By reuters –
From a sandbagged
army post near the border with Syria, Lebanese soldiers gaze through
tripod-mounted binoculars into hills where jihadist militants are
entrenched, a forgotten front in Syria’s civil war that has led to
bombings inside Lebanon.
There
is frequent fighting between the army and around 1,000-1,200 militants
dug into the hills around Arsal in a large pocket of territory
straddling the border, Lebanese General Youssef al-Dik said. Around 30
soldiers have been killed.
The
Sunni militants are members of Islamic State and the former Nusra
Front, groups fighting Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad. They regard
the mountains along the Lebanese border as a strategic base and also
consider Lebanon to be under the thumb of Assad’s ally, Shi’ite
Hezbollah.
“The
clashes are ongoing day and night. We target any gathering, activity or
anything we sense day or night with all kinds of weapons,” he told
Reuters during a visit last week.
For
Lebanon’s army, seen as a rare neutral institution in a state riven by
sectarian divisions, fighting that jihadist presence in a staunchly
Sunni Muslim area also means treading delicately to avoid prompting a
new domestic political crisis.
A
series of bomb attacks have struck Lebanon since the beginning of
Syria’s civil war in 2011, some of them linked by the security forces to
militant groups based in their neighbor who seek to widen the region’s
sectarian violence.
They
are just one way the conflict threatens to destabilize already fragile
Lebanon, where the political system is in near-permanent paralysis and
where the sectarian fault lines of its own 15-year civil war, which
ended in 1990, are still raw.
On
the road from Beirut to Arsal stand abandoned houses where weeds grow
from old shell holes. Nearby is a former Syrian army post, evidence of
Syria’s 30-year military presence in Lebanon.
That
presence ended in 2005, but Damascus retained extensive influence in
its smaller neighbor, partly through its close alliance with the
Lebanese Shi’ite movement Hezbollah, so the outbreak of its civil war
had an immediate impact in Lebanon.
In
the Shi’ite towns of the fertile Bekaa valley, on the road to Arsal,
posters for Hezbollah share the sides of buildings with portraits of the
movement’s “martyrs” killed fighting for Assad in Syria.
Whether
to support Assad or oppose him is a question that splits Lebanese
parties, partly along sectarian lines, and has accentuated the country’s
political deadlock.
DANGER
Many Lebanese Sunnis
resent the dominance of Shi’ite Hezbollah, saying it has cut them off
from power and perpetuated Syrian influence. Some of them accuse it of
instigating the political crisis and compromising the neutrality of the
army.
In recent years
that anger has caused protests and even some attacks on army patrols in
traditionally Sunni cities. Diplomats say such sensitivities mean the
army has learnt to tread carefully in policing mostly Sunni Arsal.
Supporters
of Hezbollah have said such concerns have tied the army’s hands and
stopped it rooting out militants more actively. But the diplomats said a
campaign to crush them would be difficult because they occupy well
defended positions.
In the army post above Arsal a ceaseless wind swirled fine dust, stinging the eyes and catching at the back of the nose.
The
soldiers here face real danger. Militants in the hills opposite carry
assault rifles but also medium-sized weapons like mortars and anti-tank
missiles. They attack hilltop posts and target patrols inside Arsal with
car bombs, said General al-Dik.
The
army is widely regarded in Lebanon as occupying a position above the
country’s fractured politics but its senior officers are powerful
figures.
Posters along
the road to Arsal showed the current army chief, Jean Kahwaji, with the
slogan “the right man in the right place”.
The
army is backed by Western countries, including the United States, which
this year gave it $220 million in equipment, including heavy guns like
those visible below the position above Arsal. Britain has given over 60
million pounds worth of equipment since 2012, including old border
watchtowers once used in Northern Ireland.
HEAVY FIGHTING
In August 2014, when
Islamic State was rapidly expanding across Iraq and Syria, insurgents
loyal to it and the Nusra Front, then an official al Qaeda branch,
crossed the Lebanese border and overran Arsal, regarding its refugee
camps as a base for cross-border attacks
After heavy fighting, the Lebanese
army, and in some places Hezbollah, restored control over the town and
strategic points around it, but militants remained in the hills nearby.
Islamic State still holds nine Lebanese soldiers hostage.
Across
the frontier, advances by the Syrian army, backed by Hezbollah, last
year cut off the militants from the east, leaving them surrounded in an
area straddling the border.
Both
Islamic State and the Nusra Front, which in July cut its al Qaeda links
and changed its name to Jabhat Fateh al-Sham, are still there, General
al-Dik said.
They live
in caves, ramshackle houses and other makeshift dwellings, he added,
standing in a sandbagged emplacement surrounded by a coil of barbed
wire, and saying that in winter a meter or more of snow covers the
hills.
Those harsh
conditions are also endured by the 70,000 war refugees who live in camps
in and around Arsal, some of the more than 1 million Syrians who have
fled to Lebanon.
Although
no bomb attacks in Lebanon have been directly linked to refugees, the
army chief Kahwaji said last year that the camps posed a security risk
as potential hideouts. General al-Dik said the army had staged raids in
the Arsal refugee camps in recent months, arresting “terrorist leaders”
there.
Roads towards the town are studded with army checkpoints where soldiers check drivers’ documents.
The
army believes such precautions, along with its military operations and a
change in the situation in Syria, are gradually smothering the militant
threat.
“The more they
are surrounded, the less they receive logistical support and this is
what is happening now… there are some smuggling operations from Syria
to Lebanon but they are decreasing day by day and the stress on them is
increasing,” said General al-Dik.
(Editing by Giles Elgood)
