Russia's involvement in Chenchnya has aroused the ire of Muslim militants in Lebanon with explosive consequences, writes Adel Darwish.

Lebanon celebrated the new millennium with traditional style fireworks: a bloody shoot-out at an embassy, a grenade attack on an army check point and three-day pitched battles between the army and a militant group.

However, in an ironic twist of history, the victim of the first Beirut attack of the new millennium was the Russian embassy, not the traditional American target. And, what's more, the prime suspects in all three cases were followers of the Sunni branch of Islam.

This surprised observers more accustomed to activities orchestrated by the pro-Iranian Shia group, Hizbullah, whose speciality is terrorising the Americans, the French, the Israelis and various others, supposedly in defence of Islam.

Historians recall how in the 1980s Soviet diplomats in Beirut would smile as they sipped their vodka or local beer, watching their American counterparts being shot at. They would knowingly brief reporters on the extent of inflamed feelings among Arabs supposedly enraged by American double standards and Washington's backing of Israel.

The Russians felt safe, as their embassy was - and still is - located in a Muslim sector of Beirut. Indeed, KGB agents based at the Russian embassy in West Beirut were accused of encouraging attacks on the Americans and Israelis, at a time when the CIA was busy creating an army of Islamic and Arab volunteers to terrorise Russian troops in Afghanistan.

Unlike the ongoing low-key war in the south between Hizbullah and the occupying troops of the Israeli army, last month's incidents - took place in the relatively peaceful north of the country.

Are we likely to see a division of labour in the new millennium? While the Iranian backed Shia soldiers of Hizbullah tackle the Israelis and 'their American backers' in the south, will the task of fighting the 'Russian infidels' fall to the Sunnis?

For almost two decades, the majority of Lebanese have learned to ignore the war in the south, it only occasionally touches their daily lives when Israel launches retaliatory raids after Hizbullah attacks on its troops or settlements inside Israel.

So the spread of strife throughout the country, local newspapers instantly claimed last month, is all part of an Israeli plot to undermine national stability.

To exonerate themselves, the Lebanese point to the fact that the Russian embassy attacker was Palestinian and that the grenade attack on the army check point took place outside a Palestinian refugee camp.

They say the militants used tactics not typical of the Lebanese, rather employing methods typical of the Islamist insurgency in Algeria.

"If truth be told," said a Western diplomat, "Lebanon's own Sunni population, as well as its largely Sunni Palestinian refugees, have been growing more militant of late". This observation was backed up by Lebanese officials who refused to be named for obvious reasons.

During Lebanon's long civil war, Shia militants formed the most radical groups and committed some of the more spectacular terrorist attacks, while the Sunni factions mainly stuck to more traditional lines.

There were Sunni Islamist groups, who fought to further the interest of one Arab power or another but they lacked the prominence of Shia militias, such as Hizbullah.

Their political structure was also different. Most influential Sunni politicians are grandees, whose standing comes from their clan or family position or the accumulation of money, rather than because of their affiliation to an organised party or popular ideology. That situation, however, is changing.

Jamaat Islamiya, the largest radical Sunni party, has continued to improve its position at every local and parliamentary election held over the past five years, after a boost in their funds from donations by rich Islamists world wide.

The Lebanese, under Syrian pressure no doubt, accused Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat of aiding and backing the Sunni Islamists in the north.

The Lebanese army campaign against the Islamists coincided with a wave of arrests of Islamists in Syria, according to Syrian Islamic opposition. The claim was backed by Western diplomats in Damascus, who remind us that the Lebanese army could not have launched an attack on Islamists - or any body else - without Syria's backing.

Lebanese intelligence reports say the fundamentalists of Takfir Wal Hijra - the group that fought the army last month - have long been supported by Mr Arafat and were his allies in the 1983 clashes between Fatah and Syrian army troops in the north. Arafat, the sources said, has ordered Palestinian fighters in refugee camps and their Lebanese allies to store weapons and launch attacks.

The Takfir Wal Hijra was founded in Egypt in 1970s as an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood. The Brotherhood was the first group to introduce terrorism into the Egyptian political scene in the 1940s - and was banned there in the 1950s.

Takfir Wal Hijra was responsible for several acts of violence, including the assassination of President Anwar Sadat in 1981.

Islamists, including Takfir Wal Hijra, were, in the early 1980s backed, financed, armed and even given travel documents by the CIA, British intelligence and other Western and Islamic intelligence agencies in return for their support in the fight against the Russians in Afghanistan.

When Pakistan deported thousands of 'Arab Afghan Mujahedine' in the early 1990s, they regrouped in Sudan, Algeria and Lebanon, which was used as one of several training bases for Islamic militants who later fought in Algeria, and subsequently in Bosnia and Kosovo.

They are supported by groups and donations from rich Muslims in Egypt, Algeria, and some Gulf nations, to the annoyance of the governments of those countries.

They created havoc in Egypt in the 1990s and were responsible for savage atrocities in Algeria, while threatening to destabilise some of the oil-producing nations of the Gulf.

Lebanese sources said these Muslim Brotherhood-aligned elements have received millions of dollars from fundamentalists abroad to establish schools, clinics and charities in the largely undeveloped north of the country. Inevitably some of this money found its way to Takfir Wal Hijra fighters who used it to buy weapons and organise fighters.

As the chances of a peace deal with Israel increase, politicised Lebanese Sunnis, who claim Jerusalem for Islam, and their Palestinian brethren, who fear a settlement that ignores their demands, grow more restive.

Many Sunnis in Lebanon also fear that their influence will decline since they have become the smallest of Lebanon's three main sects, behind the Shias and the Christians.

Syria's president Hafez Al Assad, who has problems with his own radical Sunni opponents, is accused of fueling such insecurities by cutting Sunni politicians down to size.

Those who have been discarded, such as Rafik Hariri, the billionaire ex-prime minister, sometimes try to recoup support by courting well-organised Islamists. However, unlike Shia organisations, only a small minority of Sunnis, even of the more radical persuasion, resort to violence.

The Syrian opposition Islamic Liberation party has accused the regime in Damascus of launching a new crackdown against Islamists in Syria and Lebanon as part of a deal with Israel. The three new year incidents do not seem to have been co-ordinated. But a plethora of militant groups have sprung up in the back alleys of Lebanon's cities and Palestinian refugee camps.

Takfeer Wal Hijra seem to have recruited enough fighters and arms to hold off the army during three days of heavy fighting. And a Lebanese Palestinian Sunni was alone, among all Arab militants, in answering the call of radical clerics to attack Russians in retribution for the killing of Muslims in Chechnya.

For Lebanese who were looking forward to a Syrian-Israeli settlement to end three decades of violence, and the double occupation by Israel and Syria of their small land, the future suddenly looks much less certain than before.