Tag Archives: Hezbollah

Syrian army takes district near Aleppo: monitor, media unit

A view shows the damage in the Old City of Aleppo as seen from the city's ancient citadel, Syria January 31, 2017. REUTERS/Omar Sanadiki

BEIRUT (Reuters) – The Syrian army and its allies took a small district on the outskirts of Aleppo from rebels on Wednesday, a war monitor and a military media unit run by Damascus ally Hezbollah said.

The advance was the army’s first from its lines in Aleppo city since rebels departed their enclave there in December, and came as government and opposition delegations arrived in Geneva for peace talks sponsored by the United Nations.

“The Syrian army and its allies control Souq al-Jibs, west of Assad suburb in southwest Aleppo,” said the Hezbollah military media unit in a message. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights also said the army had taken the district.

Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad has relied closely on allies such as Russia, Iran and Shi’ite militias, including Hezbollah, to make steady gains against rebels in western parts of the country and drive them from Aleppo in December.

Rebel forces in the area, which include both jihadist and nationalist groups, have periodically shelled parts of government-held Aleppo from positions in the western countryside nearby since the fighting inside the city stopped.

Clashes on the western side of Aleppo and its surroundings as the army and its allies advanced were accompanied by heavy shelling and aerial bombardment, said the Observatory, a Britain-based war monitor.

After the rebels were driven from their Aleppo enclave in December, Russia and Turkey – important foreign backers for the opposing sides in the war – sponsored a ceasefire aimed at being a prelude to peace talks.

However, although the intensity of fighting has calmed somewhat, violence continues across the country.

(Reporting by Angus McDowall; Editing by Tom Heneghan)

Harsh Hezbollah words aim to draw ‘red lines’ for Trump: source

Lebanon's Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah addresses his supporters through a screen during a rally commemorating the annual Hezbollah Martyrs' Leaders Day in Jebshit village, southern Lebanon February 16, 2017. REUTERS/Ali Hashisho

By Laila Bassam and Angus McDowall

BEIRUT (Reuters) – The Hezbollah leader’s harsh words for Israel and U.S. President Donald Trump this week were aimed at drawing “red lines” to prevent any threatening action against Lebanon or the group, a source familiar with the group’s thinking said on Friday.

Trump and administration officials have used strong rhetoric against Hezbollah’s political patron Iran and to support its main enemy Israel, including putting Tehran “on notice” over charges it violated a nuclear deal by test-firing a ballistic missile.

Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah on Sunday described Trump as being an “idiot”. On Thursday he said that his group, which played a major role in ending Israel’s occupation of Lebanon, could strike its nuclear reactor at Dimona.

The harsh words for Israel and Trump were aimed at drawing “red lines” for the new U.S. administration, the source familiar with the thinking of the Lebanese Shi’ite group said.

“Until now, Hezbollah is not worried about the arrival of Trump into the U.S. administration, but rather, it called him an idiot this week and drew red lines in front of any action that threatens Lebanon or Hezbollah’s presence in Syria,” the source said.

Israel and the United States both regard Hezbollah, which dominates Lebanese politics and maintains an armed militia that has had a significant part in fighting for President Bashar al-Assad in Syria, as a terrorist organization.

The group was founded as a resistance movement against Israel’s occupation of the predominantly Shi’ite Muslim south Lebanon which ended in 2000, a role that meant Beirut allowed it to keep its arms after the country’s civil war ended in 1990.

In 2006 Israel launched another war against Hezbollah in south Lebanon but withdrew without forcing the group, which gives allegiance to the supreme leader of Shi’ite Iran, to abandon its weapons.

Lebanon’s President Michel Aoun, an ally of Hezbollah, defended the group this week, saying: “As long as the Lebanese army lacks sufficient power to face Israel, we feel the need for (Hezbollah’s) arsenal because it complements the army’s role”.

THREATS

In his speech on Sunday, Nasrallah said: “We are not worried (about Trump), but rather we are very optimistic because when there is an idiot living in the White House, who boasts of his idiocy, it is the beginning of relief for the weak of the world”.

