Hezbollah declares Syria victory, Russia remains upbeat

BEIRUT/MOSCOW: The Lebanese group Hezbollah has declared victory in the Syrian war while Russia said government forces had driven militants from 85 per cent of the country where President Bashar Al Assad’s rule seemed in danger two years ago.

The comments from two Syrian government allies mark the most confident assessments yet of Assad’s position in the war that spiralled out of 2011 “Arab Spring” protests against him.

The government’s most recent advances have recovered swathes of territory in eastern Syria from IS, which is being targeted in the same region in a campaign waged by U.S.-backed Kurdish and Arab militias. Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, whose group has sent thousands of fighters to Syria, dismissed the fighting left to be done in Syria as “scattered battles”. “We have won in the war (in Syria),” he said in comments reported by the Lebanese newspaper Al Akhbar.

Referring to Assad’s opponents, Nasrallah said “the path of the other project has failed and wants to negotiate for some gains”.

The comments, made at a religious gathering, were confirmed to Reuters by a source familiar with the speech.

Hundreds of thousands of people have been killed in the conflict, which has fractured Syria into a patchwork of areas and generated a refugee crisis of historic proportions, forcing millions of people into neighbouring states and Europe.

Military backing from Iran and Russia has proven critical to Assad in the war with insurgents including rebels who have been backed by Gulf Arab states, Turkey and the United States, which has decided to end a programme of covert support to rebels. Rebel groups were making steady advances against Assad as recently as 2015, when the deployment of the Russian air force to Syria turned the tide in his favour.