Shooting broke out between soldiers at an army post and members of Jund al-Sham, a small Islamist movement that has clashed with the Lebanese army in the past.

Witnesses said gunfire broke out after an argument between a soldier and a veiled woman in a car at the entrance to the Ain el-Hilweh refugee camp, near Sidon in the south of Lebanon Thursday. the soldier wanted the veiled woman to unveil her face so he could check her identity card , one witness said.

The woman had refused to remove her veil and called for help to the group, which then shot at the army post -- prompting the soldiers open fire in response.

An army spokesman confirmed there had been an incident "in the Ain al-Hilweh camp area" in which an anti-tank rocket was fired at an army position, wounding a soldier.

According to reports the veiled woman was the sister of the gunman that shot the soldier and wounded him

About Jund el Sham

Literally meaning The Soldiers of Syria, several sources attribute the term Jund al-Sham to Prophet Mohammed's terming of Palestine as Bilad al-Sham, or Geographic Syria, a term that later came to include present-day Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Palestine.

Most of its members are dissidents of Usbat al-Ansar (Band of Supporters), which is close to the Sunni fundamentalist Islamic Group, itself a splinter of the Muslim Brothers. The predominantly Palestinian group was outlawed by the Lebanese judiciary in 1995 for assassinating a rival cleric that year. Its leader, Ahmed Abdel-Karim Saadi, alias Abu Mohjen, is believed to be hiding in Ein el-Hilweh from an in-absentia death sentence. Usbat al-Nour (Band of Light) is another splinter of his group.

Jund al-Sham is led by Abu Youssef Sharqieh, a former official with Fatah-the Revolutionary Council, which was headed by Sabri Banna. Banna, alias Abu Nidal was found dead in Baghdad before the US-led invasion and was claimed to have committed suicide by the Iraqi authorities. He is blamed by almost all Palestinian groups of having had strong enough ties with Israel's foreign intelligence agency, the Mossad.

Some of Jund al-Sham's leaders fought the Lebanese Army during a rebellion that broke out on New Year's Eve in 1999 in the predominantly Sunni Dinnieh area in northern Lebanon.

The group broke away from Usbat al-Ansar in protest of the mother group's decision to stop bullying people who do not obey Islamic teachings in their daily lives and in protest of Usbat al-Ansar's handing over of one of its leading members to the Lebanese authorities to be tried on charges of killing Lebanese soldiers.

Their alleged link to Zarqawi, who was a leader of bin Laden's al-Qaeda terrorist network , stems from reports that he has arranged training for terrorists at al-Qaeda camps. While he was in Pakistan, Zarqawi made contact with al-Qaeda to train Jordanians. His operatives (called "Jund al-Sham") began to arrive in Afghanistan in large numbers in l999. Some of these operatives trained at al-Qaeda's al-Faruq Camp, where they received full support from al-Qaeda. Zarqawi eventually established his own cell and camp in Herat, Afghanistan.

Jund al-Islam does not consider as infidels only non-Muslims but also most Muslim sects, especially Shiite ones. They even consider as non-Muslims members of Hezbollah, the Shiite militant group that fought a 34 day war against Israel in July and August last year

"Even Palestinian martyrs, including Hamas' martyrs like Ahmad Yassin and Abdel-Aziz al-Rantisi, are not martyrs of Islam," the group's literature says. "They are martyrs of the homeland and the land, but not of Islam. Any victory in Palestine will be exploited by secularists, like the leaders of the Palestinian Authority; it will not be a victory for Muslims."

They reportedly consider Christians as "remnants of the Crusades" and do not believe in fighting Israel to liberate Palestine but within the framework of what they consider as a historical conflict between Muslims and Jews, recalling the wars that Prophet Mohammed fought with Jewish tribes.

Their opponents say their number does not exceed 60 and claim they are mostly fugitives who are wanted by the Lebanese authorities. They say they are stationed in internal alleys of Ein el-Hilweh where it is hard for the Popular Committees, which run the affairs of all camps, to track them down.

Picture: Lebanese soldiers stand alert when gunmen belonging to the Jund al-Sham militant group opened fire on them as a school boy passes by in the southern city of Sidon, close to the Palestinian refugee camp of Ein el-Hilweh