On Thursday he urged Israel to dismantle its nuclear reactor at Dimona. Israel is widely believed to have the Middle East’s only atomic arsenal at its Dimona reactor but it refuses to confirm or deny if it is a nuclear power.

“We can turn the threat (of their nuclear capability) into an opportunity,” he said, signaling that Hezbollah could strike the Dimona reactor and other Israeli atomic sites according to the source familiar with Hezbollah thinking.

Israeli Intelligence Minister Yisrael Katz said in a statement on Thursday: “If Nasrallah dares fire on the Israel’s home front or on its national infrastructure, then all of Lebanon will be hit.”

The source familiar with Hezbollah thinking said that it has been Nasrallah’s policy since the 2006 war with Israel to reveal elements of the group’s military capabilities as part of a policy of deterrence against attack by the Jewish state.

(Reporting By Laila Bassam, writing by Angus McDowall; Additional reporting by Maayan Lubell in Jerusalem)

Israel completes advanced testing of mid-range missile interceptor

inactive version of Israel's air missile defense system

By Ori Lewis

JERUSALEM (Reuters) – Israel has completed successful tests of an advanced version of its ‘David’s Sling’ intermediate missile interceptor system that it is developing jointly with the United States, the Defence Ministry said on Wednesday.

The system is designed to shoot down rockets with ranges of 100 to 200 km (63 to 125 miles) such as those in the arsenal of Iranian-backed Hezbollah, a Lebanese group which last fought a war with Israel in 2006, or aircraft or low-flying cruise missiles.

An initial version of David’s Sling completed testing in December 2015 and has been handed over to the Israeli air force but it has not yet been declared operational, a ministry official said.

The system is being developed and manufactured jointly by Israel’s state-owned Rafael Advanced Defense Systems Ltd and Raytheon Co, a top U.S. arms maker.

The advanced testing announced on Wednesday included the interception of air-launched incoming test target missiles high over the Mediterranean, Moshe Patel of the Israel Missile Defense Organization said in a telephone briefing.

“The tests were intended to simulate anticipated future threats and in the coming years our system will deliver to the Israeli air force more capabilities and more confidence,” Patel said.

David’s Sling will fill the operational gap between the already deployed Iron Dome short-range rocket interceptor and the Arrow ballistic missile interceptor, both of which are in service.

Last week Israel handed over control of its U.S.-funded Arrow-3 missile interceptor, a “Star Wars”-like extension of its capabilities which is designed to safely destroy incoming long-range missiles in outer space.

That system has been developed jointly by state-owned Israel Aerospace Industries and U.S. firm Boeing Co..

The U.S.-funded short-range Iron Dome interceptor built by Israel’s state-owned Rafael Advanced Defense Systems Ltd. was used extensively with high success rates in a 2014 Gaza war against Hamas militants.

(Writing by Ori Lewis; Editing by Gareth Jones)

Hezbollah using U.S. weaponry in Syria: senior Israeli military officer

Smoke rises as seen from a governement-held area of Aleppo, Syria

By Ori Lewis

TEL AVIV (Reuters) – Israel has informed the United States that Lebanese Hezbollah fighters in Syria are using U.S. armored personnel carriers originally supplied to the Lebanese Army, a senior Israeli military officer said on Wednesday.

The U.S. State Department said last month that the American embassy in Beirut was working to investigate images on social media purporting to show Hezbollah, which supports President Bashar al-Assad, displaying U.S. military equipment in Syria.

Those images were widely reported to have been of U.S.-made M113 armored personnel carriers, which the State Department said were extremely common in the region.

In an intelligence briefing to foreign reporters in Tel Aviv, the senior officer showed a photograph of military vehicles, which he said included U.S.-made armored personnel carriers (APCs), along a road.

“These APCs are of the Hezbollah, while fighting in Syria, that they took from the Lebanese armed forces,” he said in English, describing the guerrilla group as dominant in Lebanon.

