Syria’s rebel fighters brace themselves for Aleppo assault

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Five brothers who are members of a rebel group called Martyr Al-Abbas, operating under the Free Syrian Army, pose for a picture in Aleppo. Photo: Muzaffar Salman/Reuters

Sakhour, Aleppo, June 16, 2013 by Richard Spencer

It was long after dark when the rebel fighter saw something through his night-vision goggles. In the past, the regime had made its moves openly, by daylight, but this seemed different.

There were figures flitting across the end of the street ahead of him, perhaps 150 yards away, one by one. Then he realised that there were others, already much closer, half the distance.

He called the alert, and within minutes reinforcements had arrived, 1,000 in all, such was the panic, and so overcrowding the front that some had to be withdrawn again. In the battle that ensued, half a dozen rebel fighters were killed, before they beat off the incursion, sending the regime’s troops “fleeing, leaving their weapons behind”, said the fighter, known as “Bushi”, and his friends, boasting.

The attack on the eastern suburb of Sakhour had turned into another skirmish in Aleppo’s long war, leaving the front lines just where they were before, but it gave food for thought.

Was this the start of the regime advance on Aleppo,Syria’s biggest city, promised since the fall of the Qusayr ten days ago? Was it an attempt to seize the flyover the checkpoint was protecting, which if over-run would cut off rebel supply lines around the city? Or was it just a test of their defences?

Aleppo this weekend is waiting for two things: the enemy onslaught, and American weapons. It is more confident of the first.

The fall of Qusayr, 120 miles to the south, has changed expectations in the Syrian war, both inside the country and out. The regime promptly announced it would move troops north to take the fight to Syria’s biggest city, half of which has been in rebel hands since July.

With them came Hizbollah, whose thousands of reinforcements turned the tide in Qusayr and are now said to be massing on the north side of Aleppo. Bushi and his friends believed Hizbollah were also among the Sakhour attackers, and even Iranians, given the accents they heard, though in Syria now everyone claims to hear Lebanese and Iranian voices.

On Thursday night, the United States gave its own response to Qusayr, that it would be putting its might behind the rebel cause. President Barack Obama had suddenly decided that, as France and Britain have been insisting for weeks, President Bashar al-Assad had used chemical weapons, and could not be allowed to win.

He is still set firmly against sending in the cavalry, and there will be no “boots on the ground” – nor much else, on the record at least. But officials were quietly briefing that anti-tank weapons and command-and-control vehicles were on the list.

They are also mooting the possibility – played down in other quarters – of limited no-fly zones on the southern and northern borders, with US bases at Incirlik in Turkey and Al-Mafrek in Jordan and Patriot missile defence systems handily placed. A military exercise, Operation Eager Lion, with 5,000 US troops including 300 US Marines, is conveniently also under way in Jordan.

The opposition will be rescued one way or the other, is the implication.

In Sakhour, the rebels claim they do not see it as a rescue. “Morale since the fall of Qusayr has been higher,” said Abdulmajid Malah, a Free Syrian Army fighter, over a plentiful lunch on Saturday of hummus, bean stew and salad in a rear base. “Why? In one word - Hizbollah.”

The public involvement of the Lebanese militia had galvanised the opposition, he said. Moreover, the losses the outgunned defenders of Qusayr had inflicted, with more than 130 Hizbollah killed by most counts, was itself a victory.

Meanwhile, less noticed, the rebels were still on the advance on a number of smaller fronts in the north. “Whether you in the West support us or not, we will defeat Assad. That’s my last word,” said another fighter, Ahmed Eissa.

Their confidence had an air of desperation. They had been waiting for more than a year for American help, they said, but it had never come, and they still did not believe it is on its way. “It is all lies, lies built on promises,” a former fighter, Abu Ahmed, who lost one leg in battle last autumn, said.

Up front, at the flyover, they did not even pretend. Standing next to “Bushi” when he spotted the regime “trying to sneak in”, was Mohammed Shamma, a heavily bearded fighter from the Tawhid Brigade, Aleppo’s largest.

“I used 300 bullets in one fight,” he said of that night, Thursday. “All that ammunition, gone. Our need is now urgent.

“When they come, you need to have your supplies right next to you. You need to have them there the next day, too, to be ready when they attack again.

Proper supplies - one or two magazines isn’t enough. What if they attack two or three times? Then we would be right out.

“If help is coming, let it come.” He said demand was such that a single bullet for a Kalashnikov now cost the equivalent of a euro.

Mr Obama’s hesitation over providing weapons directly comes from fear of sophisticated equipment landing in the hands of radical jihadists such as Jabhat al-Nusra, the rebel group affiliated to Al-Qaeda.

In particular, he has vetoed high-end, heat-seeking portable surface-to-air missiles - MANPADs – which could be used against civilian air-liners.

Rebels say they want them because whenever they order advances of their own the regime retaliates with air raids against civilian areas.

But evidence from Aleppo and from fighters in Qusayr suggests even lower end resources would make a significant difference. Besides ammunition, rebels particularly want anti-tank missiles, the value of which they have discovered after seizing Russian-made Konkurs weapons from regime bases and turning them against their previous owners.

In Sakhour, they have now dug a tank trap across the approach to the flyover. But a serious offensive by high-end Russian T82 tanks, impervious to rocket-propelled grenades, would be a major challenge.

There are significant differences between Aleppo and Qusayr, and not merely of scale.

Qusayr, a small Sunni town, was surrounded by regime-held areas to the east and south and by loyalist Shia villages and Hizbollah territory in Lebanon to the west. Aleppo is not only larger but in the Sunni heartlands where the Assad regime is most detested.

It is also 30 miles from Turkey, the rebels’ closest ally. The challenge facing the regime if it makes a serious attempt to retake it is immediately visible on the city’s streets, where shops are full of supplies, vegetables and spit-roasted chickens shipped in from the farms to the north and east.

While Qusayr’s women and children had largely fled in advance of the final battle, Aleppo has been a magnet, streets just 100 yards from the front jammed with cars and food stalls. Civilian officials believe more people are living in the city now than before the war.

The Assad regime has not been squeamish about civilian casualties, but the potential slaughter from an all-out battle would be on an altogether different scale.

The obliviousness to the impending storm is perhaps more shocking than the conditions in which people are living in Sakhour, a working class neighbourhood crumbling from gunfire where windows of upper floors of houses even far from the fighting are shattered by sniper fire.

The flyover and the nearby roundabout are in a hollow, making them hard to defend and exposing raised residential areas on either side, leaving them shattered and ghostly. In another minor battle on Thursday night, two civilians were killed when the regime responded with artillery to an unplanned and ill-disciplined attack further north.

At a maternity unit just half a mile away, mothers are still giving birth.

