Druze Militia Gains Control of Most of W. Beirut

Druze militiamen drove Shia Muslim fighters from the Hamra commercial district Thursday and controlled three-fourths of Muslim West Beirut after five days of house-to-house fighting that cost at least 100 lives, police reported.

A Shia religious leader called the battle for supremacy “collective suicide.”

Police said 375 people were wounded in the fighting between the Shia Amal militia and a leftist alliance the Druze formed with Lebanese Communist Party gunmen.

Yet another “final cease-fire” was called, and a comparative lull settled over the blasted and burning Muslim sector after nightfall. Syria, which supports all the factions involved, has tried to stop the killing and threatened to use its own soldiers to do so.

A police spokesman said privately that Walid Jumblatt’s Druze militia “now controls about 75% of West Beirut. It was divided 60-40 in Amal’s favor before the fighting broke out on Sunday.”

Most leftist gains were in Hamra and predominantly Sunni Muslim residential districts.

Sniping Stronghold

Amal fighters also maintained strong defenses around the 40-story unfinished Murr Tower, their main sniping stronghold. One of the tallest buildings in the city, it commands most of the no man’s land along the Green Line that divides West Beirut from the Christian eastern sector.

Some of the fiercest fighting took place around the seven-story Commodore Hotel, which the Druze captured from Amal in a seven-hour battle Wednesday.

Gunmen robbed the hotel’s last two guests, American Muslims Mohammed Mehdi and Dale Shaheen, during the night. They were trapped in the Commodore while in Beirut seeking to negotiate for the release of foreign hostages.

Mehdi said the thieves took $1,400.

The two men left the hotel Thursday morning and took a ferry to Cyprus from the Christian port of Juniyah. Mehdi and Shaheen represent the National Council for Islamic Affairs, based in New York.

‘Never Been So Humiliated’

“We’ve never been so humiliated. We felt we were violated,” Mehdi said. “We have to terminate our mission.”

As they left the hotel, looters were stripping it of liquor, television sets, typewriters, vacuum cleaners, linen and cutlery.

Mehdi and Shaheen arrived in Beirut on Saturday with messages for three American captives from their families. Eight of the 25 foreigners held hostage in Lebanon are Americans.

Informants said privately that they believe the hostages and Terry Waite, the Anglican Church hostage negotiator who dropped from sight Jan. 20, are being held in the Shia suburbs away from the street battles.

TV Station Under Siege

Druze militiamen maintained a siege at the Amal-controlled state television station in Tallet Khayyat. Spokesmen for the Druze fighters said they had orders not to assault the eight-story building.

Sheik Mohammed Mehdi Shamseddin, spiritual leader of Lebanon’s Shias, said: “This is collective suicide. This must stop.”

Brig. Gen. Ghazi Kenaan, Syria’s military intelligence chief in Lebanon, said in a statement that representatives of all warring factions had pledged “a final cease-fire.”

The statement, broadcast by all West Beirut radio stations, said without elaboration that violators would be punished.

Syria keeps 25,000 soldiers in east and north Lebanon.

Amal Outnumbers Druze

Amal, led by Nabih Berri, outnumbers the combined Druze and Communist forces, but the Druze have superior firepower and military skills.

Druze, Sunni Muslims and leftist Christians still in West Beirut fear the 1 million Shias, largest of Lebanon’s 17 officially recognized religious sects, will take over and eventually impose Iranian-style fundamentalist rule.

Police reported a de facto truce around south Beirut’s Palestinian refugee camps, Chatilla and Borj el Brajne. Amal has besieged them for three months but had to pull its men out to fight the leftist alliance.

Amal has fought the Palestinians intermittently since May, 1985 to keep them from rebuilding the Lebanese power base they lost in Israel’s 1982 invasion.

Relief Work Hampered

Relief workers said the widespread fighting was hampering international aid efforts. Neal Keny, Middle East director for Save the Children Federation of Westport, Conn., said in a telephone interview in New York that glass windows were shattered and telephones were dead at the group’s West Beirut office.

Keny said Marwan Sidani, program director for the group’s Lebanon operation, was forced to move his family out of West Beirut after their apartment building was sprayed with gunfire and hit four times by rockets.

“The situation in West Beirut is as bad as he’s seen it,” Keny said after speaking by phone to Sidani. “Fires burning out of control, fighting in all parts of the city. The newspapers didn’t even come out today.”

Keny, who last visited West Beirut in December, said the group has applied to the U.S. Food for Peace Program, part of the Agency for International Development, for a $15-million grant to provide emergency food to about half a million families.

“We have seen an alarming decline in nutritional intake,” Keny said. “If this pattern continues, Lebanon could become the next great international disaster, potentially on the order of what we saw in Ethiopia and the Sudan.”