The explosion of violence in northern Lebanon over the last two days, the worst internal fighting since the civil war ended in 1990, has provoked fears of a return to the mayhem and sectarian blood-letting of those 15 terrible years.
The carnage has taken a heavy toll on the Lebanese army - 23 dead on Sunday - while the small but heavily armed Fatah al-Islam lost 17 men. Yesterday the killing continued in the Nahr al-Bared refugee camp, a crowded, bleak home to some 40,000 Palestinians, pushing up deaths in two days to at least 76.
The battle was sparked by attempts by the Lebanese authorities to detain Fatah al-Islam members after a bank robbery near Tripoli on Saturday. Some militants ended up in an apartment block in the city where they fought it out with the army, while others holed up in the camp. The refugee camps have been no-go areas for the authorities since an Arab accord in 1969. Palestinian factions and gangsters still carry weapons inside them with impunity despite a 2004 UN Security Council resolution calling for all militias in Lebanon to be disarmed.
The violence shows the fragility of Lebanon's security situation in the aftermath of last year's Israeli-Hizbullah war in the south and of a series of unsolved assassinations before and after Syria's 2005 troop pull-out. Lebanon being Lebanon, inevitably there were fingers pointed yesterday suggesting external forces at work - in this case Syria's hand. Prime Minister Fouad Siniora, among others, claimed its purpose was to cause confusion in a bid to disrupt proposals at the UN to establish a tribunal to try the suspected killers of former prime minister Rafik al-Hariri, assassinated in a 2005 car bombing in Beirut. The US, Britain and France circulated a draft resolution at the Security Council last week that would establish the tribunal, even without a consensus among Lebanese leaders. A preliminary UN inquiry implicated Syrian and Lebanese officials in al-Hariri's assassination, although Syria has denied any role.
But Syria strongly and, perhaps for once, plausibly denies involvement in backing Fatah al-Islam. Damascus claims that it has been pursuing the group's members for some time, and it jailed its leader for three years. The 300-strong Sunni militia which only emerged late last year and has been linked to al-Qaeda and to a number of bombings in Lebanon, also appears to be politically isolated among both the 280,000-strong refugee Palestinian community and the Lebanese themselves. The mainstream Fatah organisation has denounced Fatah al-Islam as a "gang of criminals" and backed the Lebanese army. The Shia Hizbullah movement has no truck with it. The leadership in exile of Hamas pointedly last night did not back the group, simply urging the Lebanese government to avoid injury to Palestinian refugees.
The hope then must be that the current violence can be contained, despite threats from the group to mount attacks elesewhere. Yet, if this is not the spark, Lebanon still remains the tinder box it has been for so long.