The Lebanese military, which is unwilling to confront Hezbollah, has been shelling a Palestinian refugee camp aimed at disrupting the Al Qaida-linked Fatah Islam radical Islamic group. Fighting has gone on now for three days without an end in sight.

Fatah Islam is led by Palestinian Shaker al-Absi (Shaker Abssi) and the group is accused of trying to build an international terrorist organization in the mold of Al Qaida. Al-Absi is himself connected to Al Qaida, having been a close confidant to the now-deceased Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Al-Absi was released one year ago from a Syrian prison, which raises questions as to why he was released in the first place.

The Lebanese military incursion is the result of a Fatah Islam attack in the Sunni city of Tripoli. Fatah Islam is certainly a Sunni group, which once again challenges the very core of Salafist groups who claim their jihad is to be waged against those it deems un-Islamic.

Al-Absi has granted interviews in the past and offered his reasoning for attacking.

“There is no organizational relationship with al-Qaida, but we are in agreement to fight the infidels. This is the ambition and doctrine of every Muslim - to fight the enemies,” he told Al-Jazeera television earlier this year.

“The only way to achieve our rights is by force,” he said in a recent interview with The New York Times. “This is the way America deals with us. So when the Americans feel that their lives and their economy are threatened, they will know that they should leave.”

But the United States has never dealt with Fatah Islam.  It is the same deflecting of ’cause’ Islamists use to beat the drums of jihad over and over again, before or after they slaughter more Muslims while arguing they are fighting for the good of Islam.

Al-Absi is also walking the fine line of truth when he stated, “ther is no organizational relationship with Al Qaida.”  That might be true, however he is under Jordanian indictment for conspiring with Zarqawi in a 1999 plot to assassinate a United States diplomat to Jordan.

Evan Kholman of the Counterterrorism Blog picks up on the Al Qaida or not question.

Yet, arguably, some of the most convincing primary evidence showing Fatah al-Islam’s orientation towards Al-Qaida comes from a somewhat unlikely source: private, password-protected chat sessions on an infamous Internet forum known as “Al-Hesbah”, used by Al-Qaida and other Islamic militant groups to disseminate propaganda and to recruit new members. During the past two years, one of the more prolific participants on Al-Hesbah was a user known as “Khattab Laden”–a composite ID formed from the names of his two heroes, Al-Qaida leader Usama Bin Laden and the late Saudi mujahideen commander in Chechnya, Ibn-ul-Khattab.

In the real world, “Khattab Laden” was “Abu Abdelrahman al-Maqdisi”, a twenty-something Palestinian refugee originally from the Gaza Strip. After earning a college degree in chemistry, in mid-2006, al-Maqdisi passed up an opportunity to continue studying medicine in Germany, and instead joined the Fatah al-Islam movement in northern Lebanon. Al-Maqdisi was a regular participant on Al-Hesbah, offering words of support for Al-Qaida and insurgents in Iraq and providing online technical assistance to other “brothers in need”. The young Fatah al-Islam commander was also clearly an avid supporter of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, offering his unqualified support for statements spread by Zarqawi and, likewise, the current leader of Al-Qaida’s “Islamic State of Iraq” Abu Omar al-Baghdadi. When al-Hesbah offered its users the opportunity to submit questions to notorious Saudi Al-Qaida leader Abu Nasser al-Qahtani in Afghanistan, Abu Abdelrahman al-Maqdisi immediately responded, asking, “Is there an ability to receive young men arriving in Afghanistan? Are there camps and weapons training? Or will they be forced to hide indoors?” Separately, al-Maqdisi posted files for download by other Al-Hesbah users justifying and celebrating the July 7, 2005 suicide bombings in London. Perhaps it is no surprise, then, to learn that Al-Hesbah and other online terrorist websites have recently begun carrying official releases from Fatah al-Islam alongside similar material produced by Al-Qaida and jihadist organizations based in Iraq.

Fatah Islam allegedly has between 150 to 300 jihadis of Palestinian, Syrian and Lebanese origin, which is worth noting with reports indicating 50 jihadis have been killed thus far in the fighting.  The group was formed when it split from the Syrian-backed Palestinian group Fatah al-Intifada, linked to the Fatah party in Palestine.