Lebanon Battle Pits U.N. Troops Against Shias

French soldiers serving in the U.N. peacekeeping force in southern Lebanon fought Shia Muslim militiamen for nearly 14 hours Tuesday. Officials said four militiamen were killed and 17 French soldiers were wounded.

U.N. spokesman Timur Goksel said it was the gravest confrontation involving the U.N. Interim Force in Lebanon since Israel withdrew the bulk of its occupation army from southern Lebanon in June, 1985.

He said the trouble started Monday night when the Maarake commander of Amal, the Shia militia, refused to submit to a search at a U.N. checkpoint in the neighboring village of Aabbassiye.

The Amal man and his bodyguard pulled out guns, tried to disarm a French soldier and were killed by another French soldier, Goksel said.

Amal fighters from the nearby city of Tyre and neighboring villages rushed to the area and surrounded French positions in Maarake and Aabbassiye. The two sides traded machine-gun fire and rocket-propelled grenade barrages the rest of the night and Tuesday morning. Two more Amal militiamen were killed in the fighting, which ended with a cease-fire Tuesday afternoon.

“Death to France!”

The clash whipped up anti-French sentiment among southern Lebanon’s predominantly Shia Muslim population. Hundreds of angry Shias chanting “Death to France!” and “Down with Fascists!” demonstrated around the cemetery of this poor hilltop village where two of the dead Amal men were buried.

French troops abandoned their fixed checkpoints at the entrance to the village, taking shelter in foxholes inside the battalion’s compound on Maarake’s western outskirts.

“Our two men, our cadre, were murdered. There can be no doubt of this,” said Daoud Daoud, Amal’s commander in south Lebanon. “We do not blame all the French. We are not asking them to leave, but the French soldier who shot our men, I think he worked for Israeli intelligence.”

With 1,399 soldiers, France is the largest contributor to the nine-nation, 5,800-man peacekeeping force. The other countries contributing soldiers are Finland, Ghana, Fiji, Nepal, Ireland, Norway, Sweden and Italy.