Via Reuters:

Two rockets hit a Shi’ite Muslim district of Beirut on Sunday, driving home the risk of spillover from Syria’s civil war, after the head of Lebanese Shi’ite militant Hezbollah said it would keep fighting on the Syrian government’s side until victory.

It was the first attack to apparently target Hezbollah’s stronghold in the south of the Lebanese capital since the outbreak of the two-year conflict in neighboring Syria, which has sharply heightened Lebanon’s own sectarian tensions.

n Sunday’s attack, one rocket landed in a car sales yard next to a busy road junction in south Beirut’s Chiah neighborhood, and the other struck an apartment several hundred meters away, wounding five people, residents said.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility. Brigadier Selim Idris, head of Syria’s Western-backed rebel military command, told Al-Arabiya Television that his forces had not carried out the attack.

But another Syrian rebel, Ammar al-Wawi, told Lebanon’s LBC Television the attack was a warning to authorities in Beirut to restrain Hezbollah. “In coming days we will do more than this. This is a warning to Hezbollah and the Lebanese government to keep Hezbollah’s hands off Syria,” he said.

Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah had declared on Saturday night that his heavily armed fighters were committed to the conflict against what he called radical Sunni Islamist rebels in Syria, whatever the cost.

0 Shares