Beirut Militias Call Truce but Clashes Continue

Rival Druze and Amal Muslim militias issued simultaneous cease-fire calls Wednesday night to halt three days of ferocious battles for control of West Beirut that have killed at least 60.

But witnesses said clashes continued more than 90 minutes after radios broadcast the truce calls, and Druze sources said Amal had lost control of several districts.

Radio reports and hospitals estimated at least 60 people had been killed and 170 wounded in 48 hours of fighting, heaviest around the Soviet Embassy, the Verdun area and the Murr Tower.

The Shia Amal militia and the Druze-led Progressive Socialist Party (PSP), said they had ordered their fighters to stop shooting and let a Syrian-backed force restore order.

Radio reports said a Syrian-Lebanese security force had toured the city with “shoot to kill” orders to try to persuade the gunmen to observe a Syrian-backed cease-fire.

Fighting Less Intense

Gunfire and grenade blasts followed the cease-fire call, but witnesses said fighting was less intense than earlier when both sides had thrown Syrian-supplied tanks into the fray.

Volleys of machine-gun fire continued around the 40-story Murr Tower, an Amal stronghold under assault for much of the day by the Druze forces.

Amal fighters held out at the unfinished concrete office block, but were driven from streets around the Commodore Hotel, once a popular base for foreign journalists, residents said.

They said the hotel had been badly damaged and a nearby building set on fire.

PSP sources said the relative lull in fighting Wednesday night was because the Druze-leftist alliance had won full control of several districts from Amal.

Talks With Syrian Brigadier

The cease-fire announcements came after Amal and PSP officials held talks with Syria’s military intelligence chief in Lebanon, Brig. Ghazi Kanaan.

Kanaan earlier ordered a joint force of Syrian and Lebanese Army troops onto the streets with orders to shoot any gunmen who refused to stop fighting.

PSP radio said Syria had persuaded Premier Rashid Karami and Education Minister Salim Hoss, both Sunni Muslims, to withdraw threats to resign over the violence.

As night fell, flashes from exploding shells and tracer bullets lit the sky and an acrid smell of gunpowder hung in the air. Fires in many building blazed out of control and screams of wounded fighters could be heard.

The Communist Party, with the Druze the main force in the leftist alliance battling Amal, said in a statement it was prepared to stop fighting in response to the Syrian peace moves.

Siege Reported Lifted

Amal sources, meanwhile, said the militia lifted its siege of three Palestinian refugee camps--two in Beirut and one in the south. But there was no confirmation the blockade, which forced starving residents to eat rats and dogs, had ended.

Amal, Syria’s main ally in Lebanon, is in theory allied with other Muslim and leftist groups against Christian forces across the capital’s Green Line in East Beirut.

But Walid Jumblatt’s Druze-led Progressive Party and the pro-Soviet Communist Party, both of which were battling Amal in West Beirut, have strong Palestinian ties and opposed Amal’s blockade of the camps.

“The struggle is among allies,” one Palestinian source said. “Amal is a tool of Syria and, while the PSP and the Communists also want to be allies with Syria, they demand some degree of independence.”

Syria has about 25,000 troops in north and east Lebanon and sent 400 commandos and security officials into West Beirut last July to try to curb militia lawlessness there.

Political sources said that Damascus planned to send large military contingents to the Muslim sector once the fighting eased and leaders of the warring militias returned to Beirut.