Instability in the Middle East spreads and grows by the day as violence flared up in Lebanon. The region had not yet recovered from the bloody conflict between Hamas and Fatah in Palestine last week, and the fresh conflict among Lebanese Army and Islamic militants in the vicinity of a Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon has pitted the western supported government against the Islamists.

Gun battle between Fatah al-Islam and the Lebanese Armed Forces broke out yesterday after security forces raided a building in Tripoli to arrest suspects in a bank robbery, where about 50 people, together with 20 soldiers, 20 militants, and an unverified number of civilians have been killed and many more wounded by now.

The latest conflict has added further instability to a nation already caught up in its nastiest political mess, between the West-backed rule and Hezbollah-guide opposition, since the Lebanese civil war.

Radicalism is growing thick and fast in the Palestinian camps and these militants have a wide reach not only within Lebanon, but outside, including Bangladesh, Yemen and other Arab nations as well.

Fatah al-Islam, accused of carrying out bus bombings in a mountainous Christian area north of Beirut in February that killed three people, is a radical group based near Tripoli in the refugee camp of Nahr el-Bared homing about 30,000 displaced Palestinian refugees.

Fatah al-Islam has also been accused of having links to al-Qaeda and Syrian intelligence. While clashes between military and Fatah al-Islam around the Palestinian camps have become a routine, this is for the first time fighting had spilled into a major city that just indicates the growing Syrian influence in the region for these terrorist groups are too petite to carry out such plots on their own.

Why Syria wish to spread disorder in Lebanon?

The outbreak of newest violence can be related to block the international tribunal on Rafik Hariri’s assassination (former Prime Minister of Lebanon), which Washington is pushing through the UN in order to use it as a tool to exert blackmail on Damascus.

The Lebanon government has pushed for the creation of the tribunal over the objections of some opposition leaders, possibly supported by Iran and Syria. This declaration gains affirmative from the fact that the Syrian government is too determined to prevent this tribunal, since it is supposed that some senior Syrian officials were also involved in the Hariri killing. Moreover, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has refused to release any Syrian suspects to a tribunal and said, if found guilty, they would be tried in Syria only.

Will this lead to another civil-war in Lebanon?

The effects of these clashes can take on an increasingly sectarian image pitting Sunni against Shia. The Lebanese crisis over the course of time esp. in the aftermath of Hariri’s assassination is leading to the split between the two sides of the Lebanese political spectrum. Hizbulla with its goal of protecting Syria is playing a dangerous game that may pull them back to the conflicting era of civil war.