Abu Qasem, the anaesthetist, said he did not think residents would leave when the attack came, whatever the danger.

He said many had fled the regime air raids last year, but had returned after running out of money. The city was in quiet despair, he said, adding that every woman who gave birth told him they did not want to bring a baby into the world, but that they had searched in vain for contraceptive pills.

“We are living in a time of catastrophe,” he said. “But nobody will leave. In any case, most people wish they were dead already.”

Source: telegraph.co.uk

Decision to arm Syrian rebels was reached weeks ago, U.S. officials say

Washington, June 15, 2013 by Karen DeYoung, Anne Gearan and Scott Wilson

Video here

President Obama’s decision to begin arming the Syrian rebels followed more than a year of internal debate over whether it was worth the dual risks of involving the United States in another war and seeing U.S. weapons fall into the hands of extremist groups among the rebels.

The White House said the final push came this week after U.S. intelligence agencies concluded with “high certainty” that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s forces had used chemical weapons against the rebels.

But U.S. officials said that the determination to send weapons had been made weeks ago and that the chemical weapons finding provided fresh justification to act.

As Syrian government ­forces, with the help of Hezbollah and Iranian militias, began to turn the war in Assad’s favor after rebel gains during the winter, Obama ordered officials in late April to begin planning what weaponry to send and how to deliver it.

That decision effectively ended the lengthy disagreement among those in the White House — primarily Obama’s political advisers — who argued that providing arms would be a slippery slope to greater involvement, military leaders who said it would be too risky and expensive, and State Department officials who insisted that Syria and the region would collapse in chaos if action were not taken, officials said.

Even after Thursday’s announcement, critics in Washington, rebel leaders and even some U.S. allies described the prospect of sending light arms and ammunition as disappointing. The rebels have asked for armor-piercing and anti-aircraft weapons as well as other heavy equipment.

The administration has continued to deflect questions about what equipment it will provide. Any use of the U.S. military “would be things we could discuss in great detail,” Benjamin J. Rhodes, Obama’s deputy national security adviser for strategic communications, said Friday. But “when you get into questions of provision of assistance to opposition groups, we are just more limited in our ability to say, well, here is a list.”

In taking a modest first step onto Syria’s battlefield, Obama is joining a proxy war far more complicated than it was even a few months ago. It now features the United States and its European and Arab allies on one side, and Russia, Iran and its sponsored militias on the other in support of Assad.

The rapidly shifting balance in the war has made untenable the peace talks proposed last month by Secretary of State John F. Kerry and his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov. With the opposition in a position of weakness, and little immediate incentive for Assad to agree to any deal requiring him to give up power, talks initially scheduled for late May are now unlikely to take place before fall, according to officials and diplomats who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal administration deliberations.

“There does need to be a change of things on the ground,” said a Western diplomat.

The topic will be taken up by leaders of the Group of Eight, who convene Monday in Northern Ireland. Obama will also meet with Russian President Vladi­mir Putin on the summit’s sidelines to discuss Syria, among other issues.

On Friday, Russian officials called the evidence of chemical weapons use shared by the administration and its European allies inconclusive, setting up a potentially difficult Obama-Putin exchange.

“We still continue to discuss with the Russians whether there’s a way to bring together elements of the regime and the opposition to achieve a political settlement,” Rhodes said. “There are no illusions that that’s going to be easy.”

Western diplomats and U.S. officials said Putin is unlikely to soften his support for Assad at the summit, given his belief that time — for the moment at least — appears to be on the Syrian leader’s side.

More than 90,000 civilians have been killed in the worsening civil conflict, now in its third year. Obama’s caution — supported by a majority of Americans surveyed in recent polls — has angered some congressional Republicans and human rights activists, while leaving European and regional allies frustrated by what they see as U.S. dithering.

“What we’ve asked for is not weapons but U.S. leadership,” said one senior Arab official whose government helps fund the rebels.

Governments in the region, aside from Iran, are virtually uniform in their desire to see Assad go. But they have been divided over what they would like to see replace him. At an April meeting with core opposition supporters in Istanbul, Kerry forged an agreement that all military aid — including from Persian Gulf countries that the United States believes has provided weapons and financial support to Islamist extremist groups among the rebels — would come together behind the U.S.-backed Free Syrian Army’s Supreme Military Council, headed by Gen. Salim Idriss.

That effort has had mixed results. Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Jordan all believe that Qatar and, to some extent, Turkey continue to allow money to be funneled to extremists, although in reduced amounts. U.S. intelligence estimates that extremists constitute less than 10 percent of a rebel force of about 70,000, but they have been particularly effective on the battlefield.

U.S. officials believe that the change in policy will help project leadership and coalesce their international backers. It will also, they said, provide a psychological boost to rebel ­forces spooked by what officials described as an exaggerated view of the strength of Assad’s ­forces and their Hezbollah allies. An outright rebel win is seen as both unlikely and less desirable than a negotiated settlement that leaves Syrian institutions intact.

Divisions within the Obama administration on Syria date at least from last summer, when then-Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and then-CIA Director David H. Petraeus advocated a limit plan to provide arms. The Pentagon has been consistently leery of U.S. involvement, arguing that true military options such as a no-fly zone or even the use of standoff weapons to degrade Assad’s air assets would inevitably draw the United States into direct confrontation. Others were concerned that U.S. weapons would end up in the hands of al-Qaeda-linked extremists.

Kerry, despite palpable frustration in recent months over opposition disorganization, has said arming the rebels is likely to have a “multiplier effect” among other nations supporting them. He called several key foreign diplomats Friday to promote or defend the new U.S. policy, including Lavrov and his British, French and Turkish counterparts.

Previous promises of ­non-lethal supplies from the United States have been slow to materialize on the ground. Congress was just notified this week that the administration intended to provide $123 million in body armor, night-vision goggles and other supplies to Idriss’s Supreme Military Council, aid that Kerry announced at the end of April.

“It’s true that there have been times in which we couldn’t move assistance quite as fast as we would have liked,” Rhodes said Friday. But, he said, there have been marked improvements over the past several months in both communications and transportation pipelines to the rebels and among them. He said the administration was “confident” the new aid would be delivered “in a relatively timely manner.”

Despite reports that the administration is also seriously considering implementing a no-fly zone over some rebel-held areas, Rhodes said, “we haven’t ruled out options, but I think people need to understand . . . the difficulty of some of the options that have been presented.”

At this point, he said, a no-fly zone was not seen by the administration as being in U.S. national interests.

He also said the United States and its allies would not move to destroy Assad’s chemical weapons stocks. “These are dangerous weapons, and the notion that you can destroy them if you aren’t physically present is an extremely challenging one,” he said. “The preference would be to have this be a priority for the international community . . . in post-Assad Syria.”

