KEY POINTS:
At last it happened. Every one predicted - not least the United Nations officers on the team - that the international UN peacekeeping army in southern Lebanon would be attacked by a Sunni Muslim group attached to al Qaeda. Yesterday three Spanish and two Colombian soldiers paid with their lives for the fulfilment of this prediction.
A roadside bomb between the villages of Marjayoun and Khaim, only 9km from the Israeli border, exploded next to two UN armoured vehicles, killing the five UN soldiers and wounding at least four others.
The road was at the centre of fierce fighting between the Israeli army and Hizbollah last summer and it is possible - although highly unlikely - that the bombs were munitions left over from those battles.
But the straight and remote road between the two villages has been cleared by de-mining officers since the war, and the Lebanese army discovered months ago that Sunni groups around Tripoli had put together maps of southern Lebanon which showed UN patrol routes, including those of the Spanish army.
The Spanish suffered severely for their support for American President George W. Bush in the Iraq war, and now, it seems they are paying the price for being part of an expanded UN army in the south of Lebanon, one which was put in place with the encouragement of Bush and Tony Blair to secure Israel's northern border after last summer's conflict.
It is an international army commanded by four Nato generals, and many Lebanese regard it as an extension of Nato rather than a UN peacekeeping mission.
There was an almost equally dangerous outbreak of violence in the northern city of Tripoli yesterday, where Lebanese troops were forced to storm an apartment block in the Abu Samra neighbourhood after guerrillas from the Fatah al-Islam group - which the army has been fighting for at least 33 days in the Palestinian camp of Nahr el-Barad - took over the building. At least 10 of the armed men were killed when the soldiers burst into the building - only to find that the fighters had apparently murdered a young Lebanese policeman in front of his wife and young daughter.
At least 62 soldiers, 32 members of Fatah al-Islam and 30 civilians have been killed in the camp, fighting that Lebanese Defence Minister Elias Murr rashly claimed last week to have ended in a Lebanese army victory. Yesterday violence in Tripoli was clearly intended to humiliate him.
Previously, the UN has come under attack from Israeli forces, pro-Israeli guerrillas in southern Lebanon and, occasionally, from Palestinian and Hizbollah fighters. But the Hizbollah has been at great pains to try to protect the new UN force. They fear at attack such as yesterday's will prompt the US to claim falsely that it was their organisation - which is supported by Iran - that was responsible.
In fact, intelligence officers from the French, Spanish and Italian embassies met secretly with Hizbollah officials in Sidon more than three weeks ago to seek assurances that Hizbollah would do their best to protect the international force. The Hizbollah men agreed but warned that al Qaeda-type groups in the Sunni areas of northern Lebanon might well try to breach their security.
We shall now find out if America believes this - and it is the truth - or whether Western governments decide to blame Iran by claiming Hizbollah was behind the bombing.
The attack now raises serious questions about whether the enlarged, 11,000-strong UN army - originally placed in the south of the country in 1978 - can fulfil its duties as peacekeepers. Once a peacekeeping army's soldiers are assaulted, their first priority immediately becomes their own protection rather than that of the civilians around them or the international Lebanese-Israel border which they patrol.
Lebanon therefore now descends into another, even more serious crisis involving not only their own semi-al Qaeda satellite groups, but Western armies as well.
Whenever Nato has been involved in Lebanon in the past, it has always been attacked - most devastatingly when US Marines and French paratroopers were assaulted by suicide bombers in Beirut in 1982 at a cost of almost 300 lives. Scarcely an area of Lebanon has not been involved in violence in the past 12 months and each crisis has been worse than the previous crisis, so, as the Lebanese say, here we go again.
- INDEPENDENT