“We shared this information with other countries, including the U.S. of course, and I can even say that we recognized these specific APCs with some specific parameters that we know … these were given to the Lebanese armed forces. It’s not an assumption,” said the officer, who under the rules of the briefing could not be identified by name, rank or position.

Western diplomatic sources have said the APCs were delivered to the Lebanese Army by the United States as part of a program to equip that force.

The officer made no comment about when the APCs would have been supplied to the Lebanese Army.

The officer said Hezbollah has 8,000 fighters in Syria where more than 1,700 of the group’s combatants have been killed since 2011.

Israel and Hezbollah, which the officer said has 30,000 members, half of them combatants, last fought a war in 2006.

(Editing by Jeffrey Heller)

Aleppo assault likely a war crime, says U.N. as evacuation stalls

Boys stand amid the damage in the government-held al-Shaar neighborhood of Aleppo, during a media tour, Syria

By Laila Bassam, Lisa Barrington and John Davison

ALEPPO, Syria/BEIRUT (Reuters) – Plans to evacuate besieged rebel districts of Aleppo were under threat on Wednesday as renewed airstrikes and shelling rocked the Syrian city in a bombardment the United Nations said “most likely constitutes war crimes”.

Iran, one of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s main backers, imposed new conditions on a ceasefire deal, saying it wanted the simultaneous evacuation of wounded from two villages besieged by rebel fighters, according to rebel and U.N. sources.

There was no sign of that happening. Instead airstrikes, shelling and gunfire erupted in Aleppo and Turkey accused government forces of breaking the truce agreed less than a day before. Syrian state television said rebel shelling killed six people.

There were clashes on the ground later in the day, with rebels saying they launched an attack against government forces using suicide car bombs.

A ceasefire brokered by Russia, Assad’s most powerful ally, and Turkey was intended to end years of fighting in the city, giving the Syrian leader his biggest victory in more than five years of war. The evacuation of rebel-held areas was expected to start in the early hours of Wednesday, but did not materialize.

The U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, Zeid Ra’ad al Hussein, said he was appalled that the deal appeared to have collapsed.

“While the reasons for the breakdown in the ceasefire are disputed, the resumption of extremely heavy bombardment by the Syrian government forces and their allies on an area packed with civilians is almost certainly a violation of international law and most likely constitutes war crimes,” he added.

There was no immediate indication when the evacuation of civilians and rebel fighters might take place but a pro-opposition TV station said it could be delayed until Thursday. Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan and Russian leader Vladimir Putin agreed in a phone call to make a joint effort to start the process, Turkish presidential sources said.

There was no sign of Iran’s conditions being met. Insurgents fired shells at the two majority-Shi’ite villages from which Tehran wanted wounded to be evacuated, Foua and Kefraya, in Idlib province west of Aleppo, causing some casualties, the British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov predicted that rebel resistance in Aleppo would last no more than two or three days. The defense ministry in Moscow said the rebels now controlled an enclave of only 2.5 square km (1 square mile).

Civilians fill containers with water in a rebel-held besieged area of Aleppo, Syria

Civilians fill containers with water in a rebel-held besieged area of Aleppo, Syria December 14, 2016. REUTERS/Abdalrhman Ismail

RAPID ADVANCES

Nobody had left by dawn under the plan, according to a Reuters witness waiting at the departure point, where 20 buses stood with engines running but showed no sign of moving into rebel districts.

People in eastern Aleppo had packed their bags and burned personal belongings, fearing looting by the Syrian army and its Iranian-backed militia allies.

Officials in the military alliance backing Assad could not be reached immediately for comment on why the evacuation had stalled.

U.N. war crimes investigators said the Syrian government bore the main responsibility for preventing any attacks and reprisals in eastern Aleppo and that it must hold to account any troops or allied forces committing violations.

In what appeared to be a separate development from the planned evacuation, the Russian defense ministry said 6,000 civilians and 366 fighters had left rebel-held districts over the past 24 hours.

A total of 15,000 people, including 4,000 rebel fighters, wanted to leave Aleppo, according to a media unit run by the Syrian government’s ally Hezbollah.

