Refugee Camp

TRIPOLI, Lebanon -- Heavy shelling and gunfire continued for the second day at the Nahr al Bared refugee camp, as the Lebanese army intensified its offensive against the Fatah al Islam militia. Three soldiers were killed and 15 were wounded in the fighting by yesterday afternoon, the army reported, raising the number of the army's deaths from the two-day offensive to six. Dozens of militants from Fatah al Islam, an al-Qaida-inspired group, have also been killed or wounded, the army said.

BEIRUT -- A new front erupted in Lebanon's simmering political conflict yesterday in the northern city of Tripoli, where running battles between the Lebanese army and a radical new Palestinian organization said to have ties to al-Qaida killed at least 39 people. In the worst internal fighting since the end of Lebanon's civil war 17 years ago, the army battled militants throughout the day in the streets of the port city and on the edges of the Palestinian refugee camp Nahr el-Bared, which late last year fell under the control of a radical group calling itself Fateh al-Islam.

Tho Nguyen's first victory as a jockey in Maryland was a routine ride of little more than one minute. The journey preceding that triumph 13 days ago at Laurel Park began 14 years earlier with a boy, a dream and a backdrop of fear.Nguyen was 11 when his mother bribed his way onto a boat escaping his homeland of Vietnam. The boy carried no money, knew no one on the dangerously overcrowded vessel. But he possessed the knowledge that his father lived in America and the hope that they might soon be reunited.

GISENYI, Rwanda -- The Hutus began swarming home to Rwanda yesterday, taking an anxious world by surprise.By the tens of thousands they left war- and disease-ridden eastern Zaire in a mass migration rivaled only by their flight in the opposite direction two years ago.They came in numbers that were too high to count, perhaps reaching into the hundreds of thousands, walking through the streets of the Zaire town of Goma to a small border crossing where the...

HONG KONG -- When Bui Thi Minh and her husband stealthily left Vietnam in a rickety boat eight years ago in search of a brighter future, they knew their quest would be far from easy. But the couple never imagined that years after being swept onto Hong Kong's shores, they would still be in a refugee camp -- and facing the likelihood of a forced return to the country they risked their lives to flee.Barring an 11th-hour miracle, that return certainly will happen. And such a miracle seems unlikely.

BUKAVU, Zaire -- Victorious rebel troops installed an ethnically mixed government in Rwanda yesterday, but fear and Hutu propaganda continued to drive hundreds of thousands from the country."

BYUMBA, Rwanda -- Augustine Kabano's training was supposed to help him confront life and death, but nothing in his medical schooling prepared him for this."

Columbia resident Paula Joan Storch worries about returning to the Croatian war zone today. But not for obvious reasons."Should I be going abroad when there is so much to be done here? So many people don't see what is going on around them and what they can do to help. There is so much we don't know about the rest of the world," she said.Until she went to work for a financial consulting firm in New York, she was one of those people, Ms. Storch believes."I became disillusioned," she said, "seeing the amount of homelessness and poverty in the streets.

ISIKVEREN, Turkey -- When the trucks first lumbered up the narrow path, 75,000 people of Turkey's largest Iraqi refugee camp could not believe what they saw from high above: water, bread, flour meal, clothes, blankets and cradles, finally arriving here.They swarmed down the mountainside, the half-dead and the half-mad. "Please, water, water," a woman cried, walking in circles down the hill. She fell to her knees and kissed a dirty crust of bread she found.A few yards away, soldiers were beating a man, until one shouted at another to stop: "You idiot!

GWYNEDD VALLEY, Pa. -- His father and brother were executed. His baby sister starved to death, and Bun Than Ung had to claim he did not know them to live.He was forced to watch murders and torture, afraid that any moment he might be the next victim. When he finally could flee after four years, he made a perilous escape from his country, only to find the safety of a refugee camp turned into virtual imprisonment for the next 12 years.What must he have thought, this 34-year-old Cambodian, as he listened last week to an instructor explain "presumption of innocence" and other niceties of justice in a law class at a pastoral Pennsylvania college?

St. Mary's City -- Nezia Munezero and her 10-member family spent years running from one East African refugee camp to another, staying one step ahead of death in a world torn by ethnic warfare and genocide. In 2002, they were resettled in Baltimore. At age 16 and with no knowledge of English, she enrolled at the now-shuttered Southwestern High School and lived in a grim neighborhood beset by urban crime. It was a stepping-stone to a better life, but also another place to flee. "Students at Southwestern weren't friendly toward immigrants," said Munezero, 22, a slight woman with a lilting accent.

