Trip to Nahr el-Bared

Lebanese commandos waiting on the outskirts of the Nahr el-Bared (Cold River) Camp

I spent the day around Nahr el-Bared and in Beddawi, two Palestinian camps in the northern part of Lebanon. Nahr el-Bared is currently in the news because Fatah Islam members are hauled up inside, and the Lebanese army is trying to ‘extract’ them. Wonderful word, this ‘extraction. I don’t see how they are going to do any ‘extraction’. Most of these commandoes have so much gear on their back that they are going to get stuck the moment they’ve got to haul ass through those narrow alley ways. Besides, they do not know their way through this maze anyway, while the bad guys do. Now the army is waiting for night vision goggles from the Americans to be flown in. Much good is that going to do you in this labyrinth.
Luckily Fatah Islam has helped them a little by announcing that they will fight until death; this will make things a little easier.

The population in the Beddawi camp has gone up from 16,000 to over 30,000 in less than 3 days.

Nahr el Bared and Bedawi are the two poorest Palestinian camps in Lebanon. The north is the most underdeveloped region of this country anyway, and the camps have been under Syrian ‘protection’ forever. The Syrians did not like the PLO very much, and the feeling was mutual, so the PLO and related organizations never poured much funds into these camps either. Results is over 50,000 Palestinians (between 30 to 40,000 in Nahr el Bared and between 16 to 18,000 in Beddawi) live in poverty. I won't say abject poverty, but there are quite a few 'special hardship' cases there. Half of the Nahr el-Bared has moved into the Beddawi camp since the fighting started, making a difficult living environment pretty much unbearable. Let’s hope it’s just for a short while.

You cannot get into Nahr el-Bared anymore. Or at least, not the usual route. The army won’t let you. I must say, I didn’t have the urge, as sniper fire and gun fire were heard sporadically. It was ‘quiet’, the soldiers said. It was during Friday prayer, and some Palestinians were joking it was because they had gone off to Friday prayer.

I was going to go with a Dutchmen, Theo, and I had decided I would title this blog post ‘Travels with Theo’, because traveling with Theo is always a lot of fun. But then Theo got himself arrested last night over god knows what, and so it was to be ‘travels without Theo.’
I went with a fierce druze instead, and we had an interesting talk about the efficiency of an army. Or soldiers, to be more exact.

His theory is that the more hardship citizens have to deal with, the better their soldiers fight. In order to be a good fighter, you must have absolutely nothing to lose. You must not fear death, and in order not to fear death, you must not have a whole lot to look out for in life. Misery and poverty makes good fighting men, he said. The Americans in Iraq do not stand a great deal of chance. They may be better equipped, but they cry over fallen comrades. “Not a good sign,” according to my travel companion. The Israelis (‘first generation’) used to be fierce fighters, he said, but the current generation is more interested in girlfriends and clubbing in Tel Aviv. “They’re softening up, and so they lose.”

Even this cow has gone 'soft', prefering grilled chicken (it reads 'farouche' on the box, which means 'grilled chicken') over grass.

How do the Lebanese soldiers stand in all this? Pretty good, according to him. Granted, nightlife is quite tempting here, and the women gorgeous. But on the other hand, the current soldiers grew up amidst guns, mortar fire, long periods of shelling and shelter life, and so this hardened them quite a bit. “They stand a chance, especially if you get them mad. They do tend to get erratic though. But still, better erratic than afraid.”

Against Fatah Islam as well? Well, that was a bit of a dilemma. It seems that these Fatah guys are basically the remnants of that army that Osama Bin Laden organized a long time ago in Afghanistan against the Russian (at the cost of the Americans, I might add, and in more ways than one). Now that Afghanistan is over, and they were kicked out of Saudi Arabia as well during the first Gulf War, they’ve been roaming the battlefields a bit. Some have since surfaces in Chechnya, others have ended up in Iraq. And now it seems that Syria has engaged themselves some of these religious ‘guns-for-hire’.

My guess is that this is not a Palestininan child but one of the Bedouin tribes that also live here. I saw it crawling though a garbage pile outside the Bedawi camp.

And these men have been in the fighting game forever now. Most of them probably thought they’d never make it this long anyway. But according to the soldiers and Palestinians of Nahr el-Bared I spoke to, a lot of them are young guys; late teens, early twenties, with an occasional older guy. They spoke Arabic with a ‘strange‘ accent. ‘Strange’ of course is a mater of perspective. So where do you pick up all these young guns, if both sides agreed that they were neither Lebanese nor Palestinian?

Anyway, story appeared here.