A Widening Gyre of Violence: Syria vs. Lebanon

Now we have another twist to the Syrian plot. According to the Syrian government, led by Ahmad al-Sharaa, three Syrian soldiers were kidnapped inside northern Syria on the border with Lebanon by Hezbollah on Saturday, March 15. The three soldiers, once inside Lebanon, were then killed by Hezbollah. The Syrians then exchanged fire with Hezbollah. Five more Syrian soldiers were killed on Monday. The number of Hezbollah casualties is still not known. The Syrians have now sent more soldiers to the. border vowing to put paid to the Hezbollah threat. They are preparing to enter Lebanon to track down the Hezbollah operatives who they believe were responsible for killing their soldiers.

Meanwhile, Joseph Aoun, the new president of Lebanon, who is known to hate Hezbollah, nonetheless has decided to send Lebanese army reinforcements to the border with Syria where the exchange of fire took place. He is has promised to bring quiet to the region. Will Hezbollah allow him to do that? Will the Syrians?

More on the latest developments on the Lebanese-Syrian border can be found here: “Lebanon says it will retaliate for gunfire from Syria amid deadly fighting on border,” Times of Israel, March 17, 2025:

Lebanon’s president on Monday ordered troops to retaliate for gunfire from the Syrian side of the border after deadly fighting erupted overnight along the tense frontier and as more was reported on Monday.

“What is happening along the eastern and northeastern border cannot continue and we will not accept that it continues,” Lebanon’s President Joseph Aoun said on X. “I have given my orders to the Lebanese army to retaliate against the source of fire.”

Aoun added that he asked Lebanon’s foreign minister, who is currently in Brussels for a donors conference on Syria, to contact Syrian officials to resolve the problem “and prevent further escalation.”

The fighting occurred after Syria’s interim government accused operatives from Lebanon’s Iran-backed Hezbollah terror group of crossing into Syria on Saturday, abducting three soldiers and killing them on Lebanese soil.

It was the most serious cross-border fighting since the ouster of longtime Syrian president Bashar al-Assad in December.

State-run Syrian News Channel, citing an unnamed Defense Ministry official, said the Syrian army shelled “Hezbollah gatherings that killed Syrian soldiers” along the border. Hezbollah denied involvement in a statement on Sunday.

Information Minister Paul Morkos said Lebanon’s defense minister told a cabinet meeting that the three killed were smugglers. He added that one child was killed and six people were wounded on the Lebanese side.

On Monday, a Syrian soldier was reported killed by Hezbollah rocket fire and at least three people were killed as the Syrian army shelled a Lebanese village, Arabic-language media reported.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based war monitor of unclear funding, said five Syrian soldiers were killed during Monday’s clashes.

Lebanon’s state news agency reported that fighting intensified Monday evening near the Lebanese town of Hermel.

Violence recently spiked in the area between the Syrian military and armed Lebanese Shiite clans closely allied with the former government of Assad, based in Lebanon’s Al-Qasr border village….

Hezbollah claims it had nothing to do with the violence. It was, its spokesmen say, Shiite clans who fired on the Syrians. The Syrians do not believe them.

Haj Hassan, a senior member of Hezbollah, claims that the fighting started when three Syrians crossed into Lebanon and started attacking Lebanese border villages. Does that sound plausible — three soldiers attacking whole villages? Since Hezbollah has almost as long a record of lying as Hamas, I tend to accept the Syrian version of events: that the conflict started when Hezbollah kidnapped three Syrian soldiers, took them to Lebanon, and then killed them.

The response of President Aoun is worrisome. He hates Hezbollah, but now he has chosen to rally round it, as if were a genuine part of the Lebanese polity, instead of the Iranian agent it has always been. Now he has made pushing the Syrian army away from the Lebanese border in the Hermiel region the sine qua non for Lebanon. He can’t back down; in the shame-honor culture of the Arabs, you must never back down; humiliation is the most intolerable of conditions. If Aoun had thought things through, he could instead of being so quick to send more troops have simply promised to open a joint investigation with the Syrians of the border clashes, in order to discover, and punish, the guilty party. He could have said, diplomatically, that “if Hezbollah was the aggressor, so be it and we will not hesitate to back our Syrian brothers in such a case. But if Syrian soldiers entered Lebanon, and began attacking our villages, we expect the Syrians to recognize that and to deal with the malefactors in their own military. Lebanese and Syrians are brothers. Nothing must be allowed to divide us. That only helps our enemies, and we all know who they are.”

Would Ahmad al-Sharaa be satisfied with such a statement from Joseph Aoun? Of course he would.

But it’s too late now for soothing words. Each side has dug in, and sees no way to avoid humiliation except by fighting to win.

And as I have had occasion to note in several previous pieces, the West should do nothing at all, but pull up a chair, and watch, as the two sides trade blows.