Agence France-Presse,
NAHR AL-BARED, Lebanon: Two Lebanese soldiers were killed on Sunday as the army said it had made tangible advances in its eight-week-old battle to crush Islamist fighters besieged in a refugee camp.
“We made tangible progress today toward tightening the noose on the gunmen” of Fatah al-Islam entrenched in the Palestinian camp of Nahr al-Bared in northern Lebanon, an army spokesman told AFP on condition of anonymity.
“We have seized control of very strategic positions,” he said, adding: “We will continue to progress until the gunmen surrender.”
A security source and a witness told AFP earlier that soldiers had moved for the first time into the old centre of Nahr al-Bared, raising Lebanese flags on buildings seized from the Al-Qaeda-inspired Islamists.
The military spokesman said two more soldiers were killed on Sunday in clashes with the die-hard militants who have been locked in battle with the army in the seafront camp since May 20.
The overall reported death toll has now reached 186, including 97 soldiers.
From early on Sunday, soldiers exchanged machinegun fire with fighters in the camp as troops also unleashed sporadic artillery fire, an AFP correspondent said.
The militiamen fired four rockets which hit a field in the tiny village of Qaabrine about seven kilometres (four miles) northeast of Nahr al-Bared, and another two rockets south of the camp, causing no casualties, police said.
As artillery and tank shells blasted the camp, the military said elite troops had seized control of several buildings and Islamist positions, while army engineers continued to clear mines and demolish barriers.
Explosives planted by Islamists in one building blew up as an army patrol was inside on Saturday, an army spokesman told AFP.
“We retrieved two soldiers alive and we are still searching the rubble of the building,” parts of which collapsed in the explosion, he said on Sunday.
The army closed in on Fatah al-Islam positions on Saturday following two days of heavy fighting in which 11 soldiers were killed.
An army spokesman said the militiamen now controlled an area only 300 metres (yards) by 600 metres on a small hill inside the camp, left in ruins by the bloodiest internal battles since the 1975-1990 civil war.
The government has vowed to eradicate Fatah al-Islam, a shadowy band which first surfaced in the camp late last year and includes extremists of various Arab nationalities.
About 80 remaining Fatah al-Islam fighters are being supported by dozens of pro-Syrian Palestinian militants, according to one Palestinian source, citing evacuated activists.
Apart from the fighters and their families, just a small number of civilians are believed to remain in the camp, whose 31,000 residents have fled in several waves since the fighting began.
Four days after a major evacuation of civilians and militants of various Palestinian factions, a Palestine Red Crescent ambulance entered Nahr al-Bared to evacuate the head of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command in the camp, Abu Nabil.
But Abu Nabil, who is not involved in the fighting, apparently refused to leave because he did not want to be questioned by the army, relief workers told AFP.
In another refugee camp in southern Lebanon, an Islamist militant suspected of involvement in the May 7 killing of two members of the mainstream Fatah movement was shot dead on Sunday, Palestinian sources said.
The violence continued as Lebanon's political factions including the powerful opposition group Hezbollah held a second day of talks in France to try to ease the deadlock that has paralysed the nation for nearly eight months.
France aims to encourage them to renew a dialogue shattered after the resignation last November of six opposition ministers threw Lebanon into its worst political crisis since the 1975-1990 civil war.
