Could get real ugly, real fast considering Lebanon has a huge Christian population.
Via Daily Beast:
Al-Qaeda-affiliate jihadists are redoubling their recruitment in Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon and are likely to try to further fan sectarian tensions in the country by targeting Lebanese Christians in a suicide bombing campaign that until now has focused on Shia Muslims, warns a top Palestinian official.
Mahmoud Abdul-Hamid Issa, the former top security official for the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) in Lebanon, says the camps are at “boiling point”, including Ain el-Hilweh, a refugee camp an hour south of Beirut and the largest for Palestinian families that fled to Lebanon during the 1948 Arab-Israel war.
Known as el-Lino, the 44-year-old Issa says Ain el-Hilweh, which contains 17 armed Palestinian and Islamist factions, is inching towards full-blown fighting. He has been urging the PLO leadership to take a stronger line in the dozen Palestinian camps in Lebanon and uproot jihadists, warning that inaction will risk Lebanese army intervention and a major crisis in relations between Palestinians and the Lebanese. More than 200,000 Palestinians live in the camps and a further 200,000 are spread out across Lebanon.
The Palestinians themselves administer the camps, which have played significant roles in the history and politics of violence in Lebanon, having been used in the past by extremist groups. What plays out in the camps can often aggravate ideological and sectarian splits in Lebanon—and, in turn, rifts among the Lebanese can roil the settlements.
HT: Jay