About 30 Lebanese Hizbollah fighters and 20 Syrian soldiers and militiamen loyal to President Bashar al-Assad have been killed in the fiercest fighting this year in the rebel stronghold of Qusair, Syrian activists said yesterday.
Netanyahu holds out the prospect of more air strikes
Sunday’s reported death toll was the highest for Hizbollah in a single day’s conflict in Syria, highlighting the increasing intervention by the guerrilla group originally set up by Iran in the 1980s to fight Israeli occupation troops in south Lebanon.
If confirmed, the Hizbollah losses also reflect the extent to which Syria is becoming a proxy conflict between Shi’ite Iran and Gulf Arab states such as Saudi Arabia and Qatar, which back Assad’s mostly Sunni enemies.
Western countries and Russia, an ally of Damascus, back opposing sides in this regional free-for-all which is also sucking in Israel. Three times this year Israeli planes have bombed presumed Iranian weapons destined for Hizbollah.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said his country was “preparing for every scenario” in Syria and held out the prospect of more Israeli strikes on Syria to stop Hizbollah and other opponents of Israel obtaining advanced weapons.
Israel has not confirmed or denied reports by Western and Israeli intelligence sources that its raids targeted Iranian missiles stored near Damascus that it believed were awaiting delivery to Hizbollah, which fought a war with Israel in 2006.
Syrian opposition sources and state media gave widely differing accounts of Sunday’s ferocious clashes in Qusair, long used by rebels as a supply route from the nearby Lebanese border to the provincial capital Homs.
Hizbollah has not commented but in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley yesterday several funeral processions could be seen. Pictures of dead fighters were plastered on to cars and mourners waved yellow Hizbollah flags.
Several ambulances were seen on the main Bekaa Valley highway and residents said hospitals had appealed for blood to treat the wounded brought back to Lebanon.
The air and tank assault on the strategic town of 30,000 people appeared to be part of a campaign by Assad’s forces to consolidate their grip on Damascus and secure links between the capital and government strongholds in the Alawite coastal heartland via Homs.
The government campaign has coincided with efforts by the US and Russia, despite their differences on Syria, to organise peace talks to end a conflict now in its third year in which more than 80,000 people have been killed.
A total of 100 combatants from both sides were killed in Sunday’s offensive, according to opposition sources, including the British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. Troops have already retaken several villages around Qusair and have attacked isolated rebel units in Homs.