Rockets target Hezbollah turf in Beirut; 4 hurt

BEIRUT - Two rockets hit Hezbollah strongholds in Beirut on Sunday, tearing through an apartment and peppering cars with shrapnel, a day after the Lebanese group’s leader pledged to lift President Bashar Assad to victory in Syria’s civil war.

Authorities said the Grad rockets - known to be notoriously imprecise - were launched from an area about six miles away.

The strikes illustrated the potential backlash against Hezbollah at home for linking its fate to the survival of the Assad regime. It’s a gambit that also threatens to pull fragile Lebanon deeper into Syria’s bloody conflict.

Lebanese President Michel Suleiman called the spillover from Syria’s civil war an act of “terrorist saboteurs” who don’t want peace and stability for Lebanon, Lebanon’s National News Agency said.

Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah has made it clear there is no turning back. In a televised speech Saturday, he said Hezbollah will keep fighting alongside Assad’s forces until victory, regardless of the costs.

For Hezbollah, it may well be an existential battle. If Assad fell, Hezbollah’s supply line of Iranian weapons through Syrian territory would dry up, and it could become increasingly isolated in the region.

Hezbollah said it needs its arsenal of weapons to defend against Israeli attacks. Hezbollah spearheaded the fight against Israel’s occupation of an enclave in south Lebanon and claimed victory when Israel withdrew in 2000 after 18 years.

At the same time, Hezbollah, a Shiite Muslim group, is raising the sectarian stakes in Lebanon by declaring war on Syria’s rebels, most of them Sunni Muslims.

Lebanon and Syria share the same mix of Sunnis, Shiites, Christians and Alawites, or followers of an offshoot of Shiite Islam. In trying to defeat the rebels, Assad relies on support from minority Shiites, Christians and his fellow Alawites.

On Beirut’s beach promenade, opinions about Hezbollah’s new strategy seemed to fall along religious lines.

Mahmoud Masoud, a Sunni, said he fears Lebanon will become more unstable. “I don’t want to see everything I’ve worked for and my country fall apart of because of a certain group’s interests,” he said of Hezbollah.

Tamam Alameh, a Shiite, sided with Hezbollah. “The Syrians helped Lebanon a lot. We should help them and rid them of the conflict in their country,” he said.

The rockets struck early Sunday in south Beirut, an unusual type of attack. In occasional sectarian flare-ups since the end of Lebanon’s 15-year civil war in 1990, rival groups have mostly fought in the streets.

One rocket hit a car dealership in the Mar Mikhael district, wounding four Syrian workers, badly damaging two cars and spraying others with shrapnel. Part of the rocket’s main body was embedded in the ground, where a Lebanese soldier measured its diameter.

The second rocket tore through a second-floor apartment in the Chiyah district, about a mile away. It damaged a living room, but no one was hurt.

Rocket launchers were later found in the woods in a predominantly Christian and Druse area southeast of Beirut, security officials said.

There was no claim of responsibility, but the attack was widely portrayed as retaliation for Nasrallah’s defiant speech and Hezbollah’s participation in a regime offensive in the past week on the rebel-held Syrian town of Qusair, near Lebanon. The regime has pushed back the rebels in Qusair, but has so far failed to dislodge them.

In an amateur video posted online a few days ago, a rebel commander threatened to hit Hezbollah targets in south Beirut in retaliation for the militia’s part in the fight for Qusair.

Syria’s opposition leader, George Sabra, earlier this month pleaded for rebels to concentrate on Qusair and aid 50,000 people trapped inside. In recent weeks, the opposition has lost Otaibah to the east of Damascus after a 37-day battle, the southern town of Sanamein and Aziza near Aleppo in the north.

Syrian government forces entered Qusair this month to secure the highway linking Damascus with the coastal mountain region that forms the Alawite heartland, the regime’s support base, and cut the rebel resupply lines from Lebanon. The battle is seen as a test for both sides.

Some said Sunday’s rockets are just one sign that Lebanon is becoming a battleground.

“Nasrallah declared that he is part of the Syrian civil war,”said Nadim Koteich, a TV talk show host and frequent Hezbollah critic. “He did not tell the Lebanese people why he thinks this civil war will not come to Lebanon.”

In the northern Lebanese city of Tripoli, Sunni opponents and Alawite supporters of the Assad regime have repeatedly fought with mortar shells, machine guns and grenades since the start of the Syria conflict.

The latest round in the past week, apparently sparked by the Qusair offensive, was the longest and deadliest so far, with more than two dozen killed and more than 200 hurt.

Lebanese Sunnis have also entered the Syria battle, joining rebel units, though in a less-organized way than Hezbollah.

Hezbollah remains the most powerful group in Lebanon, backed by a military wing armed with tens of thousands of Iranian missiles.

Despite the risk of a backlash over the involvement in Syria, Hezbollah appears to be banking on continued support from Lebanon’s Shiites, for whom it provides an extensive social-support system.

The Arab world’s Sunni leaders were predictably harsh on Nasrallah.

In Bahrain, Foreign Minister Sheik Khalid bin Ahmed Al Khalifa described the Hezbollah chief as a “terrorist” and said it was Lebanon’s “national and religious duty” to remove him from his influential position, according to the official Bahrain News Agency.

In Cairo, Arab League Secretary General Nabil Elaraby condemned Sunday’s rocket attack but also urged Hezbollah to stop interfering in the Syrian civil war.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Saturday that his country is “preparing for any scenario” with the three-day national civil defense exercise it is set to begin today.

“Israel is the world’s most threatened country from rocket or missile attacks,” he said.

In new developments, a rocket was fired from southern Lebanon toward Israel late Sunday, Lebanon’s state run National News Agency reported.

The news agency said the rocket was fired from a location near the southern town of Marjayoun, about six miles north of the Israeli border. It was not immediately clear who fired the rocket or whether it caused any damage or casualties.

The Israeli military did not confirm that a rocket was fired, but said residents in northern Israel reported hearing an explosion. The military said it was searching the area and trying to determine the circumstances behind the explosion.

In addition to Hezbollah, militant Palestinian groups are also known to operate in south Lebanon.

It is not known how many men Hezbollah has sent to Syria, but the militia’s trained fighters fill a dire need for Assad’s army.

Regime troops have been stretched thin, both because of defections at the start of the conflict and because only the most politically loyal have been sent into battle.

The Assad government, meanwhile, confirmed Sunday that it has agreed in principle to attend U.N.-sponsored talks with opposition representatives in Geneva next month on ending the civil war.

Syrian Foreign Minister Walid al-Moallem said during a visit to Iraq that such talks present a “good opportunity for a political solution for the crisis in Syria.” He did not say under what terms Assad would dispatch representatives.

The date, agenda and list of participants for the conference remain unclear, and wide gaps persist about its objectives.

Syrian opposition leaders have said they are willing to attend the Geneva talks but that Assad’s departure from power must top the agenda. Assad said this month that his future won’t be determined by international talks and that he will only step down after elections are held.

At least 80,000 people have been killed in Syria since the uprising began in 2011, Vuk Jeremic, president of the United Nations’ General Assembly, said this month. U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry on Wednesday said “upwards of 100,000 people” may have been killed.

The U.N. has registered more than 1.3 million refugees who have fled to Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan.

Information for this article was contributed by Karin Laub, Zeina Karam, Yasmine Saker, Brian Murphy and Aya Batrawy of The Associated Press; by Andrew J. Barden, Zaid Sabah, Glen Carey, Wael Mahdi and Jeanna Smialek of Bloomberg News; and by Patrick J. McDonnell of the Los Angeles Times.