Syrian warplanes cross Lebanon for strike

BEIRUT - Syrian warplanes attacked targets inside eastern Lebanon on Monday, the official Lebanese National News Agency reported. It appeared to be the first time since the Syrian conflict began two years ago that the military had used its air force to strike at suspected rebel hideouts across the Lebanon border.

Also Monday, President Barack Obama’s administration lent its support to British and French plans to arm Syria’s rebels, saying it wouldn’t stand in the way of any country seeking to rebalance the fight against an Assad regime supported by Russia, Iran and Hezbollah.

A brief dispatch by the Lebanese Nation News Agency said that “warplanes affiliated with the Syrian Air Force” attacked the Wadi al-Khayl Valley area, near the Lebanese border town of Arsal, without specifying whether they had caused casualties or damage. The mountainous area is known for its porous border. It is considered a haven for Syrian insurgents, and the civilian population there largely opposes Syrian President Bashar Assad.

Al-Manar, the television broadcaster controlled by the Lebanese Shiite group Hezbollah, which supports Assad, said the warplanes had targeted two barns used by anti-Assad fighters. Agence France-Presse, quoting an unidentified Lebanese security services official, said at least four missiles were fired.

Syrian forces have occasionally fired guns or mortar rounds across the Lebanon border in clashes with anti-Assad fighters but had never before used warplanes to attack suspected rebel positions inside Lebanese territory.

There was no immediate confirmation of the attack from the Syrian government. But it warned Thursday thatits forces might fire into Lebanon because of what it called repeated incursions by terrorist gangs, the standard official Syrian terminology for the armed opposition to Assad.

That warning, contained in a diplomatic protest delivered through the Syrian Embassy in Beirut, complained that “armed terrorist gangs have infiltrated Syrian territory in large numbers from Lebanon.”

Lebanon’s government, mindful of the long history of entanglements with its neighbor, has sought to remain neutral over the conflict in Syria. But sectarian tensions have been stoked by the conflict nonetheless, aggravated in part by the influx of more than 300,000 Syrians seeking refuge in Lebanon. Many of them are Sunnis, the Islamic sect that also forms the backbone of the insurgency. Assad’s minority Alawite sect is an offshoot of Shiite Islam.

The warplane attack was at least the third serious border episode in the past few weeks, underscoring how the Syrian conflict has threatened to destabilize the Middle East.On March 4, anti-Assad insurgents in western Iraq killed dozens of Syrian soldiers who had temporarily sought safety on the Iraqi side of the border. On March 6, insurgents seized a group of U.N. soldiers on patrol in the disputed Golan Heights region between Syria and Israel, the first time that international peacekeepers had been ensnared in the Syrian conflict, but they were released three days later.

News of the warplane attack coincided with unconfirmed reports of mortar fire in relatively affluent parts of Damascus. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an opposition group based in Britain with a network of contacts inside Syria, reported that two mortar rounds had struck the bridge linking the Mezzeh neighborhood to Mount Qasyoun in Damascus, and that another mortar round had fallen in Mezzeh near the Ministry of Higher Education. It was unclear which side had fired them.

Meanwhile, Secretary of State John Kerry said the longer Syria’s two-year civil war goes on, the greater the danger of its institutions collapsing and extremists getting their hands on the Arab country’s vast chemical-weapons arsenal. With some 450,000 Syrians living in neighboring countries as refugees already, he said the conflict is becoming a “global catastrophe.”

Kerry said the world needs to change Assad’s calculations.

“If he believes he can shoot it out, Syrians and the region have a problem, and the world has a problem,” Kerry told reporters after a meeting with Australian Foreign Minister Bob Carr.

Kerry said the U.S. wants to leave the door open for a political solution. But concerning Syria’s rebels, he added, “the United States does not stand in the way of other countries that made a decision to provide arms, whether it’s France or Britain or others.” Information for this article was contributed by Hania Mourtada, Rick Gladstone and Hala Droubi of The New York Times ; and by Bradley Klapper, Robert Burns and Donna Cassata of The Associated Press.

Front Section, Pages 3 on 03/19/2013

Upcoming Events