NAHR AL-BARED, Lebanon, July 30, 2007 (AFP) - Lebanese troops pursued on Monday their advance deeper into a refugee camp where die-hard Islamists have been fighting the army for more than two months, an army spokesman said.

"We are moving forward. We are controlling more buildings by the day, after clearing them of unexploded ordnance and booby-traps," he told AFP.

"The gunmen now only control about 15,000 square metres (161,000 square feet)," compared with 22,500 square metres last Friday and 45,000 square metres a week before then, he said.

Heavy exchanges of machinegun fire echoed across Nahr al-Bared camp in northern Lebanon on Monday, after a night of army shelling on Islamist positions in the devastated shantytown, an AFP correspondent said.

On Sunday, a soldier was killed in the clashes at Nahr al-Bared, raising to 123 the number of Lebanese troops killed since the fighting with extremists of the Al-Qaeda-inspired Fatah al-Islam group broke out on May 20.

More than 200 people have been killed in the deadliest internal violence since the end of the 15-year civil war in 1990. That toll does not take into account the number of Fatah al-Islam dead, which is not known.

The conflict erupted on May 20 when radical Sunni Muslim Arabs of Fatah al-Islam launched a series of deadly attacks on soldiers around the camp.

Nahr al-Bared's 31,000 refugees have since fled, but the women and children of the Islamist fighters, who are thought to number at least 60, are still inside.

The violence has heightened tensions in a country already in the grip of a grave political crisis that has persisted for the past nine months, paralysing the government in Beirut.

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