They were arrested while attempting to establish a small "Islamic state in northern Lebanon." Hersh quoted a high ranking official in the Saniora government saying that there are Sunni Jihadists operating in Lebanon and that the government, according to the official, takes a liberal position that allows groups like al-Qaeda to have presence in Lebanon!

"The late Rafiq al-Hariri tried to build up the Internal Security Force, largely recruited among Sunnis, and endowed with its own intelligence service, as a counterweight to the Army. But this was not entirely successful," Seale said.

Some analysts according to Seale, believe that a group like Fatah al-Islam was initially tolerated, and perhaps even funded, by Lebanese Sunnis who may have seen in it the embryo of the militia they needed. They certainly longed to be able to demonstrate that they could stand up to the Shi 'is and to Syria.

Seale's assessment intersected with US prominent Journalist Seymour Hersh's latest article in the New Yorker magazine, in which he stated that based on the International Crises group's report, the head of the Future parliamentary bloc Saad Hariri had paid a sum of 48 thousand USD to bail out four members of an Islamic militant group from the Donniyeh region in north Lebanon.

Proof, however, is lacking. According to the British writer, interrogation of captured members of Fatah al-Islam might yield some evidence of a Syrian connection but, for the moment at least, the evidence seems to point in quite another direction.
The leader of Fatah al-Islam, a certain Shakir al-Absi, spent the years 2002-2005 in a Syrian jail. He is the sort of Sunni fundamentalist the Syrian regime has been fighting ever since the late 1970s. It certainly does not look as if Syria could have created Fatah al-Islam, because this fundamentalist Sunni movement would, from its base near Tripoli in north Lebanon, pose a potential threat to Syrian security.

Seale also stated that some expert observers of the complicated Lebanese scene point to the fact that Lebanon's Sunni population has always felt the lack of an armed force of its own. Moreover, he added, the Sunnis in Lebanon have often felt that they could not rely on the Army, which is a mixed, multi-confessional and reasonably neutral force.

Whereas a minority of its members may be Palestinian, the others - judging from those who have been killed, wounded or captured -- come from half a dozen Arab and Asian countries, some of them jihadi veterans of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Its parent body - or at least its inspiration - seems to be Al-Qaida.

Syria's opponents have been quick to claim that Damascus is using Fatah al-Islam to destabilize the Saniora government in order to prevent the creation of an international tribunal to bring to justice the killers of the former Prime Minister, Rafiq al- Hariri.
"The Lebanese Druze leader Walid Jumblatt, one of Syria's most virulent critics, has alleged that Fatah al-Islam is a 'Syria's proxy,' while the exiled Abd al-Halim Khaddam, a former Syrian vice-president who now heads an opposition movement dedicated to the overthrow of Syria's President Bashar al-Assad, has stated categorically that 'Syria is responsible'," Seale stated.