Robert Fisk is the most incisive and best informed journalist and writer about events in the Middle East. Rare amongst Western journalists, he has been stationed in Beirut now for some 30 years. So, he is more than well qualified to report and comment on the region and all its ever-ongoing upheavels.
Lebanon is again in focus. Tumult reigns and violence continues once again. Fisk, writing in The Independent, "The Road to Jerusalem" puts into context what is currently happening, the causes and where it might all be leading to:
"They came into Lebanon last summer when the world was watching Israel smash this small nation in a vain attempt to destroy the Hizbollah. But the men who set up their grubby little office in the Nahr el-Bared refugee camp, some of them fighters from the Iraq war, others from Yemen, Syria or Lebanon itself, were far more dangerous than America and Israel believed the Hizbollah to be. They had come, they told the few journalists who bothered to seek them out "to liberate" Jerusalem because "to free our territory is a sacred duty inscribed in the Koran".
That the men of Fatah al-Islam should believe that the road to Jerusalem lay through the Lebanese city of Tripoli and might be gained by killing almost 30 Lebanese soldiers - many of them Sunni Muslims like themselves, four of whom it now emerges had their heads cut off - was one of the weirder manifestations of an organisation which, while it denies being part of al-Qa'ida, is clearly sympathetic to the "brothers" who serve the ideas of Osama bin Laden."
Lebanon is again in focus. Tumult reigns and violence continues once again. Fisk, writing in The Independent, "The Road to Jerusalem" puts into context what is currently happening, the causes and where it might all be leading to:
"They came into Lebanon last summer when the world was watching Israel smash this small nation in a vain attempt to destroy the Hizbollah. But the men who set up their grubby little office in the Nahr el-Bared refugee camp, some of them fighters from the Iraq war, others from Yemen, Syria or Lebanon itself, were far more dangerous than America and Israel believed the Hizbollah to be. They had come, they told the few journalists who bothered to seek them out "to liberate" Jerusalem because "to free our territory is a sacred duty inscribed in the Koran".
That the men of Fatah al-Islam should believe that the road to Jerusalem lay through the Lebanese city of Tripoli and might be gained by killing almost 30 Lebanese soldiers - many of them Sunni Muslims like themselves, four of whom it now emerges had their heads cut off - was one of the weirder manifestations of an organisation which, while it denies being part of al-Qa'ida, is clearly sympathetic to the "brothers" who serve the ideas of Osama bin Laden."
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