Now It's Ain al-Helweh

Guerrillas of the Jund al-Sham extremist faction attacked a Lebanese army checkpoint earlier tonight outside the Ain al-Helweh Palestinian refugee camp near the southern Lebanese port city of Sidon. The attackers then fired off several rounds of rocket-propelled grenades at the soldiers, wounding at least one of them. The army's two-week-old confrontation with the Fatah al-Islam faction in the northern Palestinian camp of Nahr al-Bared now appears to be spreading to south Lebanon.

Lebanese officials I spoke to afterwards, who believe that the Syrian regime is behind Fatah al-Islam's provocations, contend that Damascus is now using Jund al-Sham to stretch the army's resources and relieve the army's assault on Fatah al-Islam. With 45,000 people, Ain al-Helweh is by far the largest of Lebanon's 12 refugee camps, with Nahr al-Bared second with around 30,000. Having to fight major battles on two fronts simultaneously will put enormous strain on the largely untested Lebanese army.

That's partly because the army is experiencing even stronger resistance from Fatah al-Islam than it expected. After making some initial advances against the group in Nahr al-Bared in the first two days of renewed fighting on Friday and Saturday, the army encountered massive return fire. For the last 24 hours or so, troops found it impossible to move any further forward. The Fatah al-Islam fighters, who are jihadists mainly from other Arab countries rather than being Palestinians or Lebanese, are fighting to the death. They haven't used suicide bombers in the battles so far, but the army is expecting them to do so once the fighting gets at closer quarters.

For the army, the good news is that the Fatah group founded by Yasser Arafat launched a counterattack on Jund al-Sham in Ain al-Helweh tonight in an apparent sign that mainstream Palestinian factions are determined not to let Ain al-Helweh fall into a crossfire between Islamic extremists and the government forces.

Prime Minister Fouad Siniora's government sees the battle in Nahr al-Bared as a decisive one to prove Lebanon's independence. Syrian officials, while denying any connection to the extremists, have nonetheless warned that Siniora's political moves in defiance of Lebanese opposition groups like Hizballah were destined to trigger instability in the country. In this increasingly polarized political context, the fate of Lebanon is very much up to the army--an army whose mission just got more complicated.

--By Scott MacLeod/Beirut