The evacuation plan was the culmination of two weeks of rapid advances by the Syrian army and its allies that drove insurgents back into an ever-smaller pocket of the city under intense air strikes and artillery fire.

By taking full control of Aleppo, Assad has proved the power of his military coalition, aided by Russia’s air force and an array of Shi’ite militias from across the region.

Rebels have been supported by the United States, Turkey and Gulf monarchies, but the support they have enjoyed has fallen far short of the direct military backing given to Assad by Russia and Iran.

Russia’s decision to deploy its air force to Syria 18 months ago turned the war in Assad’s favor after rebel advances across western Syria. In addition to Aleppo, he has won back insurgent strongholds near Damascus this year.

The government and its allies have focused the bulk of their firepower on fighting rebels in western Syria rather than Islamic State, which this week managed to take back the ancient city of Palmyra, once again illustrating the challenge Assad faces reestablishing control over all Syria.

FEAR STALKS STREETS

As the battle for Aleppo unfolded, global concern has risen over the plight of the 250,000 civilians who were thought to remain in its rebel-held eastern sector before the sudden army advance began at the end of November.

The rout of rebels in Aleppo sparked a mass flight of terrified civilians and insurgents in bitter weather, a crisis the United Nations said was a “complete meltdown of humanity”. There were food and water shortages in rebel areas, with all hospitals closed.

On Tuesday, the United Nations voiced deep concern about reports it had received of Syrian soldiers and allied Iraqi fighters summarily shooting dead 82 people in recaptured east Aleppo districts. It accused them of “slaughter”.

The Syrian army has denied carrying out killings or torture among those captured, and Russia said on Tuesday rebels had “kept over 100,000 people in east Aleppo as human shields”.

Fear stalked the city’s streets. Some survivors trudged in the rain past dead bodies to the government-held west or the few districts still in rebel hands. Others stayed in their homes and awaited the Syrian army’s arrival.

“People are saying the troops have lists of families of fighters and are asking them if they had sons with the terrorists. (They are) then either left or shot and left to die,” said Abu Malek al-Shamali in Seif al-Dawla, one of the last rebel-held districts.

(Reporting by Laila Bassam in Aleppo and Tom Perry, John Davison and Lisa Barrington in Beirut; Writing by Angus McDowall in Beirut; Editing by Giles Elgood and Pravin Char)

Hezbollah to send more fighters to Syria’s Aleppo

Hezbollah leader

BEIRUT (Reuters) – The leader of Lebanon’s Hezbollah movement said on Friday it will send more fighters to Syria’s Aleppo area, a battleground where it has suffered heavy losses fighting alongside Syrian government forces against insurgent groups.

Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah said thousands of Hezbollah’s Sunni militant foes had recently entered Syria via the Turkish border with the aim of taking over Aleppo and its surrounding countryside.

“We are facing a new wave…of projects of war against Syria which are being waged in northern Syria, particularly in the Aleppo region,” Nasrallah said in a speech broadcast live on the group’s Al Manar TV.

“The defense of Aleppo is the defense of the rest of Syria, it is the defense of Damascus, it is also the defense of Lebanon, and of Iraq,” he said.

“We will increase our presence in Aleppo,” he said. “Retreat is not permissible.”

Shi’ite, Iranian-backed Hezbollah has long supported President Bashar al-Assad against mostly Sunni insurgents.

Aleppo has been a focus of intensified fighting in the months since peace talks in Geneva broke down and a ceasefire deal brokered by Washington and Moscow unraveled. Russia intervened in the five-year-old conflict in September with an air campaign to support Assad.

“It was necessary for us to be in Aleppo … and we will stay in Aleppo,” Nasrallah said.

Aleppo city is split between government and rebel control. Russian and Syrian warplanes have pounded a road leading from the rebel-held areas north towards the Turkish border. That major rebel supply line from Turkey to Aleppo city was effectively cut by government advances earlier this year.

A pro-Damascus source recently told Reuters government forces and their allies are trying to encircle rebels in the Aleppo area. Assad, for whom the recapture of Aleppo would be a strategic prize, has vowed to take back “every inch” of Syria from what he calls terrorists.

