Islamists: Profile of Lebanon's Islamic Unification Movement (Lebanon-Report‪)‬

While Israel's army was besieging Beirut to force militant Palestinian groups out of the city in the summer of 1982, Lebanese newspapers reported that thousands of Sunnis in Tripoli gathered at a local mosque in the historical city center, according to the Beirut-based influential daily AN NAHAR in a two-part feature on May 16 and 23. The participants paid allegiance to the mosque's imam, Sheikh Said Shaaban, as their Islamic emir and emir of the northern port city, the newspaper reported. "The event was some sort of an announcement of the birth of the Islamic Unification Movement (IUM), or Harakat al-Tawhid al-Islami, that encompassed local armed groups, whose leaders paid allegiance to Shaaban as their Islamic emir," said the newspaper's Mohammed Abi Samra, an authority on Sunni and Shiite fundamentalism. "Three things were in common among the groups. First, they had security, military and financial ties to Fatah," the mainstream Palestinian organization of Yasser Arafat, who later became president of the Palestinian Authority, the newspaper said. "They had taken part in rounds of fighting in Tripoli in 1975," the first year of Lebanon's 15-year civil war. "Second, they did not agree with the influence of the Syrian regime, whose army held posts in Tripoli as of 1976," when it entered Lebanon on a peacekeeping mission that became official in 1977, according to AN NAHAR. The Syrian army left Lebanon in 2005, 15 years after the Lebanese civil war ended.