Hezbollah's role in Syria grows
murky By Nicholas A Heras
Recent
reports of an increase in Hezbollah's involvement
in Syria's civil war as combatants alongside the
Syrian military represent a potentially sharp
escalation in the regional impact of the ongoing
conflict. Accusations concerning Hezbollah's
military support for the Bashar al-Assad
government leveled by the party's Lebanese
political opponents, the Syrian opposition and
pro-opposition states have been persistent since
the outbreak of the Syrian revolution in March
2011.
Hezbollah's leadership
has replied that it is protecting Lebanese Shi'ite
villagers living along the Lebanese-Syrian border
from attacks by Syrian rebels and that the Syrian
opposition is actively being funded and armed by
anti-Assad international actors, including
Hezbollah's Lebanese opponents in the March 14
political bloc.
On October 3, Free Syrian
Army (FSA) chief Colonel Riyad Musa al-As'ad
stated that the FSA had killed a senior Hezbollah military
commander named Ali Hussein
Nassif (aka "Abu Abbas") and two of his bodyguards
near the restive city of Qusayr on the
Lebanese-Syrian border. Colonel al-As'ad further
asserted that Nassif's activities in the area had
been monitored for two weeks, and that his death
was the result of a carefully planned FSA targeted
assassination intended as part of a larger FSA
offensive against Hezbollah in and around
Qusayr.
Hezbollah officials simply stated that Nassif had
died "performing his jihadi duties". Several weeks
after Nassif's death, the FSA claimed it had
killed an additional 60 Hezbollah fighters and
captured 13 in the vicinity of Qusayr.
Lebanese newspapers (some of them
antagonistic to Hezbollah) have recently begun
publishing stories describing a deeper military
commitment by Hezbollah to the Syrian regime.
According to one such report, an agreement between
the Syrian Defense Ministry and Hezbollah calls
for the latter to provide over 2,000 "elite"
fighters to Syria in the event of a foreign
invasion. The report also claimed that Hassan
Nasrallah offered the Assad government the full
use of Hezbollah's military capabilities in the
event that "urgent assistance" was needed.
Another Lebanese publication claimed that
Unit 901, an alleged elite Hezbollah military
unit, had crossed into Syria to fight in the
cities of Qusayr, al-Rastan, Talbiseh, and Homs,
all near the Lebanese-Syrian border. This movement
of Hezbollah troops into Syria was reported to be
the result of the Syrian military's need for
assistance in the campaign to defeat rebels in
Aleppo. Hezbollah, along with the Iranian Quds
Force, was also alleged to be training a
60,000-person Syrian military division modeled
after the Iranian Revolutionary Guards to protect
the Alawite-majority Latakia Governorate of Syria.
Hezbollah's soldiers were recently
reported to have been participating as shock
troops in several of the most intense battles of
the conflict, including in and around Homs, Hama,
suburbs of Damascus such as Zabadani and in the
vital northern city of Aleppo. FSA units operating
in Qusayr claim they have killed over 300
Hezbollah and Iranian fighters. A defected member
of the powerful Syrian Air Force Intelligence
Branch has asserted that Hezbollah has 1,500
fighters supporting the Syrian military inside the
country.
Sayyid Hassan Nasrallah,
Hezbollah's Secretary General, has refuted these
allegations, stating that his party only supports
the al-Assad government politically and that it
was assisting 30,000 Lebanese Shi'ite villagers
living in 20 villages in Syria near the Lebanese
border. [1] The villagers, in close vicinity to
Qusayr and the city of Hermel in Lebanon, had,
according to Nasrallah, been the victims of
targeted assaults by the FSA and deserved the
right to self-defense and support from the party.
Shi'ite refugees from the embattled
villages claimed that over 5,000 armed men, the
majority with ties to Hezbollah, were protecting
the villages from attack. Hezbollah is alleged to
have used Katyusha rockets against Sunni villages
on the Syrian side of the border.
In
spite of Hezbollah's strong support for the
al-Assad government, the presence of thousands of
Hezbollah fighters actively participating in
Syrian battlefields would be a significant
departure from the established understanding of
the party's force capabilities.
At present, the most consistent
reports of direct Hezbollah military involvement
in Syria occur in regions of the country that
border Lebanon and have a significant Shi'ite
population, or in areas that are of strategic
interest to Hezbollah because of their use as
routes for moving weapons from Iran through Syria,
such as the route through the Zabadan District of
the Rif Dimashq Governorate.
