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It's the kind of gun culture more commonly associated with the streets of Los Angeles or New York: eight shootings and four deaths.

But this is not the United States - it's Sydney,  the battleground for an increasingly vicious war between rival criminal gangs of mostly Lebanese Muslim background.

The city, better known for its beaches, harbour and enviable lifestyle, has been shocked by the spate of shootings, which started in July.

The latest death came on Thursday, when unemployed Ahmad Fahda, 25, was shot by masked men armed with semi-automatic pistols as he filled his car with petrol at a suburban service station.

'He had about 15 bullet holes in his back and when the paramedics turned him over, he had about four more in his chest,' a witness said.

Police said yesterday  that Fahda was an associate of Ziad 'Ziggy' Razzak, 24, a convicted drug dealer, who was murdered in a friend's house on October 14.

The gunmen struck before dawn, spraying the home with more than 100 bullets and also killing mother of two Melissa Nemra, 22, who was asleep in a front room.

That was one month after Razzak's uncle, Ali Abdulrazzak, 34, was shot dead in the street by three gunmen wearing balaclavas while leaving afternoon prayers at a mosque in the  suburb of Lakemba.

The shootings began at the end of July, when a 25-year-old man was shot at while visiting a butcher in the nearby district of Bankstown. Since then, barely a week has gone by without a shooting incident, many involving homes being raked with bullets by gunmen in cars.

In a country where gun crimes are still rare, the killings have prompted outrage and condemnation from politicians, community leaders and the media.

'How dare you do this to our city' ran the headline in The Daily Telegraph tabloid newspaper on Friday.

New South Wales Police Minister John Watkins said: 'These bloody turf wars will not be allowed to be played out on the streets of Sydney.'

Meanwhile, the head of the New South Wales police force, Ken Moroney, said the 'angst, anguish and uncertainty' the killings were creating was a 'form of mental rape'. And John Brogden, leader of the state's opposition Liberal Party, said parts of the city were turning into 'a jungle'.

Police say the violence is the result of a turf war between two rival Lebanese-Australian families battling for control of drug-dealing operations and car 'rebirthing', where stolen cars are repainted and sold on the black market.

For the Lebanese community, the shootings could not come at a worse time. Australian Muslims have been subjected to racial taunts and vilification since the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States. Anti-Muslim sentiment was also fuelled last year by a series of sickening rapes carried out by a gang of Muslim youths on young white Australian women.

New South Wales Premier Bob Carr added to the controversy in the wake of the October 14 double murder, when he apparently threatened to deport those responsible, regardless of whether they were Australian citizens.

'My message is simple: obey the law in Australia or ship out of Australia,' Mr Carr said. 'We're not going to see, step by step, our civilisation dragged back to medieval standards of revenge cycles. Simple as that.'

Other political leaders have been at pains to stress that the violence is being carried out by a tiny minority, saying that the majority of Arab-Australians are law-abiding citizens, who have been just as shocked by the murders as the rest of the country.

A senior Muslim leader, Egyptian-born Sheik Taj el-dene Elhilaly, 62, was quick to condemn the feud. 'This is sickening. There is no room for this in our society.'



Shootings turn Sydney streets into gangland war zone