Source: Washington Post

In Lebanon, traumatized Syrians struggle to survive

June 15, 2013 by AFP

Sadness is written on the face of 45-year-old Jamila, living in the open-air municipal courtyard of Arsal in Lebanon and still traumatized by her escape from Syria’s former rebel stronghold Al-Qusayr.

Along with her sick husband and three children, she fled the town in Syria’s central province of Homs in the hours before it fell on June 5 to regime forces backed by Lebanon’s Hezbollah.

They had to watch fellow Syrians who died on the way buried hastily by the roadside as they made for the safety of Arsal town across the border inside Lebanon.

Now they are struggling to survive, with no shelter of their own and almost no way to feed themselves. When food is handed out, the refugees queue in their hundreds for rations.

“We left in group after group a few hours before the fall of the town. We were practically running, it was everyone for themselves,” Jamila says, her sick husband lying on a mattress nearby.

“Dozens died of thirst, or their injuries, or just plain exhaustion,” she says, wrapped in a black veil, her voice faltering.

“The men dug graves in a hurry to bury those who died. It was horrible.”

Thirst was a constant companion, with the refugees so desperate that they tried to draw sap from twigs and drops of water from irrigation hoses.

Guided by rebel fighters, they ate fruit from trees along the route, and even raw potatoes dug up from fields.

The conflict in Syria, now in its third year, has changed the face of Arsal, a Sunni Muslim town of 40,000 residents that is now also home to some 35,000 refugees, including 3,000 who arrived from Al-Qusayr in just 10 days.

With nowhere to live, some refugees have set up makeshift shelters in the corners of the municipality courtyard, suspending blankets from trees to provide rudimentary privacy and shade.

“We have no money and no food,” Jamila says.

UN agencies and NGOs from Qatar, Denmark and Norway are trying to meet the needs of the refugees, but their work is “insufficient,” municipal council member Wafiq Khalaf says, urging that tents be distributed.

Some residents have offered up empty rooms or buildings still under construction as temporary shelters.

One group of 17 people are living in a stairwell. In the next building, 30-year-old Mohammad has taken up residence in a garage with his three children, the eldest just five.

“Their mother was killed by a rocket on the road,” he says sadly.

A one-time member of the ruling Baath party, he speaks bitterly about his fate.

“For years, we used to sing ‘Long live Bashar al-Assad’ and this is how they repaid us.”

In the municipality courtyard, a boyish-looking 18-year-old is covered in bandaged wounds that he says were sustained “in combat.”

He fled Al-Qusayr on foot, but insists he want to go back to Syria “in order to bring down the regime.”

For other refugees, daily life and the struggle to survive are a greater priority.

“There’s nowhere to wash… we’ve been homeless for seven days,” sighs another, Rima.

She fled with her husband and their four children, including a baby just 10 months old, in a car.

They say they were turned back at the border with Jordan before arriving in Lebanon by travelling through Damascus province.

The Arsal region shares some 55 kilometers of border with Syria, packed with illegal crossings used by those desperate to flee the violence that has killed more than 93,000 people.

Syrian aircraft have bombed the area many times, the regime arguing that it is “chasing down terrorists”, its description for rebels.

The Sunni region largely supports the Syrian uprising, which is Sunni-dominated, but lies within a mostly Shiite area that is a bastion of the Hezbollah movement, an ally of the Damascus regime.

The flow of refugees shows no sign of slowing, with a truck carrying another 30 people arriving on Friday.

“May God make them suffer as they have made us suffer!” one woman cries as the vehicle pulls up.

Source: now.mmedia.me

Iran emerging as victor in Syrian conflict

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Beirut, June 12, 2013 by Liz Sly

As fighters with Lebanon’s Hezbollah movement wage the battles that are helping Syria’s regime survive, their chief sponsor, Iran, is emerging as the biggest victor in the wider regional struggle for influence that the Syrian conflict has become.

With top national security aides set to meet at the White House on Wednesday toreassess options in light of recent setbacks for the rebels seeking Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s ouster, the long-term outcome of the war remains far from assured, analysts and military experts say.

But after the Assad regime’s capture of the small but strategic town of Qusair last week — a battle in which the Iranian-backed Shiite militia played a pivotal role — Iran’s supporters and foes alike are mulling a new reality: that the regional balance of power appears to be tilting in favor of Tehran, with potentially profound implications for a Middle East still grappling with the upheaval wrought by the Arab Spring revolts.

“This is an Iranian fight. It is no longer a Syrian one,” said Mustafa Alani, director of security and defense at the Dubai-based Gulf Research Council. “The issue is hegemony in the region.”

The ramifications extend far beyond the borders of Syria, whose location at the heart of the Middle East puts it astride most of the region’s fault lines, from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to the disputes left over from the U.S. occupation of Iraq, from the perennial sectarian tensions in Lebanon to Turkey’s aspirations to restore its Ottoman-era reach into the Arab world.

An Iran emboldened by the unchecked exertion of its influence in Syria would also be emboldened in other arenas, Alani said, including the negotiations over its nuclear program, as well as its ambitions in Iraq, Lebanon and beyond.

“If Iran wins this conflict and the Syrian regime survives, Iran’s interventionist policy will become wider and its credibility will be enhanced,” he added.

From Iran’s point of view, sustaining Assad’s regime also affirms Iran’s control over a corridor of influence stretching from Tehran through Baghdad, Damascus and Beirut to Maroun al-Ras, a hilltop town on Lebanon’s southern border that offers a commanding view of northern Israel, according to Mohammad Obaid, a Lebanese political analyst with close ties to Hezbollah.

Iran has sought to minimize its visible involvement in Syria so as not to exacerbate sectarian tensions that have been inflamed by a conflict pitting an overwhelmingly Sunni opposition against a regime dominated by Assad’s minority Shiite-affiliated sect, Obaid said.

Iran has provided advice, money and arms to Assad’s regime, but the manpower needed to bolster his forces, flagging after two years of trying to contain the revolt, has come from Hezbollah, which was founded in the 1980s with help from Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps and has become Lebanon’s leading military and political force.

“Hezbollah is part of the Iranian strategy,” Obaid said. “This counts as a victory for the group of Iran, Syria, Iraq and Hezbollah against the group backed by the United States.”

Supporters of the Syrian opposition contrast the hesitancy of the U.S. administration in offering arms to the outgunned, poorly trained and deeply divided rebels with the commitment that Iran has shown to its Damascus ally.

The U.S. goal was to pressure Assad into making concessions at the negotiating table, without delivering a resounding military victory to the rebels that might have brought Islamists to power in Damascus, said Amr al-Azm, a history professor at Shawnee State University in Ohio who is Syrian and is active in the opposition. Instead, a proposed peace conference in Geneva seems likely to be held on Assad’s terms, should it go ahead.