Russia’s intervention has helped government forces and their allies advance against insurgents, and separately against Islamic State, in some areas.

But some of those battles have been costly, including around Aleppo.

Islamist insurgents including the al Qaeda-linked Nusra Front in May inflicted heavy losses on a coalition of foreign Shi’ite fighters including Iranians and Hezbollah members south of Aleppo.

Nasrallah said that 26 Hezbollah fighters had been killed in June alone, a rare acknowledgment of the toll their involvement is taking. Several of its senior military commanders have died in the Syrian conflict, alongside hundreds of fighters.

Nasrallah also denied Hezbollah was in imminent fiscal trouble as a result of a U.S. law targeting the group’s finances. The law, passed in December, threatens to bar from the American financial market any bank that knowingly engages with Hezbollah. It has ignited a standoff between Hezbollah, a dominant political force in Lebanon, and the Lebanese central bank.

(The story is refiled to change city to area in lead)

(Reporting by John Davison and Laila Bassam; Editing by Angus MacSwan)

Lebanese Ex-Minister Sentenced for Plotting Attacks

Former Lebanese Information Minister Michel Samaha gestures at his house after being released in Beirut, Lebanon, January 14, 2016.

By Angus McDowall

BEIRUT (Reuters) – A Lebanese military court on Friday increased to nearly 10 years the jail term for a former minister convicted last year of smuggling explosives and planning attacks, in a case that has underscored the country’s sharp political divisions.

Former information minister Michel Samaha, who has close ties to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, was detained in August 2012 and confessed to involvement in a plot for which Damascus’ security chief Ali Mamluk was also indicted.

Syrian officials have denied Damascus was involved, but the allegations exposed rifts in Lebanon, which often break along sectarian lines, over Syria’s long-standing involvement in the country.

Samaha’s initial four-year sentence and later release on bail prompted bitter protests from opponents of Assad, who saw the decisions as unduly lenient and evidence that Damascus and its ally Hezbollah held sway over the justice system.

The case also gained wider regional significance when Saudi Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir suggested it was part of the reason Riyadh was withdrawing billions of dollars in aid from Lebanon’s army and security forces.

He said the military court’s granting of bail to Samaha raised questions over the army’s independence from the Shi’ite Hezbollah movement, Lebanon’s main powerbroker and a principle ally of Riyadh’s top regional rival Iran.

On Friday the court set Samaha’s new sentence at 13 years, but in Lebanon a prison year is equivalent to nine months.

“The issuance of the verdict on the terrorist Michel Samaha corrects the former lenient verdict, which we had rejected and declared we would not tolerate,” said former prime minister Saad al-Hariri, a leading critic of Damascus.

Interior Minister Nohad Machnouk, a member of Hariri’s Future Movement, said the new sentence confirmed “the correctness of our trust in the president and members of the court”.

Ashraf Rifi, another Sunni Muslim politician, had resigned his post as justice minister over his granting of bail in January after describing the trial last year as a travesty of justice.

Syria is Lebanon’s largest neighbor and dominated the country from the end of its civil war in 1990 until 2005, when U.S.-led pressure helped force Syrian troops to leave.

Its ally Hezbollah remains Lebanon’s main power broker and has fought alongside government forces in Syria’s civil war.

Hezbollah and its leading members made no immediate comment on Friday’s sentence.

(Reporting By Laila Bassam and Angus McDowall; editing by John Stonestreet)

Saudi Arabia says it will punish anyone linked to Hezbollah

DUBAI (Reuters) – Saudi Arabia said on Sunday it would punish anyone who belongs to Lebanon’s Iran-backed Shi’ite Islamist group Hezbollah, sympathizes with it, supports it financially or harbors any of its members.

An Interior Ministry statement carried by the state news agency SPA said that Saudis and expatriates would be subjected to “severe penalties” under the kingdom’s regulations and anti-terrorism laws. Foreigners would be deported, it said.

