained rela­tions between the Lebanese and the Pales­tini­ans. They were happy that the war up north seemed to be over, and Was­sim was par­tic­u­larly happy about the pledge from Sin­iora to rebuild the camp and, more impor­tant, place it under Lebanese authority.

Under a tacit agree­ment, the Pales­tini­ans policed them­selves, and main­tained large weapons stock­piles, mainly as sym­bols of their resis­tance to Israel. The Lebanese gov­ern­ment has never claimed sov­er­eignty over the camps, pub­licly com­mit­ting itself to the Pales­tini­ans’ right of return to their homeland.

But those weapons stock­piles had been turned against the Lebanese Army as one fac­tion, Fatah al-Islam, gained ascen­dency in Nahr el-Bared. Now Was­sim was done with Pales­tin­ian in-fighting.

“No more fac­tions,” he said.

Al-Masri was glad the war was over, too, and he hoped that cus­tomers could come back soon to start shop­ping at his store again, one of the largest in the area. He wor­ried that Islamist cells, inspired by Fatah al-Islam and al Qaeda might still be active in Lebanon, but said opti­misti­cally, “if there are any, the Army will wind up catch­ing them. It is over,” he added with a smile.

It wasn’t. Moments later the scat­tered sound of weapon fire sounded off in the dis­tance in the direc­tion of the camp. A few min­utes later, about three dozen Lebanese troops who had been fight­ing in the camp just the night before pulled up in front of the store. Com­man­dos in build­ings across the street began to take up posi­tions and direct­ing their com­rades to train their weapons both toward the camp and up the hill in the oppo­site direc­tions. Two groups of Fatah al-Islam fugi­tives had opened fire on the Army patrol as it exited the camp and now the store, its employ­ees and the sol­diers were caught in the crossfire.

“May God burn them,” Asma­han Jawhar, 23, one of the female employ­ees of the store, said of Fatah al-Islam. “They came and messed the place up.”

She had good rea­son to be angry. On July 14, her brother, Bas­sam, a com­mando in the Lebanese Army, died along with six of his men in an ambush by the mil­i­tants. They were killed when a booby-trapped build­ing col­lapsed on top of them. It took six days to recover the bod­ies and jihadi snipers killed three more Lebanese troops as they dug through the rubble.

She cried for days when she heard the news. How­ever, “I was very sad and proud at the same time,” she said.

And now the same mil­i­tants had her pinned down in a dark gro­cery store next to a stack of water bottles.

“The sons of bitches are mov­ing quickly” to escape, said the Lebanese pla­toon leader, who declined to give his name as he wasn’t autho­rized to speak to the media.

When asked how many had him under fire, he growled, “There are plenty of them. The more we kill, the more we see.”

The company’s lieu­tenant esti­mated there were per­haps a dozen fugi­tive mil­i­tants split into two groups, one still inside the camp and one out­side, had staged the ambush.

The sol­diers soon responded with heavy machine guns and out­go­ing artillery fire, although it was unclear where the shells were land­ing. The boom of the nearby guns rat­tled the win­dows of the store and shook loose dust built over three months of neglect. Al-Masri herded his jit­tery employ­ees into a cor­ner away from the front of the store.

The fight­ing even­tu­ally died down and the Lebanese troops began to relax. Some lounged in the lee of the armored per­son­nel car­ri­ers in evi­dent exhaus­tion. They had been on patrol all night and they were sup­posed to be en route back to base for some R ‘n’ R.

“Hey, you guys stand up,” barked one sol­dier, half in jest. “There are still more to kill.”

Sud­denly, sol­diers hauled over a young man in a T-shirt and pushed him against the side of an APC, as the sol­diers checked his papers. He had been picked up just moments before, in an area where civil­ians were not sup­posed to be. The sol­diers wanted to make sure he wasn’t another Fatah al-Islam fighter. An offi­cer ordered that he not be mis­treated. His papers showed him to be a Pales­tin­ian from the camp, but the sol­diers were still unsure. One said he had marks on his shoul­ders from car­ry­ing a ruck­sack and shrap­nel marks on his legs, signs of being a fighter. They zip-tied his hands behind his back and arrested him, tak­ing him away to an inter­ro­ga­tion center.

Was­sim blanched. “I know him, he’s from the camp,” he thought to him­self. “If they’re arrest­ing Pales­tini­ans they’re surely going to arrest me.” That’s when al-Masri pro­tected him and lied to the soldier.

“It’s my duty,” he would say later, as he and his employ­ees — includ­ing Was­sim — were being evac­u­ated in a small con­voy. While in the car, he tem­pered his ear­lier praise of the Army.

“They declared vic­tory yes­ter­day, but it was too quick,” he said. “The Army was con­fused today. We know and they know (Fatah al-Islam) are out in the fields.”

He thought despite the appar­ent gains, the Army would be fight­ing for another two days. “There is no quick end,” he said and sighed. “There will always be some­thing to finish.”

*A ver­sion of this post appeared in the [Wash­ing­ton Times](http://www.washingtontimes.com/article/20070904/FOREIGN/109040025/1003) and the [Newark Star-Ledger](http://www.nj.com/news/ledger/index.ssf?/base/news-12/1188880008262240.xml&coll=1).*