“Politically we’re screwed, and militarily we’re taking a pounding,” Azm said. “America talked the talk while Iran walked the walk.”

This would not be the first time that Iran has outmaneuvered the United States since the Iranian revolution brought Shiite clerics to power in Tehran in 1979. But the assertion of Shiite power in Syria rankles Sunnis across the region, compounding the dangers that the Syrian conflict could provoke a wider and even bloodier war than the one currently underway, which is estimated to have killed at least 80,000 people.

Escalating violence in Iraq and growing tensions in Lebanon, whose conflicts are inextricably intertwined with the increasingly sectarian nature of the war in Syria, underscore the risk that centuries-old religious rivalries between Sunnis and Shiites will be aggravated by Iran’s role. The leading religious authority in Saudi Arabia and al-Qaeda chief Ayman al-Zawahiri have in the past week called on Sunnis to volunteer to fight in Syria, marking a potentially dangerous convergence that could herald an intensified influx of Sunni jihadis.

Saudi Arabia’s role

Saudi Arabia, the leading Sunni power in the region and Washington’s closest Arab ally, is unlikely to tolerate an ascendant Iran even if the United States chooses to remain aloof, said Jamal Khashoggi, director of the al-Arab television channel.

“It is a serious blow in the face of Saudi Arabia, and I don’t think the Saudis will accept it. They will do something, whether on their own or with America,” he said. “Syria is the heart of the Arab world, and for it to be officially conquered by the Iranians is unacceptable.”

One way in which Saudi Arabia could influence the outcome is by facilitating unchecked supplies of arms to the rebels, analysts say. Although the umbrella Free Syrian Army has received small quantities of weaponry from Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar over the past year, the United States has sought to control the flow, vetting the recipients and restricting the caliber of the weapons provided.

After videos surfaced in March of Islamist groups wielding antitank weapons funneled across the Jordanian border by Saudi Arabia, the United States imposed a freeze on all further deliveries, putting the rebels at a disadvantage just as Iran, through Hezbollah, was gearing up to rejuvenate the Assad regime’s army with reinforcements, according to rebel leaders.

A symbolic battle

Military analysts caution against overestimating the impact of the rebel defeat in Qusair on what is likely to be a long and unpredictable war. The obscure western town abutting Hezbollah-controlled territory in Lebanon almost certainly offered an easier conquest than other rebel strongholds, such as the city of Aleppo, where the regime is touting an imminent offensive.

The rebels are continuing to press attacks in the northern, eastern and southern peripheries of the country even as the government appears to be tightening its grip on the central provinces of Damascus and Homs, raising the specter that the country will be partitioned into enclaves backed by rival Sunni and Shiite regional powers. A suicide bombing in Damascus on Tuesday highlighted the likelihood that the rebels will sustain an insurgency similar to the one that persists in Iraq even if they are defeated militarily.

The chief significance of the battle for Qusair lay in the powerful symbolism of the role played by Hezbollah, which eliminated any doubt that the Syrian conflict has turned into a proxy war for regional influence, said Charles Lister, an analyst with IHS Jane’s defense consultancy in London.

“External actors are becoming increasingly decisive and pivotal in terms of where the conflict is going,” he said. And if the United States increased its support for the rebels, Assad’s allies would be likely to boost theirs, he added.

“The conflict has regionalized, and, unfortunately, that gives it the potential to drag on longer,” he said. “As long as one side increases its assistance, the other will see the need to do so, too.”

Source: Washington Post

Nasrallah says Hezbollah will not bow to sectarian threats

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Hezbollah’s leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah delivers a speech on recent developments on June 14, 2013. Photo: NOW

June 14, 2013

Hezbollah’s leader on Friday said that his party would continue its military role in Syria and warned against sectarian rhetoric amid the growing tension between Sunnis and Shiites following Hezbollah’s military intervention on the side of the Bashar al-Assad regime.

“We will be where we should be, and what we began we shall continue when it comes to taking up our responsibilities,” Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah said in an implicit reference to his party’s fighting in Syria.

“If anyone thinks that by using lies, killings, or threats we will change our stances, they are wrong,” he said in a televised address during a commemoration for Hezbollah’s injured fighters.

“Our position after Al-Qusayr is the same as before, nothing has changed.”

Nasrallah further defended his party’s role in Syria by warning that “those who want to bring down Syria, want to bring down Lebanon and the rest of the region and put it under the control of the Israeli-American-takfiri powers.”

Hezbollah-led troops defeated rebels in Al-Qusayr on June 5, weeks after Nasrallah promised his Shiite party would emerge victorious in its fighting alongside the Syrian regime. Following the conclusion of the battle, Gulf powers have acted to blacklist the Shiite party while Sunni clerics, including Saudi Arabia’s grand mufti, have called on their Sunni brethren to take action against Hezbollah.

Nasrallah responded to these developments by warning that opponents of his party and the Assad regime were “trying to create a sectarian war in the region.”

“The crisis in Syria is not pitting two sects against each other, the battle in Syria is not sectarian, but those who consider it as such are those who are weak and those who are losing out.”

“The worst that has happened recently is sectarian rhetoric,” Nasrallah added.

The Hezbollah chief also addressed the looming threat of sectarian violence breaking out in Lebanon, saying that  security incidents in the Beqaa are worsening ties between Sunnis and Shiites.

“[Some] are working on creating problems between Sunnis and Shiites in the Beqaa.”

“We will find a solution to this problem,” he added.

Barrages of rocket fire originating from Syria in recent weeks have hit Shiite-populated areas of the Beqaa amid Syrian rebels’ threats to fight Hezbollah in Lebanon. Meanwhile, the Syrian regime on Wednesday bombed the center of the Sunni-populated town of Arsal for the first time since the Syria conflict erupted.

“I call on our supporters to exercise self-restraint,” Nasrallah also said, especially since “any dispute is being given a sectarian meaning nowadays.”

The Hezbollah chief further defended his party as an “integral” component of Lebanon.

“We are a constituent part of this country, this land and the Lebanese people,” he said, warning, “We were born here, we will be martyred and buried here, and no one will rout us out of here.”

Nasrallah also addressed critics who say his party aims to stifle dissenting voices within the Shiite sect itself, saying, “Let [Shiites] object and criticize us.”

Nasrallah’s comments come after the Shiite anti-Hezbollah Lebanon Option Gathering party was attacked during a demonstration outside the Iranian embassy on Sunday, which led to the death of one Hezbollah critic.

Source: now.mmedia.me

UN human rights council slams Hezbollah’s role in Syria

June 14, 2013 by AFP

The UN’s top human rights forum on Friday condemned the involvement of foreign fighters in Syria’s civil war, singling out the pro-regime forces sent across the border by Lebanon’s Hezbollah.

