qussaya, Lebanon • On the road out of Qussaya village in east Lebanon, a barrier and a bunker signal the entrance to the military training camp of a Palestinian militant group. Around the camp housing the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine -General Command (PFLP-GC) are Lebanese troops who bar access to what has become a “forbidden zone” since the departure of Syrian soldiers and intelligence agents in 2005.

From a balcony overlooking almond and cherry fields, villagers point to the mountainous ridge and farther away to the plateau adjoining the Syrian frontier. High up there is another camp of the pro-Syrian group which first set up bases in the region in the early 1970s.

At the foot of the mountain, an army checkpoint guards access to the zone. “Until 2005 and the departure of Syrian forces from Lebanon, the combatants would come and go as they pleased,” recalled Suheil Kaidi, a 43-year-old farmer. “They would come to shop in the village. But since the army surrounded the area they have reduced their movements,” said Kaidi, who lives in the Christian district of Qussaya sandwiched between the Bekaa Valley and Syria. Nonetheless, the army posts which control access to Qussaya only partly reassure the villagers.

The fighting which erupted on May 20 between the army and Fatah Al Islam extremists in the Palestinian refugee camp of Nahr Al Bared in north Lebanon—battles which are still raging — adds to local anxiety in Qussaya. “Villages in the area are in danger. With these ‘sleeping’ groups in the camps anything can happen,” said one man, who like others was afraid to give his name.

The Beirut government has accused the Islamist radicals in Nahr Al Bared of being manipulated by Syria and supported by the PFLP-GC and by Fatah-Intifada, another armed Palestinian group implanted in east Lebanon. The PFLP-GC denies any links. “We are training ourselves to lead operations against Israel — never will we direct our weapons against Lebanon,” one of its representatives, Ramez Mustafa, said.

He acknowledged strong links with Syria and said that some of the group’s fighters had been in Nahr Al Bared, but said they had left more than a month ago. Officials in Lebanon from Fatah, the party of Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas, said last year that Fatah al-Islam had infiltrated the country via the bases of pro-Syrian groups.

Some 20km south of Qussaya, a tiny path leads towards Halua district abutting Syria, and which also shelters a Fatah-Intifada base. If one successfully negotiates three military checkpoints, at the fourth — a bunker protected by sandbags, huge blocks of cement and an armoured vehicle — a soldier bars the route.

“It is forbidden to pass.” The Lebanese government and the UN Security Council have both warned against what they call the “dangerous intrigues” of the PFLP-GC and Fatah-Intifada. And in recent months there have been repeated allegations of a flow of arms towards the Lebanese Shi’ite movement Hezbollah, which is supported by Syria, or to pro-Syrian groups across the Lebanese-Syrian border, a mountainous zone criss-crossed by paths that are impossible to control completely.

“The logistic tracks (from the training camps) head towards Syria, not towards Lebanon,” said one military officer who would not be named. Lebanese officials say the army has set up a watertight control system by deploying 2,500 troops in the Bekaa Valley after Syrian forces left in 2005.

“Only Palestinians with refugee status in Lebanon can pass the checkpoints, without arms and in civilian vehicles. Others cannot,” said the officer. Georges, a young grocer in Qussaya, said he was used to seeing Palestinians coming and going, buying fizzy drinks and “tuna and tinned sardines.” But for the past two years, he added, “they have been much more discreet.” They still drive to shop “but in civilian clothes, in a jeep registered in Lebanon.”