2 hurt as Hezbollah SUV nearing Syria takes blast
BEIRUT — A roadsideblast struck a sport utility vehicle carrying Hezbollah members near Lebanon’s border with Syria on Tuesday, wounding at least two people in the second attack targeting the Lebanese Shiite Muslim group in a week.
A police official said the vehicle appeared to have been part of a two-vehicle Hezbollah convoy heading to Syria and that the two injured men were transported in ambulances affiliated with the group to a hospital in Beirut. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to brief journalists.
It is the latest fallout for Lebanon from the civil war in Syria, where an estimated 5,000 people are being killed every month, according to the United Nations.
Lebanon, long-troubled by Syria’s civil war and its potential to overwhelm its smaller neighbor, has been on edge since a powerful car bomb July 9 in a Hezbollah stronghold in Beirut’s southern suburbs wounded 53 people. To many in Lebanon, that blast confirmed fears that the Iranian-backed group, a staunch ally of President Bashar Assad’s government, would face retaliation for its now overt role fighting alongside Assad’s troops inside Syria.
As Hezbollah’s hand in the Syrian conflict has become public, Lebanon has seen a spike in Sunni-Shiite tensions that has sparked gunbattles in several cities around the country. Many Lebanese Sunnis support the overwhelmingly Sunni uprising against Assad in Syria, while Shiites generally back Hezbollah and the regime.
Tuesday’s roadside blast near Lebanon’s border struck the SUV as it was driving on the main road in Majdal Anjar leading from Lebanon to the Syrian capital, about 1 mile from the Masnaa border crossing. The road is frequently used by Hezbollah security officials and other Lebanese officials heading to the Syrian capital, Damascus.
The state-run National News Agency identified the wounded men as Hussein Ali Bdeir and Fadi Abdul Karim. Local media reports said the two may have been bodyguards for a Hezbollah official traveling in the convoy.
Lebanese security officials said the SUV appeared to have been ambushed and the bomb detonated remotely. They spoke on condition of anonymity in line with regulations.
A Hezbollah official said the group had no information on the blast.
The group’s fighters played a key role in a recent victory by Assad’s forces to retake control of the Syrian town of Qusair, near the Lebanese border, where rebels held sway for more than a year. Syrian activists have said Hezbollah fighters are now aiding a regime offensive in the besieged city of Homs.
Iran’s president-elect, Hasan Rouhani, has sent messages to Assad and Hezbollah, reaffirming support for the two allies, saying close ties will be able to confront “enemies in the region, especially the Zionist regime,” or Israel, the official IRNA news agency said.
The Israeli military on Tuesday said mortar shells from neighboring Syria struck the Golan Heights, causing no damage. It did not believe the fire was aimed at Israel. Israel has been warily watching the Syrian conflict, fearing the violence could spill across its borders.
Iraq’s envoy to the United Nations warned Tuesday that the Syrian war also was taking a toll on his violence-plagued country, saying “the battlefields are merging.”
Martin Kobler told the U.N. Security Council that Iraqi armed groups have an increasingly active presence in Syria. As a result, he said, the Syrian conflict is no longer just spilling over into Iraq, but Iraqis are also reportedly taking arms against one another inside Syria, he said.
“These countries are interrelated,” Kobler stressed. “Iraq is the fault line between the Shia and the Sunni world, and everything which happens in Syria, of course, has repercussions on the political landscape in Iraq.”
Kobler said the past four months have been among the bloodiest in Iraq in the past five years, and the the perpetrators of violence are taking advantage of the ongoing political stalemate in the country and the Syrian conflict.
Kobler warned that the violence in both countries “could easily spiral out of control if not urgently addressed.”
What’s critically important, he said, is to address the roots of the conflict in Iraq and find a political solution to the civil war in Syria.
As of July 7, he said more than 160,000 Syrian refugees have been registered in Iraq, mainly in the northern Kurdistan region. He appealed to the Iraqi government to reopen the border to Syrians seeking protection.
More than 93,000 people have been killed and millions uprooted from their homes in the Syrian conflict, according to the U.N.
U.N. officials said Tuesday that approximately 5,000 people a month are being killed in Syria and the flight of refugees is the worst since the 1994 Rwanda genocide.
U.N. refugee chief Antonio Guterres said two-thirds of the nearly 1.8 million Syrian refugees known to the agency have fled since the beginning of 2013, an average of more than 6,000 daily.
“We have not seen a refugee outflow escalate at such a frightening rate since the Rwandan genocide almost 20 years ago,” Guterres said.
Inside Syria, the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said gunmen in a village killed seven men, including two retired army officers, who were Sunnis working to convince gunmen to abandon their weapons and return to normal life.
The main Western-backed Syrian opposition group, the Syrian National Council, accused Assad’s regime of “luring people” to the front lines under the pretext of negotiating a cease-fire or evacuating civilians, and then killing the mediators. The group cited the village killings as an example.
Meanwhile, British Foreign Secretary William Hague said his country is rushing to issue Syria’s rebel fighters with nearly $1 million worth of chemical-warfare protection, including escape hoods, drugs and chemical detector paper, because evidence suggests Assad has deployed chemical weapons against the opposition.
Syrian officials deny the charge, alleging instead that rebels have used the arms against government forces. Information for this article was contributed by Bassem Mroue, Zeina Karam, Edith M. Lederer and staff members of The Associated Press.