The 47-member UN Human Rights Council backed a resolution from the United States, Britain, Qatar, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Turkey, with 37 votes in favor, nine abstentions and just one member, Venezuela, against.

The text said that the council “condemns the intervention of all foreign combatants in the Syrian Arab Republic, including those fighting on behalf of the regime and most recently Hezbollah”.

It said that the involvement of foreign forces in the conflict “further exacerbates the deteriorating human rights and humanitarian situation, which has a serious negative impact on the region”.

At a May 29 sitting the council had also condemned the Syrian regime’s use of foreign fighters in the besieged town of Qusayr, near the Lebanese border, and ordered an urgent probe into the killings there but stopped short of naming Hezbollah.

Friday’s resolution condemned “in the strongest terms all massacres taking place in the Syrian Arab Republic and stresses the need to hold those responsible to account”, as well as “all violence, especially against civilians, irrespective of where it comes from, including terrorist acts and acts of violence that may foment sectarian tensions”.

It also noted the “widespread and systematic gross violations of human rights and fundamental freedoms and all violations of international humanitarian law by the Syrian authorities and the government-affiliated Shabbiha militias”.

At the same time it also condemned similar abuses by rebels, but underlined that a UN commission of inquiry had stated that they had not reached the intensity and scale of those committed by the regime camp.

The council also reiterated its demand that Syria admit the commission of inquiry, which was set up in September 2011 but has failed to win entry.

The council vote came a day after new figures from the United Nations showed that at least 93,000 people — including 6,500 — have been killed since the war erupted in March 2011 after protests against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

More than 1.6 million Syrian refugees have fled to neighboring countries, and the UN warns that the number could more than double this year.

Source: now.mmedia.me

France says Syrian army must be stopped before Aleppo

June 12, 2013 by AFP

France on Wednesday urged the international community to stop the progression of Syrian troops, backed by Hezbollah fighters and Iran, towards the strategic northern town of Aleppo.

After winning a strategic victory by retaking Al-Qusayr, an important town near the border with Lebanon, Syrian troops are now focusing their attention on Aleppo as they continue to gain ground against the rebels.

“We must stop this progression before Aleppo. It is the next target of Hezbollah and of the Iranians,” Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said on France 2 television.

“We need to re-balance things because over the past few weeks the troops of Bashar al-Assad [Syrian leader] and especially Hezbollah and the Iranians, along with Russian arms, have gained considerable ground.”

But he did not expand on how Syrian troops, buoyed by military support from its Shiite allies Hezbollah and Iran, should be stopped.

On Tuesday, France’s foreign ministry warned that the nearly 27-month Syrian conflict, which is estimated to have killed at least 94,000 people, was at a “turning point.”

“What should we do under these conditions to reinforce the opposition armed forces? We have had these discussions with our partners, with the Americans, the Saudis, the Turks, many others,” said ministry spokesman Philippe Lalliot.

“We cannot leave the opposition in the current state.”

The European Union, under pressure from London and Paris, last month failed to renew an arms embargo on Syria, leaving individual member states free from August 1 to supply weapons to the opposition, if they decide to do so.

Fabius said France had not yet decided what to do after the deadline.

“Bashar… used chemical weapons in an outrageous manner. We must stop him because, if there is no re-balancing on the ground, there will be no peace conference in Geneva as the opposition will refuse to come,” he said.

The United States said it is evaluating information received from France which Paris has billed as proof that chemical weapons have been used in Syria.

The United States and Russia are meanwhile trying to organize a peace conference bringing together Assad’s regime and the rebels in a bid to end the fighting.

Amid wrangling between opposition leaders and a fierce debate over who should attend, the date for the talks initially slated for May has now slipped back to July at the earliest.

Source: now.mmedia.me

U.S. Seen Moving Closer to Move on Arming Syrian Rebels

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Syrian opposition fighters are seen in the northern city of Aleppo. Photo: Ricardo Garcia Vilanova/AFP/Getty Images

June 11. 2013 by Nicole Gaouette

The Obama administration is weighing more seriously whether to provide Syrian rebels with arms and ammunition as momentum in the conflict shifts toward the Assad regime, according to a former U.S. official.

“I believe there is now a sense of urgency in administration deliberations on whether or not to participate in the desperately needed resupply of rebels with arms and ammunition,” Fred Hof, a former State Department liaison to the Syrian opposition, said yesterday in an interview. “I would not be at all surprised were a decision arrived at very soon, and I would be surprised if the decision is negative. 

President Barack Obama’s administration is under pressure to provide lethal aid to the Syrian opposition, which has said it won’t participate in talks arranged by the U.S. and Russia to end the conflict until such deliveries begin. Domestic critics such as Senator John McCain, an Arizona Republican, have called the administration “delusional” to believe that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad would be willing to negotiate while he has the military upper hand.

State Department spokeswoman Jennifer Psaki said yesterday that administration officials were concerned by what they heard in recent conversations with General Salim Idris, the head of the Syrian opposition’s military wing.

Secretary of State John Kerry postponed a trip to the Mideast this week and will instead attend White House meetings, some of which will be about Syria, according to Psaki, who described the sessions as “routine.”

Conditions Worsened

“As we’ve heard firsthand from General Idris over the weekend, conditions on the ground have worsened, and that is greatly concerning,” Psaki said. “The bloodshed, and the loss of innocent lives has grown worse. The increase of foreign fighters has led to a greater concern about sectarian violence. So we are taking a closer look at what we can continue to do, to help the opposition.”

Rebels lost the strategic city of al-Qusair last week. Government control of the town, about 30 kilometers (19 miles) southwest of Homs, secures the road from Damascus to Lebanon, cuts cross-border weapons supplies for the rebels and provides a staging ground for further offensives.

Obama has been reluctant to get the U.S. more deeply involved even though U.S. intelligence officials have concluded that Assad’s regime has probably used small amounts of chemical weapons three times, according to three U.S. officials with knowledge of the administration’s deliberations.

At least until now, Obama has concluded that the potential benefits of a muscular intervention are outweighed by the negatives, beginning with the installation of a regime in Damascus that may no longer keep Syria’s cold peace with Israel.

Channeling Aid

The U.S. has let other countries, such as Saudi Arabia and Qatar, supply weapons to the rebels and recently began an effort to channel all lethal aid through Idris in an effort to ensure that fewer weapons get into the hands of extremists. At the same time, the administration has pushed a plan to hold negotiations between rebels and the regime about a negotiated political transition that would have Assad step down.

In a May press conference with U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron, Obama acknowledged that his push with Russia for a peace conference — dubbed Geneva 2 — might not work.

