Clashes along the Syria-Lebanon border on Monday killed more than a dozen people, less than a week after Washington leveled sanctions against a Beirut-based network of companies believed to be supplying resources to the terror group:
Seven fighters from the Lebanese group Hezbollah were killed in fighting with Sunni Islamist insurgents in a mountainous area on the Syria-Lebanon border in which at least 16 rebels were also killed, a monitoring group reported on Monday.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an opposition-affiliated watchdog, said a further 31 fighters from Hezbollah had been wounded in the fighting in the border area between Ras al-Maara in Syria and Arsal in northeast Lebanon.
The region was last month the site of heavy fighting that saw dozens of Hezbollah fighters killed near the Syrian resort city of Rankous. Hezbollah has been widely blamed for providing critical support for the Bashar al-Assad regime and for dragging Lebanon into that country’s war in the process.
The terror organization’s willingness to endanger Lebanon’s economic and financial stability in pursuit of its global terror campaigns, often if not exclusively to promote Iranian interests, sits uneasily alongside the notion that it is an indigenous Lebanese organization promoting Lebanese interests. The Iran-backed terror group has in the past been openly ridiculed for the claim, with observers arguing instead that Hezbollah was a key force in destabilizing Lebanese institutions.
Meanwhile, the UN Security Council, in what The New York Times assessed as “rare unanimity” among UNSC members, voted to provide humanitarian aid for Syrians in rebel-held areas of the country without the prior approval of Syrian officials. The resolution slammed the Assad regime for among other things ignoring previous international efforts at humanitarian access to Syria’s civilian population:
Despite objections by Syria’s government, the United Nations Security Council voted 15 to 0 on Monday to authorize cross-border convoys of emergency aid for millions of deprived Syrian civilians in rebel-held areas, without prior approval by the Syrian authorities.
Monday’s resolution strengthened the provisions of another adopted five months ago and signified a rare unanimity among the Security Council members over how to deal with the civil war in Syria, which is now in its fourth year. The conflict has left more than 150,000 people dead, spread instability in the region and created what international aid officials are calling one of the world’s biggest humanitarian disasters.
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