The Los Angeles Times
"NABLUS, WEST BANK — For much of the last week, Fatah gunmen in black masks have ruled the streets here, abducting rivals, looting or burning their property, and intimidating elected officials inside the Hamas-run City Hall. Demoralized by Hamas' military defeat of their comrades in the Gaza Strip, the gunmen are sowing retribution across the West Bank......
"We have seen chaos here before, but this is different. The police have lost control," said Hafez Shaheen, a Hamas municipal legislator who has abandoned his City Hall office in Nablus, the largest West Bank city and epicenter of the violence. "People are afraid for their lives."......
Most of the attacks have been carried out by the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, a decentralized Fatah militia that is nominally loyal to Abbas but acts beyond his control. Like Hamas, it is branded by Israel and the U.S. State Department as a terrorist organization.
The victims of the rampage apparently are unarmed Hamas sympathizers or members of the Islamist group, which enjoys wide popular support in the largely secular West Bank as an alternative to the corrupt rule of the secular Fatah.
Hamas won the mayoral race in Nablus and at least a share of municipal power in five other West Bank cities in elections in 2004 and 2005......
"Hamas has a power base and popular backing here," said Taysir Nasrallah, a member of Fatah's leadership council from Nablus. "You can't erase that with a decree.".....
The Al Aqsa militia arose in 2000, at the start of the second intifada, or uprising, against Israeli occupation. But many of Al Aqsa's units have since turned to armed robbery and extortion.......
Nasrallah, the Fatah leader, said Nablus police were starting to crack down on Al Aqsa-based car theft rings when the fighting in Gaza gave the militants a reprieve."Not only did the police lay off Al Aqsa, the two have been working together to burn down Hamas offices......
Othman Mosleh, a prominent member of the Nablus Chamber of Commerce, is a large, graying man who is not accustomed to being treated with disrespect. Yet while sitting in his wholesale distributorship Saturday, he looked up into the barrel of an AK-47 assault rifle and heard five young masked men ordering him and his brother Salah, in an insulting tone, to turn over their entire stock of imported cigarettes.
The masked Al Aqsa militiamen also made off with a truckload of groceries, saddling the Mosleh brothers with $15,000 in losses......
Anis Salous, a 32-year-old unemployed man who lived with his parents in Nablus, was kidnapped Thursday as he left a mosque after evening prayers. Relatives said he was not a Hamas member. Worried that he hadn't returned home, his mother called Salous' cellphone, relatives said, and was horrified to hear one of his captors laugh into the phone while the others shot her son to death. Al Aqsa claimed responsibility for the slaying......
Former Palestinian Cabinet minister Mustafa Barghouti said he doubted that Abbas' emergency government, made up mostly of politically independent technocrats, could restore order. "If Abbas, the leader of Fatah, is incapable of controlling the Fatah gunmen," he said, "how can this government, which includes not a single major Fatah leader, accomplish it?""
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