portions of West Beirut. On 21–22 February, the week of fighting was ended by the arrival in West Beirut of 7,000 Syrian Commando troops under the command of Major general Ghazi Kanaan, assisted by Lebanese Internal Security Forces (ISF) gendarmes, who immediately closed over fifty militia "offices" and banned the carrying of weapons in public, detaining in the process many young men with beards suspected of being militiamen and began executing anyone found with unauthorised weapons. An incident on 24 February in which over twenty Hizbollah supporters were killed led to intense pressure on Syria from Iran and an end to the army’s advance into the Southern suburbs, Dahieh, with its 800,000 Shia residents. Shortly afterwards Syria troops took over positions around the camps and began allowing medicines into them. Women were allowed to leave to find food. Men were not. It was estimated that there were 200 PLO fighters remaining in Shatila Camp and 700 in Bourj el-Barajneh. There were around 20,000 non-combatants. During the last bout of fighting around 240 people were killed and 1,400 wounded, many of the casualties were in the Shia districts which were shelled from the Chouf. In the summer of 1988, Abu Musa returned to the camps, and another 127 people were killed in the fighting. After this episode, the War of the Camps was considered to be concluded by July 1988. Consequences Internal fighting had happened before in the Muslim/leftist camp (the former Lebanese National Movement or LNM) but never on such massive scale. This inflicted a severe blow in terms of public image for many Muslim militias and destroyed the perception of unity. The main Lebanese Sunni militia, the Al-Mourabitoun, was crushed and their leader Ibrahim Kulaylat sent into exile. The results were mitigated since the PLO retained control of some of the camps. At the end of the war, an official Lebanese government report stated that the total number of casualties for these battles was put at 3,781 dead and 6,787 injured in the fighting between Amal and the Palestinians. Furthermore, the number of Palestinians killed in inter-factional clashes between pro-Syrian and pro-Arafat organizations was around 2,000. The real number is probably higher because thousands of Palestinians were not registered in Lebanon and the blockade meant that no officials could access the camps, so that all the casualties could not be counted. As the Amal-initiated "War of the Camps" against