Labweh, Lebanon: Islamist militants from Syria who overran a Lebanese border town mostly withdrew back across the rugged hills separating the two countries as a ceasefire appeared to hold on Thursday, allowing Lebanese troops to free seven fellow soldiers and ambulances to evacuate dozens of casualties.
The seizure of Arsal over the weekend marked the first time that Islamist extremists from Syria had carried out a large-scale incursion into Lebanon and raised fears of a further spillover of the conflict across the porous border.
A senior Lebanese security official said the majority of the fighters had withdrawn by mid-Thursday.
As the militants withdrew, the extent of the fighting that began on Saturday became clear, as Sunni clerics who negotiated the ceasefire uploaded videos of wounded, wailing children and photographs of dead children.
“We were weeping to see people in need. We had some bread, and people were fighting for the bread,” said Shaikh Hussam Al Gali of the Association of Muslim Clerics, who oversaw the negotiations. “I went to some of the [Syrian refugee] camps. The stench of death was very strong,” he told media on the outskirts of Arsal.
Red Cross official Abdullah Zogheib said the group evacuated 42 wounded people, most of them women and children, from Arsal on Thursday.
The fighting began on Saturday when militants from Syria overran Arsal, seizing Lebanese army posts, soldiers and policemen, and demanding the release of a rebel commander detained in Lebanon. The militants included fighters from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant as well as from the Al Nusra Front, Al Qaida’s official Syrian affiliate.
At least 17 soldiers have been killed in the clashes, while 10 are still missing, along with an unknown number of policemen. The fighting trapped tens of thousands of Lebanese civilians and Syrian refugees in Arsal, and ratcheted up tensions inside Lebanon between supporters and opponents of the uprising against Syrian President Bashar Al Assad.
As the truce negotiated overnight appeared to hold, the Lebanese army said it had freed seven soldiers who had been captured by the militants, without providing further details. Twelve more soldiers are still missing along with an unknown number of policemen.
Evacuate wounded
Lebanon’s army chief, General Jean Kahwaji, said on Thursday that the army’s situation in Arsal was “very good,” according to state media.
As the men were released, some 20 ambulances of the Lebanese Red Cross rushed into the town to evacuate 34 wounded people.
A field hospital in Arsal said 38 people had been killed in the fighting by Wednesday. The Association of Muslim Clerics posted onto its Facebook page photographs of at least two dead little girls that it claimed were killed in Arsal, alongside videos and photographs of wounded children.
Cleric Al Gali and a pro-rebel activist who uses the name Ahmad Al Quseir said that some Syrian tent encampments near Arsal were struck and burnt by shelling.
In Syria meanwhile, militants from Isil overran one of the last remaining army bases in the northeastern Raqqa province, activists said on Thursday.
The militants seized the Brigade 93 base overnight after days of heavy fighting, according to Rami Abdul Rahman, head of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, and the Raqqa Media Centre, an activist collective. The base lies some 60 kilometres from the provincial capital of Raqqa, a stronghold for Isil.
Abdul Rahman said dozens of Syrian soldiers were killed. The Britain-based Observatory obtains its information from activists on the ground in Syria. Syrian state media did not report the incident.
A video uploaded to social media networks showed heavily armed men with thick beards — who claimed to be from Isil — walking through the military base, showing off tanks, assault rifles and boxes of ammunition.
Isil, an Al Qaida breakaway, has seized wide swaths of Syria and Iraq, where it is imposing an ultraconservative version of Muslim law, including killing people seen as apostates, and beheading and crucifying rivals.
