Beirut: Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah said on Tuesday he recently received an envoy from Qatar, the first contact between the two sides since divisions over the crisis in Syria severed their once strong relations.
“There is talk between us...there was a line between us and Qatar which was reopened [recently] but up to a certain limit,” Nasrallah said in an interview with Lebanon’s OTV television.
He did not disclose details about the identity or seniority of the envoy but when asked by the interviewer if the meeting took place in the past few days Nasrallah said: “Yes, it is true. I can not hide it.”
Hezbollah, a Shiite group, had developed relatively strong ties with Qatar, especially after the Gulf state funded the reconstruction of many Shiite villages destroyed during a 2006 war between Hezbollah and Israel.
In 2010, the Emir of Qatar, Shaikh Hamad Bin Khalifa Al Thani, toured south Lebanon, a Hezbollah stronghold, inaugurating several Qatar-funded projects in the village of Bint Jbeil, where Hezbollah and Israel fought fierce battles.
But relations soured the following year when Qatar took the side of the rebels in the revolt that erupted against the rule of Syrian President Bashar Al Assad, a Hezbollah ally.
Syria’s civil war has divided the region and ignited Sunni-Shiite sectarian tension. The mostly Sunni Gulf states, including Saudi Arabia and Qatar, funded and armed the Sunni rebels while Al Assad, an Alawite, was supported by Shiite Iran, which is also a patron of Hezbollah.
The conflict has killed more than 120,000 people, displaced millions of Syrians and attracted thousands of fighters from across the world, including hundreds of Hezbollah fighters.
Nasrallah said he told the Qatari envoy that a military option was “pointless” in Syria and called for a political solution. Western powers are trying to bring Al Assad and his opponents together for peace talks on January 22. Nasrallah said that regional and Western countries have no appetite for a large-scale war and said several European countries have sent envoys to Damascus to meet with the government. He did not provide additional details.
The meeting between Hezbollah’s leadership and a Qatar representative came after Iran and world powers struck a deal over Tehran’s nuclear programme last month.
Nasrallah praised the agreement and said it would ease tensions in the region and bring different views together. “The number one winner in this deal is the people of this region...I can not say that this agreement has annulled the choice of war permanently but I can say it has pushed it away for a long time.”
While saying that several countries were trying to improve relations with Damascus, he noted that Saudi Arabia, which has expressed caution about the Iran nuclear deal, was determined to continue the fight inside Syria “until the last bullet”.
“There is a Saudi decision to try and change the events on the ground until January 22...they will fail,” adding that he expected fierce battles in Syria until then.
Saudi Arabia and Iran are locked in a struggle for influence across the Arab world.
