The Los Angeles Times reports: The leader of the militant group Hezbollah on Saturday aligned his powerful movement squarely behind the government of Syrian President Bashar Assad and vowed victory against Syrian rebels, whom he assailed as proxy warriors for the West and Israel.
The televised comments by Hassan Nasrallah were the most definitive to date rallying Hezbollah to the defense of Assad’s government, which has been trying to put down a revolt by rebels supported by the United States and its allies.
The comments came as Syrian government forces, assisted by Hezbollah militiamen, intensified their assault on the strategic Syrian town of Qusair, near the Lebanese border. Both sides reported fierce fighting in Qusair six days after Syrian forces and their Hezbollah allies launched an attack on the longtime rebel stronghold.
“Syria is the backbone of the resistance, and the resistance cannot stand with folded hands while its backbone is being broken,” Nasrallah said in a televised speech, referring to Hezbollah’s signature “resistance” to the state of Israel.
“The battle is ours,” Nasrallah added, “and I promise you victory.”
The Independent reports: Two rockets hit a Beirut neighbourhood earlier today raising fears that the bloody civil war in Syria is increasingly seeping across the border into Lebanon.
AFP reports: Twenty-two Hizbullah members were killed in fighting alongside Syrian government forces against rebels for control of the town of Qusayr, a source close to the Lebanese group said on Sunday.
“There were 22 killed on Saturday. Nine bodies were repatriated the same day and the rest on Sunday,” the source said, declining to be named.
The Syrian army announced that on Saturday its forces had infiltrated Dabaa military airport, a rebel post north of Qusayr, a week into a Hizbullah-backed offensive to recapture the strategic central town near the Lebanese border.
Martin Chulov reports: The workmen had been busy in the room where Hezbollah honours its dead. In one corner of the martyrs’ cemetery in south Beirut, four women shrouded in black sat cross-legged near a new grave, reading from the Qu’ran. Metres away, the yellow flag of the militant group covered a freshly covered hole in a white marble floor. The scent of burning incense wafted across the room.
Another grave, its concrete seal barely dry, had been partly completed nearby. There were seven fresh holes in all; and the grave digger was never far away. More bodies were due on Friday. At this rate, the tiny room – a shrine to Hezbollah’s cause as much as to the men who died fighting for it – would soon be full.
The flurry of activity in the martyrs’ cemetery marks the busiest period for the militant movement since the 2006 war with Israel, in which an estimated 400 of its members died. All the new graves here have been dug in the past 10 days. Many others have been sealed with the familiar yellow and green standard in villages across Lebanon where the rumblings of a very different war have now boiled over into sacrifice and loss.
The newly arrived dead have ushered in a new reality for Hezbollah, one that has taken more than two years of uprising and war in neighbouring Syria to publicly acknowledge: all the fallen have died fighting Arabs in Syria, not Jews in Israel. Such a shift in orientation, for so long denied by the group’s leadership, is now being worn as a badge of honour by the families of the dead.
Many of the next of kin interviewed by the Guardian said that their sons and brothers had been defending Lebanon from foreign plotters – in this case Salafists from the east rather than Zionists from the south. “The threat to us comes from all directions,” said one grieving relative in the Beirut suburb of Chiyah on Friday. “But behind it all is the hidden hand of Israel.”
Oy veh! It’s one thing to be an anti-Zionist, but when people start seeing “the hidden hand of Israel” lurking everywhere, they start to sound more like devotees of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
At this time, instead of obsessing about mischief emanating from the Jewish state, it might be more appropriate to be asking what “resistance” means if its backbone has been provided by Bashar al-Assad.
“At this time, instead of obsessing about mischief emanating from the Jewish state, it might be more appropriate to be asking what “resistance” means if its backbone has been provided by Bashar al-Assad.”
Really? Well it might be more appropriate to ask what “freedom” means when it’s supported by the jihadists supported by the worst fanatical despots in the region.
At least Assad provide some measure of freedom however limited, can you say the same for the Saudis or their fanatical “rebels”? Can there be any doubt of the ethnic cleansing once these “rebels” take over? Maybe more beating hearts cut out of the losers and eaten as a sign of victory.
It’s amazing how easy it was to live under Assad’s rule for those who never had to live under Assad’s rule.
… and then Syria got swamped by all those foreign terrorists directed by the evil Arabs. No doubt the scripts are already circulating around Hollywood ready for this to be turned into a movie.
But seriously, who is that claims Assad’s opponents are all fighting for the same goal?
But seriously, who is that claims Assad’s opponents are all fighting for the same goal?
No one. However, no war can be won without funding. Follow the money and who has the deepest pockets to fund the rebels? Could it be Saudi Arabia and Qatar and they are the ones funding the most radical rebels? That Saudi Arabia wants to impose a democratic and free society in Syria is not a reasonable assumption.
Yes, I didn’t live under the Assad regime but just look at the alternatives. For non-royals compared to the Saudi regime Assad is a flaming liberal.
You wrote: “it might be more appropriate to ask what “freedom” means when it’s supported by the jihadists supported by the worst fanatical despots in the region.” That rhetorical question is supposedly a rebuttal to those who claim that the rebels are all fighting for freedom. Yet now you’re saying no one claims the rebels are all fighting for the same goal.
Again, on the Saudi and Qatar funding — who is denying its existence? But does supplying weapons and ammunition then provide the suppliers with control over the fighters? Only to a limited degree. The French supported American revolutionaries in their fight against the British. That didn’t turn the Americans into proxies following French orders.
External powers always try to buy influence and shape the outcome of wars. But the idea that were it not for such interference, Syria would now be at peace, has no basis. After all, the primary source of weapons for the rebels was, for much of this conflict, the Syrian army’s own weapons stockpiles.
“Yet now you’re saying no one claims the rebels are all fighting for the same goal.”
No, I’m saying that the faction that is the best funded and most fanatical will probably win the war and that faction will be the one backed by the deepest pockets.
While this conflict started as a local rebellion much like the other regional uprising, the only reason that it became a viable war was due to external support, i.e. the Sunni Saudis. No one ever said that there would be peace without external interference but there certainly would not be a viable rebel resistence without external support and money, much like in Libya.
As you say external powers can always shape the outcome of war and the U.S. has a bad track record in nation building. They created the environment that helped to put the Ayatollahs in power in Iran. As much as the U.S. thinks it can control the outcome in Syria it’s more likely that the most fanatically religious group that is well funded will prevail and that will be the Saudi supported Wahabi jihadists.
The French didn’t support the American revolutionaries in an effort to establish a religious cult to reign supreme over the country. That is exactly what the Saudis want to do, it has nothing to do with “freeing” the Syrian people. Topple an ally of Iran and establish another Sunni dominated government with Sharia law. Hardly worthy of a comparison to the American revolution.
I said: “External powers always try to buy influence and shape the outcome of wars.” The operative word in that sentence is “try”. But there is a huge difference between trying to shape the outcome and actually being in control. And in relation to Syria, I think there are far fewer people in Washington than you might imagine who think the U.S. can control the outcome in this conflict.
The truth about power is that it isn’t powerful as some people fear or as other people might want it to be.
What’s funny is that while there is no one inside Syria who can fully grasp everything that’s going on there, there is no shortage of two-bit experts on the outside who on the basis of little more than reading the half-baked opinions of a couple of their favorite bloggers are convinced that they have a handle on “the truth.” As Yeats might have written, the internet is overflowing with passionate intensity.