Hezbollah's
active-duty military force is widely estimated to
stand at between 2,000 and 4,000 fighters. These
fighters are thought to be deployed mainly in
southern Lebanon as a deterrent to Israeli
invasion and throughout Hezbollah-controlled or
monitored areas of Lebanon to guard the party's
exclusive "security zones" and weapons caches.
Predominately Shi'ite regions of Lebanon, such as
in the southern suburbs of Beirut, southern
Lebanon, and the Beka'a Valley, are secured by a
mix of Hezbollah full-time fighters, auxiliary
village-level militias and armed members of the
Lebanese Shi'ite AMAL movement. [2]
A
Lebanese Army source with extensive knowledge of
Hezbollah's war-fighting abilities states that any
large-scale deployment of Hezbollah forces in
Syria would most likely be the result of a severe
strain being placed upon the Syrian military's
ability to overcome rebel activity in the larger
cities of Syria, such as Aleppo and Homs. [3]
Hezbollah's specialization in reconnaissance and
intelligence operations and doctrinal emphasis on
the use of guerilla warfare would be of limited
use in the current context of the Syrian theater
of operations and its demand for mechanized
capabilities that Hezbollah does not possess.
Hezbollah Special Forces, such as the "Scorpions,"
could be used in limited engagements to disrupt
the Syrian rebels' lines of support near the
Turkish border or to perform rural ambush
operations.
As a result of Hezbollah's
limited resources and specialized doctrine of
warfare, deploying a large force in active combat
alongside the Syrian military would present an
enormous strain on the party's ability to combat
Israel and overcome its internal enemies inside of
Lebanon. The presence of thousands of Hezbollah
fighters in Syria would indicate either that the
party has far more active-duty fighters than was
previously believed, or that in order to execute a
strategy of supplementing the Syrian military,
Hezbollah is drawing significantly from its
village-level reserves.
Potentially, Hezbollah could
also convince its March 8-bloc allies in Lebanon,
particularly AMAL, but also the Free Patriotic
Movement, the Syrian Socialist Nationalist Party
and the Marada Movement, amongst others, to
provide armed support for the Syrian military to
supplement its efforts. Although this is a
possibility, there is no convincing evidence at
this time that Hezbollah's Lebanese allies are
mobilizing for combat duties in support of the
Syrian military.
This type of broad, March 8-bloc
deployment would indicate that the parties in the
bloc are confident in their ability to resist
Israel in the event of another invasion of Lebanon
and to overcome internal Lebanese rivals such as
the Future Movement and Salafist militant groups
in the event that an internal conflict were to
erupt.
Further, the Syrian civil war
presents anti-Hezbollah factions in Lebanon with a
convenient opportunity to strike at the party and
potentially minimize the risk of Hezbollah's
retribution against them. Reports indicate that
more than 300 Lebanese fighters, mainly Sunnis,
have been actively supporting the Syrian rebels in
Homs Governorate, including an all-Lebanese
military unit. Some of these Lebanese fighters
state that they have fought with veteran rebel
units such as the "Standard of the Free Orontes,"
which claims to have faced Hezbollah soldiers in
action in and around Homs.
Areas of the
Syrian governorates of Homs and Rif Dimashq that
border Lebanon are now a battlefield where the
Syrian military and Hezbollah are arrayed against
fighters from the FSA and Lebanese anti-Hezbollah
factions. The March 14 bloc, frustrated in its
ongoing efforts to reduce the political power of
Hezbollah inside of Lebanon and to force the party
to relinquish its heavy weapons, would benefit if
the defeat of the Assad government forced
Hezbollah to renegotiate its armed presence in
Lebanon.
Nicholas A Heras is an
MA Candidate in International Communication at the
American University (DC) and a former David L
Boren Fellow.
Notes: 1. The United States Department of Treasury
designated Hezbollah Secretary General Sayyid
Hassan Nasrallah as a sponsor of terrorism for
"providing training, advice, and extensive
logistical support to the government of Syria;
directly trained Syrian military personnel and
facilitated training efforts by the Iranian Quds
Force; coordinating efforts with the Syrian
military and the Quds Force to expel Syrian
rebels" (US
Department of the Treasury, September 13,
2012). 2. The author would like to thank Dr
Carl Anthony Wege, professor at the Coastal
College of Georgia, for his insight into the
structure of Hezbollah's military forces. 3.
Interview conducted by the author with a Lebanese
Army source with extensive operational experience
throughout Lebanon who requested anonymity due to
being on active duty. Interview conducted on
October 24, 2012.
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