A Lebanese government official close to Hezbollah revealed that Hezbollah fighters and the Lebanese army will soon tighten their control over the entire border with Syria. The official told Al-Monitor on condition of anonymity that the Syrian town of Zabadani will imminently fall in the hands of Hezbollah and the Syrian army.
The official said that Zabadani, which is located east of Damascus and is close to the Syrian-Lebanese border, in the center of the Lebanese Bekaa Valley, fell at the military and field levels, as no more than 400 gunmen from fundamentalist groups — most notably from Jabhat al-Nusra — have been trying to resist the Syrian army and Hezbollah in the town’s neighborhoods since early July. These gunmen have been exhausted by the siege imposed by Hezbollah and the Syrian army. In the town are also roughly 350 wounded militants with no access to medical treatment.
He said that this reality prompted the two conflicting parties — the Syrian authorities and Hezbollah on the one hand and Jabhat al-Nusra on the other — to try to reach a swap deal regarding the wounded and the militants remaining in Zabadani, as well as the Syrian civilians trapped in the villages of al-Fu’ah and Kefraya in Idlib province, in northwest Syria near the border with Turkey.
The idea of the swap deal came about because the residents of these villages are Shiite, just like the Hezbollah fighters. However, the gunmen besieging the villages are Sunnis from among Jabhat al-Nusra’s fundamentalists and other Sunni fundamentalist groups. The wounded in Zabadani are Sunni, too.
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