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In an abandoned school building, a small laminated card lies on a table, bearing the words “The martyr’s course”. Torn pictures of former Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah and Iran’s late supreme leader Ruhollah Khomeini are hanging off a wall.
Downstairs, scores of tins filled with Russian ammunition fill the corridors, next to a home-made drone inside a wooden box, complete with batteries and a remote-control device.
This is what remains of a training base used by the militant group Hezbollah in the town of Al Qusayr on the Lebanon-Syria border, a religiously-mixed area of Christians and Sunni and Shia Muslims.
In a group of streets described by rebels as Hezbollah’s “security square”, The National toured the base, as well as a former Hezbollah field hospital, and the site of an Israeli air strike on a building allegedly used by the group around a month ago.
Hezbollah, a political and military Shia group, played a significant role in 2013 in taking Al Qusayr back from rebel forces who had earlier seized it from the Assad regime’s security forces. They have since stayed.
Residents and rebel fighters now in control of the town told The National how the Iran-backed Lebanese group used to move its fighters and weapons, and facilitate drugs and goods trade through the area.
Military commander in Homs
Their presence in the town ended abruptly at the beginning of this month, when rebels led by the former Al Qaeda affiliate Hayat Tahrir Al Sham swept across Syria in a lightning offensive, eventually entering the capital Damascus and prompting the president, Bashar Al Assad, to flee to Russia. Hezbollah’s time in Al Qusayr was over.
“There was fierce battles in Aleppo, Hama and Homs,” Bassil Idriss, a military commander for the southern rural Homs area, told The National. “When we entered Al Qusayr there were a few pockets of Hezbollah left, they were taking their weapons and fleeing to Lebanon. There were a few small clashes but not much. The [Syrian] army collapsed, and so did Hezbollah.”
They left some behind. Although much of the group’s arsenal of larger weapons has been destroyed in Israeli strikes in recent months, the rebels found ammunition and weapons in the group’s former base.
The National sent pictures of the cache to a former British Army weapons expert, who identified them as Russian-made rifle ammunition, anti-armour and machinegun rounds, and a Russian speaker translated some of the labelling as “full charges in the cartridges”.
The rebel fighters estimated there were thousands of bullets in the crates, which they would hand over alongside heavy machineguns to the new HTS-run authorities for storage.
Hezbollah justified its 2012 entry into the Syrian conflict on the side of the Assad regime on the basis of protecting Lebanon’s borders from terrorists, and securing Damascus’s Sayyida Zaynab shrine, a holy place for Shia Muslims.
“Syria is the backbone of the resistance (in the region) and its main supporter,” Mr Nasrallah, who was killed in an Israeli air strike in Lebanon in September, said in a speech in 2013. “The resistance will never stand by while its backbone is exposed.”
Rebel fighters from the area and residents tell a different story. Standing among Al Qusayr’s ruined buildings, they said that Hezbollah wanted to control the town because of its strategic border location, which facilitated weapons transfers from Lebanon. The group aimed to eventually create a route across central Syria to connect with allied militias in Iraq, they claim, and even brought Lebanese families to live in Al Qusayr.
“They have an Iranian project, they want to create a ‘Shia crescent’ across the Middle East,” said one fighter, who participated in the battle for the town in 2013 against Hezbollah before fleeing to northern Syria when the Lebanese fighters ousted the Syrian rebels.
The recent Israeli air strikes on the former Hezbollah bases in the town have terrified civilians too. “The strikes threatened us but we had nowhere else to go,” Khadija Naser, 42, told The National near her home, about 300 metres from the site of an Israeli strike about one month ago.
“I have two children with disabilities and I don’t have anywhere else to go. We’ve just stayed in a state of constant anxiety. We made a safe spot in the house and whenever the sound of a plane came, we went to sit there.”
Marwan Kasouha, 60, a local shopkeeper, described how Israel recently targeted a base containing Hezbollah rockets in Al Qusayr, leading to secondary explosions from the weapons.
“They were exploding for days afterwards – boom, boom,” he said, waving his hands in the air and pointed to buildings surrounded by walls and barbed wire in the distance where the strikes took place. “Everyone was terrified,” his wife, Maha Kasouha, added.
The rebel fighters once ousted from Al Qusayr by Hezbollah do not underestimate their enemy. “They were well trained,” one fighter said. He described how Hezbollah would advance in groups of around 50 soldiers, the first one brandishing the group’s signature yellow and green flag, aiming to plant it on captured territory. If many of the soldiers in that wave were killed, another 50 would advance.
Another rebel fighter, a slim, animated man who waved a cigarette as he spoke, described how Hezbollah had clearly mapped-out plans of Al Qusayr – evidenced by the white scrolls showing detailed maps of the area strewn across the floor of the group’s former field hospital.
He described how they would map out individual streets and houses to track down and attack rebel fighters. The fighting left huge destruction in Al Qusayr and the surrounding villages, where some buildings have been pancaked by air strikes.
The Hezbollah sites visited by The National indicated that they not only used the buildings to store weapons, but to train and accommodate fighters. Three dormitory rooms housing bunk beds contained dozens of boxes filled with biscuits, sugar and tinned food from the Al Abbas shrine in Karbala, Iraq, according to labels. In the upstairs classroom bearing the posters of Mr Nasrallah and Mr Khomeini, a poster showing “a summary of fighting principles” lies crumpled next to a stack of chairs.
The laminated training course ID card bore a young man’s name and a nom de guerre, Abu Hussein – a standard practice for the Lebanese group. On it was also printed the face of Imad Mughniyeh, a senior Hezbollah commander assassinated in Damascus in 2008.
In the field hospital, a weapons training manual for Hezbollah’s elite Radwan Forces lay tossed on the floor. A rebel fighter pointed from a window on to a large space behind the school building, which he said was used as a Hezbollah training ground.
Alongside the huge levels of destruction, there are other challenges in Al Qusayr. “The biggest issue now is securing the border,” said Mr Idriss. “There are drugs smugglers who are wanted by both the Syrian and Lebanese governments.”
Many of the town's residents fled during the early years of fighting. Local residents estimated about a quarter of Al Qusayr's original population of around 50,000 remained after the Hezbollah and Assad regime takeover.
Marwan Kasouha described how he came back to Al Qusayr, after fleeing in 2013 to rural Damascus, to find his house severely damaged. His brother’s home fared worse, he said, pointing to a pile of stone and rubble on the floor.
It was always difficult to know how many Hezbollah fighters were in the town at any one time, he said. “This year, when Israel was bombing them in Lebanon, they would come and stay here in Al Qusayr for 20 days or so, and then go back.”
Some of Al Qusayr’s civilian former residents are returning home following the fall of the Assad regime and the departure of Hezbollah, according to people in the town and rebel fighters, although there are no clear overall numbers.
Mrs Naser said her sister returned on Wednesday after living as a refugee for 11 years in Lebanon. “People are coming home. People are sleeping on the ground, but there is a roof over their head, not a tent.”