“I’m not promising that it’s going to be successful,” the president said. “Frankly, sometimes once sort of the furies have been unleashed in a situation like we’re seeing in Syria, it’s very hard to put things back together.”

U.S.-Russia Meeting

Hof, now a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, a Washington policy group, said that he would be “shocked if arms and ammunition, whether from U.S. stocks or elsewhere, were not ready to move instantly to and through Idris.”

Psaki said U.S. and Russian officials will meet on June 25 to discuss arrangements for the Geneva 2 talks, which are expected to be held in July. In the meantime, she said that the administration has had continuing talks about how to strengthen their position on the ground.

“The political process can’t happen in a vacuum, so we are taking a closer look at what we can do on the ground to help the opposition,” she said. “Many of these options have been discussed and they will continue to be.”

Source: bloomberg.com

Al-Qusayr wounded make gruelling trek to Lebanon

June 10, 2013 by AFP

Exhausted by a grueling five-day trek to reach safety in Lebanon over rocky mountains and valleys, Mohammad from war-torn Syria had to walk despite injuries to his leg while hiding from regime troops.

Wounded in Al-Qusayr, Mohammad, 35, is now being treated in a rudimentary hospital in Minieh, northern Lebanon, after Syrian troops and Hezbollah seized control of his town last Wednesday.

For fear of retribution, Mohammad refused to reveal his real name. He was injured in shelling on Al-Qusayr in central Syria on June 5, just hours before the border town fell out of rebel control.

An AFP journalist was asked not to discuss the route taken by the refugees to reach Lebanon, or to ask whether the wounded men were rebels or civilians.

“People tried to evacuate me on a pick-up truck, but there was so much destruction the vehicle couldn’t move,” said Mohammad, his face bearded and extremely pale.

“We left the town on foot though I was losing a lot of blood,” he added, as he lay in a dirty pair of jeans and a grey t-shirt — the same clothes he used for the five days.

He arrived in a village near Al-Qusayr whose name he refused to reveal. There, both he and several other wounded people were treated using a basic first-aid kit.

“There wasn’t enough blood to give everybody transfusions. They treated my wound but couldn’t give me blood,” he told AFP.

Meanwhile, the army consolidated its grip over Al-Qusayr, which had been under rebel control for a year. Mohammad and some 30 other wounded men decided to risk everything to flee Syria for Lebanon, on foot.

“We walked for five nights, to avoid the army patrols,” Mohammad said.

“We rested during the day and whenever we saw the soldiers, we’d hide behind trees in the fields,” he smiled.

The area separating Al-Qusayr from Lebanon is rough terrain. Mountainous and dry, it is a hard walk even without the added danger of the army patrols.

“Some had wounds to their feet, others had shrapnel injuries in their backs and stomachs. We didn’t even have painkillers,” Mohammad said, his voice barely a whisper.

“One time, a man started bleeding… We bandaged his wound with our clothes,” he added.

Their ordeal ended at dawn Sunday, when they reached the north Lebanese area of Akkar. They were then transferred to Minieh, near the Mediterranean coast.

Psychological fatigue

——————————-

Akram, a thin, 40-year-old man, made the journey alongside Mohammad.

Wearing a blue vest and shorts donated by the hospital, he had shrapnel wounds to both legs, his back, and the back of his head.

“I was in front of my home in Al-Qusayr when a rocket landed right in front of me. I spent half an hour on the ground,” Akram said.

He thinks back to the “terrible bombings” the day Al-Qusayr was seized. He also remembers the “shortage of gauze for our wounds” in the town’s makeshift field hospital.

Akram made the same journey as Mohammad.

“One time, we spent 24 hours without food or water,” he said.

“They arrived at 6:00 a.m. on Sunday, tired, psychologically exhausted,” Minieh hospital director Amer Alameddine told AFP.

Two wounded men lay outstretched in each hospital ward, in somber silence.

“Some of them couldn’t answer the doctors’ questions because they were so destroyed, they fell asleep right away,” said Alameddine.

“Most of them just wanted to eat. We immediately disinfected the wounds that had caused swelling.”

Abu Raed, a Syrian who assists refugees arriving in northern Lebanon, told AFP the hospital was “rented” by activists to treat the wounded.

Lebanese associations provide bread, food and mattresses.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights has voiced concern for hundreds of wounded it says are still trapped in the Al-Qusayr region, where the United Nations has demanded “immediate” humanitarian access.

Source: now.mmedia.me

Qusair refugees overwhelm Bekaa Valley town of Arsal

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Lebanese Red Crescent volunteers push a wounded Syrian man on a stretcher as they arrive at Al-Minieh hospital in the Lebanese coastal city of Tripoli on June 9, 2013. Photo: AFP/STR

Arsal, Lebanon, June 10, 2013 by Rakan al-Fakih

Thousands of Syrian refugees fleeing from the battles in the Syrian city of Qusair have taken refuge in the border village of Arsal, as 85 people wounded in the fighting were transferred to hospitals in the Bekaa Valley and north Lebanon.

“There are now around 27,000 Syrian refugees in Arsal, which is nearly equal to the number of its residents, which is only 35,000,” Arsal’s Deputy Mayor Ahmad Fliti told The Daily Star Sunday.

He said the sudden influx of such a large number of refugees made it impossible to obtain accurate statistics about the arrivals.

An operation to evacuate the wounded began Saturday in Qusair, security sources said, adding that 85 of the wounded had been transferred to hospitals in both north Lebanon and the Bekaa Valley.

They said Lebanese Red Cross ambulances transported 50 of the wounded to hospitals in the western and central Bekaa Valley and another 35 were taken to facilities in the north of the country, such as Kheir Hospital in the town of Minyeh.

The International Committee of the Red Cross took the wounded from Qusair to Lebanese border crossings where they were handed to the Lebanese Red Cross, the sources said.

The evacuation process is ongoing and more wounded are expected to arrive for treatment, they added.

Security sources told The Daily Star that a total of some 800 people who were wounded in Qusair are expected to arrive gradually to Lebanon, noting that around 70 succumbed to their injuries during the evacuation process.

During the battles and intense bombardment on the village by Hezbollah and the Syrian army, the Red Cross was refused access to the wounded and there were conflicting reports of civilians’ ability to flee from the city. Syria’s government refused to grant the Red Cross access to the city until the fighting ended last week. Mahmoud, 23, who fought alongside the rebel Free Syrian Army, was recovering at his father’s home in Arsal after his hand was amputated and his leg had multiple fractures. He was among a group of fighters who confronted a convoy of tanks at the entrance of the village of Buwayda near Qusair, he said.

“There were around 4,000 fighters in the last battle who were besieged in the city center after they lost all their ammunition and were losing about 50 fighters every day,” he said.

