Arafat loyalists fight hardliners linked to al-Qa'ida

So now it is Yasser Arafat's "war on terror". Amid the slums of Ein al-Helweh – the largest refugee camp in Lebanon with up to 70,000 Palestinians living in its stinking, narrow streets – they are asking if Mr Arafat has done a deal with the Americans, even with the Israelis. Why else, they ask, would Arafat's Fatah guerrillas have tried to arrest 10 Islamist gunmen linked to Osama bin Laden?

Like everything associated with the Palestinian leader, his plans came badly unstuck. In a brief but bloody gun battle, the 10 wanted men – they are variously accused of killing judges in a Sidon courthouse and murdering Lebanese soldiers more than two years ago – stormed a Fatah checkpoint with rocket-propelled grenades and a machine-gun, leaving an Arafat loyalist and an Islamist dead and several other gunmen wounded. The Wahabi-style bearded Muslims then retreated back into the camp while the multitude of Palestinian political and religious groups that contest power in Ein al-Helweh held a meeting to decide on a deadline for the 10 men to leave.

In the streets of the camp yesterday, every self-respecting Palestinian faction was touting more hardware than a typical army, complete with Kalashnikovs, grenade launchers and a tatty old anti-aircraft gun. And all this because of 10 men.

The 10 belong to an outfit called Jaamat al-Noor – the "Group of Light" – and none are Palestinian. At least seven are Lebanese and three are Kurds. "Would you believe it, they told us to leave our camp," one astonished Palestinian leader announced to me in anger. "They said we were strangers here in Lebanon, that as Lebanese they could tell us to leave."

The Jaamat men have threatened to turn the camp into a bloodbath. Indeed, when another of their members, Badi Hmadeh, was turned over to Lebanese police last month, its leader, Ahmed Miqati, warned he would transform the camp into "another Afghanistan". The trouble is, these few armed and very strict Muslims could provoke a great deal of killing.

Ein al-Helweh has many Palestinian groups who sympathise with the Jaamat men; Hamas and Islamic Jihad and several other Muslim organisations do not want them arrested but Fatah – performing a role many Israelis would like Mr Arafat to adopt in the West Bank – is all for handing them over to the authorities.

The Jaamat has its roots in a long and savage – and still largely unexplained – battle in the snows of the Mount Lebanon range near the village of Dinnieh more than two years ago, when young Sunni Muslims, some said to have been trained in Afghanistan, attacked units of the Lebanese army. Lebanese troops used tanks and helicopter gunships to suppress the uprising.

One of the dead, Bassam Kanj, had supposedly been introduced to Osama bin Laden some months earlier by another Lebanese fighter called Abou Mahjane. The Lebanese government agrees there were links between the armed men and Mr bin Laden although the Palestinians of Ein al-Helweh take a more cynical view. As one put it: "They would like to have links with bin Laden ... but I don't think they could find Afghanistan on a map."

Since Mr bin Laden did once make a vague reference to these men, they might have more contact with al-Qa'ida than the refugees believe. But Ein al-Helweh is not Tora Bora and the men now have to contend with a delegation of Palestinian Islamists who have asked them to leave. The Fatah movement wants them out within 15 days. The delegation wants to give them longer.

As for the men of the Jaamat al-Noor, they have told their friends that they do not recognise Syria, Lebanon or Palestine, that "we live in Allah's wide dominion and implement his decree". Their wives wear the chador. Their homes are decorated with pictures of Mr bin Laden. In protest at the arrest of Badi Hamadeh, they left an explosive device in Sidon – inside the city's al-Quds mosque.