Iftin Iftin dodges through the crowded halls of Patterson High School. In low-slung khaki pants and black-and-white sneakers, a backpack thrown over his shoulder, the slight senior blends in as students pass by him, slapping his hand. "Iftin, wassup?" says one student. The 21-year-old flashes a smile, nodding his head in recognition. "What's up?" the Somali Bantu refugee responds, his strong African accent belying his appearance. A small black pin reading "Amini" is on his powder-blue shirt.

BEIRUT, Lebanon -- Fierce clashes between government forces and Islamic militants left at least six soldiers dead yesterday as Lebanon marked the first anniversary of the summer war that stretched the country to the breaking point. The Lebanese army fired artillery and tank shells into the Nahr el Bared refugee camp near the northern coastal city of Tripoli. A well-armed Islamic militant group called Fatah al Islam, which shares the ideology of al-Qaida, has quartered itself in the camp that was home to 40,000 Palestinian refugees before the fighting started May 20. Television footage showed thick plumes of black smoke rising from the camp, which has been the scene of occasionally fierce fighting since the conflict broke out. "It's the fireworks," Mustapha Abou Harb, a spokesman for the Palestinian group Fatah, said in a phone conversation, explosions erupting in the background.

AIN AL-HILWEH, Lebanon -- Islamic militants attacked an army checkpoint yesterday in the south near the country's largest Palestinian refugee camp, raising fears that a second front has opened between the Lebanese army and al-Qaida-inspired militants. Thousands of soldiers are deployed in the northern part of the country, fiercely battling a few hundred fighters who are holed up in a Palestinian refugee camp there. Fighters from the Jund al-Sham group attacked the checkpoint at the entrance to the Ain al-Hilweh camp, using rocket-propelled grenades and machine guns.

TRIPOLI, Lebanon -- Heavy shelling and gunfire continued for the second day at the Nahr al Bared refugee camp, as the Lebanese army intensified its offensive against the Fatah al Islam militia. Three soldiers were killed and 15 were wounded in the fighting by yesterday afternoon, the army reported, raising the number of the army's deaths from the two-day offensive to six. Dozens of militants from Fatah al Islam, an al-Qaida-inspired group, have also been killed or wounded, the army said.

NAHR EL-BARED, Lebanon -- Government troops stormed positions held by al-Qaida-linked militants on the outskirts of this refugee camp in northern Lebanon yesterday, in some of the fiercest fighting in two weeks. At least 14 people, including two soldiers, were killed, according to security officials, who also said Lebanese forces moved against outlying paramilitary bases used by Fatah al-Islam militants without entering the camp itself. "Elite forces were able to take over a number of key posts that were used by snipers from group on the northern and eastern outskirts of the camp," a senior army official said on condition of anonymity.

NAHR EL-BARED, Lebanon -- An Islamist militant group holed up in a Palestinian refugee camp in northern Lebanon will fight to the death, a spokesman said yesterday, adding that newly arrived military aid from the United States and other countries to the Lebanese army don't faze the fighters. Abu Salim, the spokesman for Fatah al-Islam, told McClatchy Newspapers in a phone interview that surrender was not an option and that fighters were ready for the next stage of battle with the Lebanese troops surrounding them in the olive groves, citrus orchards and a commercial strip just outside the Nahr el-Bared camp.

NAHR EL-BARED, Lebanon -- Thousands of Palestinian refugees, caught for days in the crossfire between warring Lebanese government troops and Islamist militants with alleged al-Qaida ties, began fleeing their embattled camp last night as a lull in the fighting took hold. Intense street battles broke out around this refugee camp in northern Lebanon this week after an army raid against militants from a group called Fatah al-Islam wanted in a bank robbery. The fighting gave way to a shaky cease-fire yesterday afternoon as reports of a mounting civilian toll were aired on Arab-language television.

The plumes of black smoke rising this week from a Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon and the sound of gunfire are eerily reminiscent of the country's decades-old civil war and the ethnic fault lines that kept it going for 15 years. The difference now is that Lebanon's military is fighting to rout a new band of extremists, clearly well armed and reportedly influenced by al-Qaida. The government of Prime Minister Fouad Siniora is asserting itself - as it must to protect this fledgling democracy.

NAHR EL-BARED, Lebanon -- The Lebanese army unleashed a torrent of firepower yesterday on a Palestinian refugee camp that is home to a militant group loyal to al-Qaida, amid fears that the two-day-old conflict could spread and undermine a government already beset by political schism. The fighting has claimed at least 50 lives and was the worst internal conflict since Lebanon's 15-year civil war ended in 1990. Fighting erupted in another Palestinian refugee camp in the south, and a bomb exploded in an upscale Sunni Muslim neighborhood in the capital, injuring six people.