He added that the unit he fought with consisted of 30 fighters, of whom only four survived.

In the Baalbek village of Brital, dozens of men held a protest along the international highway, objecting to seeing the wounded from Qusair treated at dispensaries in Arsal and hospitals in the Western Bekaa.

The protesters didn’t block the highway, however, and they dispersed after a short period, according to the National News Agency.

Early Sunday, an Army checkpoint in the border village of Deir Ashayer in the western Bekaa Valley was shot at by unidentified armed men with machine guns and took off in a car, according to media reports. Army troops returned fire at the men in an attempt to stop them, but no casualties were reported.

Caretaker Social Affairs Minister Wael Abu Faour, an MP for the district, denounced the incident. “Rashaya and the Western Bekaa will always respect the law,” he said, stressing the importance of “embracing the Army and supporting it, because it is the sole protector of civil peace.”

He called for an immediate investigation into the issue and the arrest and of those responsible.

Hezbollah MPs, meanwhile, continued to defend their party’s decision to fight in Syria following fierce criticism from March 14 politicians.

Nabatieh MP Mohammad Raad, who heads the party’s parliamentary bloc, accused critics of being responsible for “involving Lebanon [in the Syrian crisis] over the past two years, when they kicked out the Army from the northern areas making it an area outside of the law, while advocating the process of state-building at the same time.”

“They have violated the country’s security and stability by implicating it in the support for armed gangs,” he said, referring to the Syrian rebels.

“At a time when they propose implementing the Taif Accord and accuse others of attempting to topple it, they don’t respond to our calls to implement all its articles, the most important of which is to establish distinguished relations with Syria.”

“We won’t respond to the insult campaigns … and it’s enough that we have restored glory to Lebanon … Those who count on the West, the Israelis, and takfiri groups to harm this glory won’t be part of the national partnership of this country.”

Syrian army preparing for Aleppo battle, security source says

June 8, 2013 by AFP

Syria’s army is preparing to launch an assault on Aleppo aimed at driving rebels out of the northern city and surrounding province, a Syrian security source told AFP on Sunday.

The announcement comes five days after the army and its Lebanese ally Hezbollah seized Qusayr in central-west Syria, a year after the strategic region had fallen into rebel hands.

“It is likely the battle for Aleppo will start in the coming hours or days, and its aim is to reclaim the towns and villages [under rebel control] in the province,” the source said on condition of anonymity.

“The Syrian Arab army is ready to carry out its mission in this province,” the source said, without giving further details.

Analysts say that its success in Qusayr has given the army the confidence to try to suppress the insurgency elsewhere in the strife-torn country.

Pro-regime daily Al-Watan said Sunday the army has “started to deploy at a large scale in Aleppo province, in preparation for a battle that will be fought in the city and its outskirts”.

Rebels in July last year launched a massive assault on Aleppo, once Syria’s commercial hub. The city has suffered daily regime bombardment and clashes pitting insurgents against troops.

Al-Watan also said “the Syrian army will take advantage of its experience in Qusayr and Eastern Ghouta [near Damascus] to advance in the [central] province of Hama and Homs” nearby.

“The consequences of the battle for Qusayr will… map out the contours of Syria’s political future,” the daily added.

Syria: Assad forces massing for major assault on Aleppo

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A Syrian regime gathering point is seen through a sniper scope in Aleppo’s Karm al-Jabal district  Photo: Reuters

Istanbul, June 7, 2013 by Richard Spencer and Ruth Sherlock

News outlets close to the Syrian regime and the Lebanese Shia militia Hizbollah, which has come to its support, said that “Operation Northern Storm” to retake Aleppo, the biggest city in the country, and the surrounding countryside had begun. Other sources told the AFP news agency that the battle would start in “the coming days or hours”.

There was no evidence of a major attack last night, but there was renewed fighting near a government-held base on the north-western outskirts. Hizbollah reinforcements were said to have arrived in the area, while a video leaked to an opposition website showed a regime general recruiting men from two Shia towns to join in a fresh attack.

The regime is in high spirits after the Syrian army and Hizbollah retook Qusayr, close to the Lebanese border. They continued their advance over the weekend, sweeping through the last opposition-held villages north of the town.

They harried the retreating rebels and the thousands of civilians who had fled with them.

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Syrian army soldiers drive a tank in the town of Qusayr Photo: AFP

Video posted online showed streams of people, mostly rebels and male civilians, marching dejectedly and in some cases staggering on crutches through the fields and orchards distinctive to the area, the sound of shelling in the background. In some, wounded men lay dying under trees.

Hadi Abdullah, one of the main opposition spokesmen in Qusayr, told The Daily Telegraph he was trapped in an enclave with 2,000 men, women and children. He said 110 people, including 40 women and children, had been killed when the refugee column was attacked by government forces on Saturday.

“We were a group of around 7,000 people,” he said. “The first group of 1,000 got through (the encirclement) successfully. Then it was followed by another group but that came under direct fire from the regular army and Hizbollah forces.

“The dead and injured fell where they were. We could not even retrieve the bodies of women. The army tanks pulled some civilians and assassinated them. I called out for one of my relatives who was caught by the army. Someone from the other side answered saying, ‘Come take him in pieces’.”

State media at first claimed government forces had killed Abdulqader al-Saleh, also known as Hajji Marea, head of the biggest rebel brigade in Aleppo, and second-in-command of the military wing of the western-backed Syrian National Coalition.

Hajji Marea had led a group of reinforcements sent to help Qusayr’s defence. The claim was later retracted, but rebels confirmed he had been injured.

The regime’s recent fightback has cast doubt on the chances for a peace conference, backed by Britain, France and the United States, originally due to take place later this month in Geneva. Its date had already slipped back to next month, and William Hague, the Foreign Secretary, said regime advances reduced its chance of success.

“It makes it less likely that the regime will make enough concessions in such negotiations, and it makes it harder to get the opposition to come to the negotiations,” he said.

He said he accepted demands by Tory MPs last week that a House of Commons vote be taken on any decision to arm the rebels.

“People have understandable concerns about the idea of sending arms to anybody in Syria and we’d all be very reluctant to do that,” he said.

“On the other hand, at the moment, people are being killed in huge numbers while the world denies them the right to defend themselves.”

The opposition says it cannot attend the conference under current circumstances.

“How can you imagine someone talks about a peace or political solution under this kind of war, this sectarian war?” George Sabra, the Coalition’s acting head, said in Istanbul.

Separately a Lebanese man demonstrating against Hizbollah’s participation in Syria was shot dead in Beirut, the first such incident in the Lebanese city.