The move comes after Gulf Arab countries declared Hezbollah a terrorist organisation, raising the possibility of further sanctions against the group, which wields influence in Lebanon and fights alongside President Bashar al-Assad’s forces in Syria.

“Any citizen or resident who supports, shows membership in the so-called Hezbollah, sympathises with it or promotes it, makes donations to it or communicates with it or harbours anyone belonging to it will be subject to the stiff punishments provided by the rules and orders, including the terrorism crimes and its financing,” the statement said.

Foreigners working and living in the oil-exporting kingdom would also face expulsion, it said.

Hezbollah has close ties to Iran, Saudi Arabia’s bitter rival for power in the region. Saudi Arabia supports Syrian opposition groups to topple Assad and blames Iran and Hezbollah for helping him cling to power after five years of civil war.

Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah has stepped up criticism of Saudi Arabia, accusing it of directing car bombings in Lebanon.

(Reporting by Sami Aboudi; Editing by Kevin Liffey, Larry King)

Israeli city frets about chemical depot after Hezbollah threat

JERUSALEM (Reuters) – The mayor of Haifa implored Israel’s prime minister on Tuesday to remove an industrial chemical depot from the northern city, saying a veiled threat by Lebanon’s Hezbollah militia to shell the site put as many as a million people in danger.

Israeli worries about the toxic risks posed by the four-storey ammonia vat in Haifa port were stoked by Hezbollah rocket salvoes in the 2006 Lebanon war. In 2013, Benjamin Netanyahu’s cabinet said the depot would shut down as part of a planned new ammonia storage and production plant in the southern Negev desert.

Lags in the plan’s implementation, and Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah’s description last week of the Haifa depot as a makeshift weapon of mass-destruction should it be attacked, prompted Mayor Yona Yahav’s call on Netanyahu to take action.

“We are alone in this battle,” Yahav told Israel’s Army Radio. “There are a million people around this depot here. It is a gaseous material. It is very, very dangerous material.”

Netanyahu’s office did not immediately respond. The Environment Ministry referred Reuters to a statement it put out after Nasrallah’s threat, in which it said that by the end of next month it expected bids for construction of the Negev site.

“Currently, the main issue delaying construction of the plant is the high price of gas, since the plant needs gas to produce ammonia,” said the statement, which also acknowledged the Haifa depot was “an environmental and security risk”.

Yahav argued that it was incumbent on the Netanyahu government “to put up the money and not wait for the business sector. Health and danger are more important, the residents are 100 times more important, than any economic consideration.”

The depot belongs to Haifa Chemicals Ltd., a private company, the Haifa municipality said. The company was unavailable for comment.

A decade ago, Israel relocated a gas depot from Pi Glilot, near Tel Aviv, after a bomb set off by Palestinian militants at the site almost caused a major conflagration.

Yahav said the Pi Glilot move also freed up lucrative real estate — a motive that would not apply for the Haifa depot.

“They (government authorities) don’t really take us into account, because we are talking about a depot that is in a port and to my regret there is no great property value,” he said.

Haifa is home to many other large industrial plants including Oil Refineries, Israel’s biggest refinery.

In his Feb 16 speech, Nasrallah said Hezbollah had spared the Haifa depot in 2006 but might not do so in the future.

“We don’t have a nuclear bomb,” he said. “The intended ‘nuclear bomb’ is the combination of several rockets and the ammonia storage tanks in Haifa, the result of which would be like a nuclear bomb.”

(Writing by Dan Williams; editing by Katharine Houreld)

Israel Retaliates After Hezbollah Bombs Army Vehicles

Israel launched a military response after Islamic militants bombed one of its army convoys on Monday, reports indicate.

According to the BBC, Israel’s artillery attack against the Lebanese village of Wazzani was a retaliatory measure after the Islamic militant group Hezbollah claimed responsibility for attacking Israeli vehicles that were patrolling contested territory near the Lebanon border.

Hezbollah’s bombing came in the wake of the death of one of its key members, the BBC reported, and the Lebanon-based group had previously said it would seek to avenge Samir Kuntar’s death by attacking Israel.