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Inside the Palestinian camp, Mr. Abssi seems to be building his operation with little interference.
Maj. Gen. Achraf Rifi, general director of Lebanon’s Internal Security Forces, says the government does not have authority to enter a Palestinian camp — even though Mr. Abssi is now wanted in Lebanon, Jordan and Syria on terrorism charges.
To enter the camps, he said, “We would need an agreement from other Arab countries.” He said that instead the government was tightening its cordon around the camp to make it harder for Mr. Abssi or his men to slip in and out.
Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon have long been fertile ground for militancy, particularly focused on the fight against Israel. But militants in those camps now have a broader vision. In Ain el Hilwe camp, an hour’s drive south of Beirut, another radical Sunni group, Asbat al Ansar, has been sending fighters to Iraq since the start of the war, its leaders acknowledged in interviews.
“The U.S. is oppressing a lot of people,” the group’s deputy commander, who goes by the name of Abu Sharif, said in a room strewn with Kalashnikovs. “They are killing a lot of innocents, but one day they are getting paid back.” A leading sheik in the camp, Jamal Hatad, has a television studio that broadcasts 12 hours a day with shows ranging from viewer call-ins to video of Mr. bin Laden’s statements and parents proudly displaying photographs of their martyred children.
“I was happy,” Hamad Mustaf Ayasin, 70, recalled in hearing last fall that his 35-year-old son, Ahmed, had died in Iraq fighting American troops near the Syrian border. “The U.S. is against Muslims all over the world.”
On the streets of the camp, one young man after another said dying in Iraq was no longer their only dream.
“If I had the chance to do any kind of operation against anyone who is against Islam, inside or outside of the United States, I would do the operation,” said Mohamed, an 18-year-old student, who declined to give his last name.
Hussein Hamdan, 19, who keeps a poster of Osama bin Laden in the bedroom he shares with two sisters, is a street tough attuned to religious fundamentalism. He dropped out of school at age 10, spent 18 months in jail on assault charges, and in March — “just to make a statement,” he said — took a razor and repeatedly slashed both his forearms. “I want to become a mujahedeen and go to jihad in any country where there are Jews or Americans to fight against them,” he said.
Lebanon has increasingly become a source of terror suspects. One of the Sept. 11 hijackers came from Lebanon, as did six men charged with planting bombs on German trains last summer. Two other Lebanese men and a Palestinian were among those accused last spring of plotting to blow up the PATH train tunnels beneath the Hudson River.
The Killing of Innocents
Mr. Abssi said he derived much of his spiritual guidance from Abu Abdullah Muhammad al-Bukhari, a ninth-century Islamic scholar. A recent study by the Defense Department’s Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, N.Y., listed Mr. Bukhari among the 20 Islamic scholars who had greater influence today among militant Arabs than Mr. bin Laden.
“Originally, the killing of innocents and children was forbidden,” Mr. Abssi said. “However, there are situations in which the killing of such is permissible. One of these exceptions is those that kill our women and children.”
“Osama bin Laden does make the fatwas,” Mr. Abssi said, using the Arabic word for Islamic legal pronouncements. “Should his fatwas follow the Sunnah,” or Islamic law, he said, “we will carry them out.”
His closest known association with Mr. Zarqawi involved the killing of Mr. Foley. In previously undisclosed court records obtained by The Times, Jordanian officials say that Mr. Abssi helped organize the assassination, working closely with Mr. Zarqawi.
A senior administrator for the United States Agency for International Development, Mr. Foley was leaving his home in Amman on Oct. 28, 2002, when he was shot at close range by a man who had hidden in his garage. Seven bullets from a 7-millimeter pistol struck his neck, face, chest and stomach, the Jordanian government said in court papers.
Eleven men were charged in the case, and two men have been hanged, including the gunman, Salem Sa’ad Salem bin Saweed. According to the court records, Mr. Saweed met Mr. Abssi five years earlier in Syria, where they became friends and “arranged military operations against American and Jewish interests in Jordan.” Mr. Zarqawi provided the $10,000, along with $32,000 more for additional attacks, the court papers say. But in meeting Mr. Saweed, Mr. Zarqawi told him to work through Mr. Abssi, who helped the gunman with money, logistics and training in weapons and explosives.
Mr. Saweed and an accomplice in Jordan chose Mr. Foley as a target by watching his neighborhood for cars bearing diplomatic plates.
A Valid Target
In the interview with The Times, Mr. Abssi acknowledged working with Mr. Zarqawi. He said he played no part in Mr. Foley’s death, but considered him a valid target. “I don’t know what Foley’s role was but I can say that any person that comes to our region with a military, security or political aim, then he is a legitimate target,” he said.
[Mr. Foley’s widow, Virginia Foley, said Wednesday that she thought her husband’s killers had either been killed or jailed. “I’m appalled and surprised that there is still somebody out there,” she said, when told of Mr. Abssi’s current activities.]
The American intelligence official said the prosecution of Mr. Foley’s killers was under the control of the Jordanians.
At the time of Mr. Foley’s death, Mr. Abssi had been in jail for two months, having been arrested on charges of plotting attacks inside Syria. He ultimately served three years in prison, says Mounir Ali, a spokesman for the Ministry of Information.
Mr. Ali denied recent reports in Lebanon that Syria sent Mr. Abssi to that country to stir trouble there. “This accusation is baseless,” Mr. Ali said. “After he was set free he restarted his terrorist activities by training elements in favor of Al Qaeda.”
He said Syria sought his arrest in late January, but discovered Mr. Abssi had “disappeared, and no one knew where he went.”
Late last November, Mr. Abssi moved into the Palestinian camp here, seized three compounds held by a secular group, Fatah al Intifada, raised his group’s black flag, and issued a declaration saying he was bringing religion to the Palestinian cause. Mr. Abssi reappeared on Jordan’s radar in January when police had a three-hour battle with two suspected terrorists in the northern Jordanian city of Irbid, killing one of the men. Authorities say they learned that Mr. Abssi had sent the men. A short while later, Lebanese authorities picked up two Saudi Arabian men leaving Mr. Abssi’s camp, and learned both men had fought in Iraq. Two more men were found leaving the camp in February, General Rifi said.
General Rifi said officials were trying to learn as much as possible about Mr. Abssi’s operation from sources and surveillance, but it was clear that their information was limited. In questioning people, security officials are showing a photograph of Mr. Abssi that is 30 years old, though it displays his most distinctive feature — two moles, one on each side of his nose.
The apparent inability to apprehend Mr. Abssi provokes fury in the men who are hunting him. A security official in one of the countries where he is wanted scowled when asked why Mr. Abssi was operating freely: “I can go lots of places to grab people, but I can’t grab him.”
In the interview with The Times, Mr. Abssi said he had been largely warmly received in the Palestinian camp, and that he was optimistic about his cause. “One of the reasons for choosing this camp is our belief that the people here are close to God as they feel the same suffering as our brothers in Palestine,” he said.
“Today’s youth, when they see what is happening in Palestine and Iraq, it enthuses them to join the way of the right and jihad,” he said. “These people have now started to adopt the right path.”
Mark Mazzetti contributed reporting from Washington, and Margot Williams from New York.
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How long before the scourge of religion is removed from the face of this world?
Again, the US should pull out... all the way out, all military, all aid, all technology, close all off-shore accounts for money going to terrorist organizations and fake charities for all time... then see how they like it.
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