Source: telegraph.co.uk

Hezbollah unites clans to raise border force

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Hezbollah’s Hassan Nasrallah, Bashar al-Assad, and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Damascus in 2010. Photo: SANA 

June 9, 2013, Baalbek, Lebanon

Hezbollah has significantly increased its presence along Lebanon’s northern border to prevent Syria’s conflict from spilling into its territory, after recent Syrian Army gains ousted rebels in the region.

Sources within Hezbollah and close to Lebanon’s Shia political-military group said more forces have been deployed to the border to prevent rebels fighting President Bashar al-Assad’s army from entering the country. The mobilisation is also intended to thwart a repeat of last week’s events when a barrage of rockets fired by Syrian rebels hit the historic town of Baalbek and surrounding areas.

The rocket attack last Wednesday came hours after Assad’s forces re-captured the strategic city of Qusayr after days of heavy fighting. Syrian rebels accused Hezbollah of sending thousands of fighters to join the battle on the side of Assad.

“We have increased the number of people on the border and the number of patrols conducted along there, and within the Lebanese territories to prevent armed groups from infiltrating,” a Hezbollah member told Al Jazeera, on condition of anonymity for security reasons.

Other groups have set up armed patrols in key towns, such as Baalbek, conducting stop and searches of people deemed suspicious.

Baalbek, a town in the plains of the Bekaa Valley, is home to about 75,000 residents of a variety of religious sects. It is a popular tourist destination because of the ancient Roman ruins located in the town’s centre.

“With Hezbollah concentrating on the border areas, we’re running patrols in the towns and between the towns,” Ahmad, a Baalbek resident and a member of the newly established patrols, told Al Jazeera.

“We all thought Hezbollah was protecting the whole area, but the rocket attacks showed there was a breach somewhere, so we took the initiative to help with security,” said Ahmad, who gave only one name citing security concerns. ”Now, anyone we don’t know, or think is suspicious, we stop and search them, and then hand [them] over to Hezbollah who will conduct investigations.”

Clan security 

The Bekaa - known as the “tank of the resistance” because of the large number of fighters it has provided Hezbollah over the years - is also home to several of Lebanon’s tribal clans, whose origins trace back to Arab tribes from centuries ago.

Clans are increasingly playing a security role in the area with numbers in the tens of thousands.

“We have a presence on the border because we are part of the defence system in the area,” said Suleiman Chammas from the Chammas clan.

Already armed and using the training gained while serving in the Lebanese military, the clans are working in close coordination with Hezbollah, according to Chammas.

“We all have arms but the big operations are left to [Hezbollah] because they have the heavy weaponry,” he said. “We just defend our towns and villages.”

Originating in Syria, the Chammas clan has an estimated 45,000 members throughout Lebanon and also in parts of Syria. It is one of two original clans in the country, the other being the Hamadeh. Others include Nasreddine, Allaw, Dandash, Ala’eddine, which are offshoots from the two.

The clans typically mete out their own forms of justice, resolving issues through rulings by elders, rather than the local authorities. They have a reputation for being outlaws, and are said to be heavily involved in Lebanon’s drug and smuggling trades.

Joining forces

Hashem Osman, a former mayor of Baalbek, sits in his home perched on a hill overlooking the sprawling town.

“Back in the day there used to be problems and scuffles between the clans and Hezbollah,” Osman told Al Jazeera. “Today they are on the same path… A large majority of people from the clans are now part of Hezbollah, and have sacrificed their blood for the [Syrian] resistance.”

According to Chammas, whose clan lost several members in the battle for Qusayr, the clans were neutral at the start of the Syrian conflict. But following a series of threats and cross-border kidnappings in the Bekaa by members of the Syrian opposition, the clans felt obliged to get involved.

“By attacking us in Lebanon [the Syrian rebels] are poking a hornets nest. What are they trying to achieve?” Chammas asked.

Osman echoed the sentiment, urging Syrian opposition fighters to think twice before launching any further attacks.

“Offending Baalbek is expensive and there is a high price to pay,” he warned. “We ask them to keep their battle in Syria, or it will backfire heavily on them.”

Hezbollah claims to be defending Lebanese residents in Syrian border areas, as well as protecting Shia shrines in Damascus. But its role in the Syrian conflict has polarised the Lebanese population, causing many to hold the group responsible for dragging the war into Lebanon.

Stoking further tensions, several towns and villages located on the northern border have become key military supply routes into Syria, whether for the rebels or for the regime.

But according to Osman, the rocket attacks have so far failed to divide or instill fear amid Baalbek’s population.

“Their whole aim was to get people to stop supporting Hezbollah,” he said. “This hasn’t worked. People from Baalbek have martyrs returning from Syria, and they are offering more.”

The civil war in Syria is also driving up tensions within religious sects.  

Sami Ramadan is a Sunni high schoolteacher and resident of Iaat. The tiny village fell victim to the barrage of rockets last week, and Ramadan described how his brother’s house was hit, wounding his 18-year-old niece.

“It’s a miracle she survived. She bent down to pick something up from under the table, and the rocket hit. The table protected her,” Ramadan said.

Such attacks show the “misguidance” of the Syrian rebels, he said. “I’m a Sunni and the house that was hit is a Sunni house… These attacks on us have a reaction from the Sunni street in the Bekaa, and it is against the Syrian armed opposition.”

Ramadan said he feared a victory by the Syrian rebels. “I am an open-minded Sunni, and as far as the extremists fighting in Syria, I have ‘strayed’ so they’ll come after me before they go after the Shias.”

Divisions in Baalbek

Not everyone in Baalbek supports Hezbollah’s role in Syria. Despite being an active member of the armed patrols and having lost family members fighting with Hezbollah in Syria, Ahmad made it clear he was not a supporter of the Shia militia’s actions across the border.

“Hezbollah took a decision, acting on behalf of us all, to fight in Syria,” he said. “Well, I wasn’t asked, and I don’t support that decision. They don’t need to be in Syria, they can defend Lebanon from the Lebanese territories, and just stay on the borders.”

On Sunday in the capital Beirut, meanwhile, a protest against Hezbollah’s involvement in the Syrian civil war turned violent with one demonstrator shot dead outside the Iranian Embassy.

But in Bekaa, most villagers support Hezbollah’s mobilisation in Syria. That said, people here are more cautious about spending time outside for fear of further attacks by the rebels.

“The atmosphere has changed,” Ahmad said. “Yes, there were huge celebrations after the battle of Qusayr, but I think these celebrations are premature… It is very likely we’ll see more attacks.”

Ahmad said about 20 percent of Baalbekis were opposed to Hezbollah siding with the Syrian Army. He said if the attacks continue, he would eventually leave the area.

Chammas, however, said his clan was preparing for the long haul. “There will definitely be more confrontations, and in a military aspect we are ready,” he said, adding a warning to the Syrian rebels and their Lebanese backers: “Don’t play with fire.”