Hezbollah chief Naim Qasim said on Saturday that the Lebanese armed group had lost its supply route through Syria, in his first comments since the toppling of President Bashar al-Assad in a sweeping rebel offensive nearly a week ago.
Under Assad, Iran-backed Hezbollah used Syria to bring weapons and other military equipment from Iran to Lebanon via Iraq and Syria. But on December 6, anti-Assad fighters seized the border with Iraq and cut it off, and two days later, Islamist rebels captured the capital, Damascus.
“Yes, Hezbollah has lost a military supply route through Syria at this stage, but this is the details of the damage resistance,” Qassem said in a televised speech on Saturday, without naming Assad.
“A new regime may come and this route may return to normal, and we may find other ways,” he added.
Hezbollah began intervening in Syria in 2013 to help Assad fight rebels who were trying to topple him at the time. Last week, as the rebels neared Damascus, the group sent observer officials there to oversee the withdrawal of its fighters.
The Assad family’s more than 50-year rule has now been replaced with a transitional caretaker government by the former al-Qaeda affiliate Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, which led the rebel offensive.
Qassim said that Hezbollah “cannot judge these new forces until they are stabilized” and “cannot take a clear position”, but he hoped that the Lebanese and Syrian people and governments could continue to cooperate.
“We also hope that this new ruling party will consider Israel as an enemy and not normalize relations with it. These are topics that will affect the nature of relations between us and Syria,” Qasim said.
Hezbollah and Israel traded hostilities along Lebanon’s southern border for nearly a year, beginning with the Gaza War, before Israel launched an offensive in September, killing most of Hezbollah’s top leadership.
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