Joining the Battle

"They have many weapons, and they are fighting hard because Yabroud is important for them. But it's our country and we are strong men. We will defend our people, our land and our honour until we die."
Basel, Sunni Lebanese fighter

Basel may indeed die. He is receiving medical treatment in a makeshift hospital next to a mosque. The kind of medical treatment he requires, however, cannot be provided there, they have not the means, the skills, the equipment. His brother, at his bedside, refuses to send him anywhere else in Lebanon for fear he would be captured by Hezbollah whose fighters man checkpoints in a neighbouring Shiite village.

The brothers are from Arsal, on the border with Syria in the northeastern part of Lebanon. Arsal is a Sunni town. And it has become a base for Syrian rebels. Their main concern is to ensure that the strategic Syrian town of Yabroud remains in their hands. Armed fighters in pickup trucks and on motorbikes drive down roads out of Arsal into the mountains, crossing into Syria, then head to Yabroud, a town under siege. Any who are wounded in battle are brought back to Arsal for treatment.

Even while Lebanese Sunni men pledge their allegiance to the Syrian Sunni rebels, Lebanese Shiites loyal to Hezbollah cross into Syria to fight with the Syrian regime's forces. Yabroud has been under fire from the forces of Syrian President Bashar Assad since November. Is it possible that without Hezbollah having pledged its military strength and capabilities to the Syrian regime, Lebanon would have remained out of the conflict?

Arsal, with its majority Sunni population is encircled by mostly Shiite towns in Lebanon's eastern Bekaa valley. Rigid antipathy between Lebanese Shia and Sunni has been exacerbated by Hezbollah's full-battle entry into the Syrian revolution. The two countries, Syria and Lebanon, in close geographical proximity, the borders completely porous, see rival militias flood the border in both directions.

The town of Baalbek, some 30 kilometres to the south is where many of the Hezbollah fighters heading toward the Yabround battle come from. Hezbollah guerrillas, according to the Sunni rebels being treated in the clandestine hospital, comprise the bulk of the forces surrounding Yabroud, challenging the Sunni rebels for its capture.

This is an especially fierce battle ongoing since Yabroud has a special purpose for the rebels, their last stronghold in the Qalamoun region between the Lebanese border and the Syrian capital of Damascus, as an important smuggling route for supplies to rebels from Lebanon. Other rebel held towns in the area have fallen to government forces in the past month.

Government helicopters have attacked the outskirts of the town with barrel bombs packed with explosives and fuels, used to horrendously wretched effect in other rebel-held urban Syrian areas.