Nasrallah vows to expand Hizbollah’s presence in Syria

Hizbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah addresses supporters from a screen in Beirut's southern suburbs on Friday. Aziz Taher/Reuters

BEIRUT // Hizbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah on Friday vowed to expand the group’s presence in Syria and send more leaders to the battlezone than ever before.

It came a week after the Lebanese Shiite group announced that its top commander in Syria, Mustafa Badreddine, had been killed near Damascus.

“No death of any of our leaders will drive us from the battle. This precious blood will push us to a larger, stronger and more sophisticated presence,” Mr Nasrallah said in a speech broadcast live on the group’s Al Manar television channel.

“We are staying in Syria. More leaders will go to Syria than the number that were there before.”

“We will be present in different forms as well,” he added without elaborating. “We will complete this battle.”

Mr Nasrallah also promised harsh retaliation to any future Israeli attacks – even at the risk of war. Despite this, however, he reiterated his previous claim that it was Sunni militants who were responsible for Badreddine’s death, not the Israeli security forces.

Hizbollah announced the death of Badreddine on May 13. Initial suspicions fell on Israel, but a day later Hizbollah said an investigation carried out by the group had determined that the commander was killed by an artillery attack mounted by Sunni militants near Damascus’ airport.

This claim was met with pushback, however, as no rebel group took responsibility for the attack, while the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights – an opposition monitoring group – said it had not recorded any shelling in the area.

Mr Nasrallah provided no new evidence to support his group’s claim, instead maintaining that Hizbollah’s investigation of the incident did not point to Israel. He argued that Israel would have been too afraid to kill such a leader and that Hizbollah had a history of speaking the truth.

“For us, even in psychological war, we don’t lie,” he said, according to a translation of his speech broadcast by Iran’s state-run Press TV.

Over the course of Hizbollah’s deployment to Syria, Israel has carried out several attacks on the group’s military leaders.

In air strikes last year, Israel killed commanders Jihad Mughniyeh and Samir Kuntar. Hizbollah also blames Israel for gunning down commander Hassan Laqqis in Beirut in 2013, though a Sunni militant group also took credit for his death.

If Israel strikes Hizbollah forces again, Mr Nasrallah promised on Friday that it will face a major retaliation going beyond the Lebanon-Israel border where recent revenge attacks have been focused.

“If you do any harm to our mujahideen, you the Zionists, our response will be direct and harsh and go beyond the Shebaa Farms ... whatever the repercussions,” he said.

In response to the January 2015 killing of Mughniyeh – the son of Hizbollah’s most famed operative Imad Mughniyeh – the group’s fighters ambushed an Israeli convoy in the disputed Shebaa Farms area on Lebanon’s border with Israel.

The subsequent clashes died down over the course of a few hours, but Mr Nasrallah said on Friday that Hizbollah had been mobilised for a full-scale war.

“The operation in response to the martyrs of Quneitra could have led to war, and we were ready for war. On that day, we evacuated all of our positions, we had thousands in the military training camps, we took all of our measures, we opened all of our operation centres,” he said. “History does not show that we back down or are afraid.”

In the four years that Hizbollah’s forces have been fighting on behalf of Syrian president Bashar Al Assad’s government, the group has likely lost about as many fighters as it did in decades of conflict with Israel.

Senior commanders have also faced increased risks in Syria, with a number of leaders dying in Israeli assassinations and battles with extremist groups.

Mr Nasrallah said he recognised the danger of sending one of Hizbollah’s most important leaders to Syria.

In the early days of the war “I prevented [Badreddine] from going to Syria in order to preserve his life, for his own protection,” said Mr Nasrallah.

He recalled Mr Badreddine’s frustration at running the war from Beirut’s Hizbollah-controlled southern suburbs, saying he pushed to be allowed to manage the war from the ground.

“He joked, unless you don’t want me to be martyred and want me to die in a bed,” Mr Nasrallah said.

* With additional reporting by Reuters