Fatah al-Islam, (Arabic: فتح الإسلام, English: Conquest of Islam) is a radical Sunni Islamist group that formed in November 2006 in a Palestinian refugee camp, located in Lebanon. It has been described as a militant jihadist movement that draws inspiration from al-Qaeda. It became very well known in May 2007 and June 2007 after engaging in combat against the Lebanese Army in the Nahr al-Bared UNRWA Palestinian refugee camp. The United States Department of State classified the group as a terrorist organization on August 9, 2007 but it was not classified as such anymore on November 24, 2010.

Fatah al-Islam was led by a fugitive militant named Shaker al-Abssi, a Palestinian refugee who was born in Jericho in 1955. Al-Abssi was once a pilot with the rank of colonel.

Al-Abssi's first militant activities can be traced to connections he established with a secular Palestinian militant group named Fatah al-Intifada in Libya, after it defected from the umbrella Fateh movement in 1983. From Libya, al-Abssi reportedly moved to Damascus, where he made close ties with Fatah al-Intifada's number two in command, Abu Khaled al-Omla.

Seymour (Sy) Myron Hersh (born April 8, 1937) is an American Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist and author based in Washington, D.C. He is a regular contributor to The New Yorker magazine on military and security matters. He has also won two National Magazine Awards and is a "five-time Polk winner and recipient of the 2004 George Orwell Award."

He first gained worldwide recognition in 1969 for exposing the My Lai Massacre and its cover-up during the Vietnam War, for which he received the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting. His 2004 reports on the US military's mistreatment of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison gained much attention.