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Hezbollah Secretary General Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah said that extremists belonging to the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) would have reached Beirut if it were not for his party’s decision to send fighters to Syria.
During a meeting of al-Mahdi Scouts Association on Sunday, he said, “Had we not interfered in Syria at the appropriate moment, ISIL would have been in Beirut now”. The Hezbollah leader also said that he was bewildered as to why the party’s critics have not decried ISIL’s march towards Baghdad.
In the latest conflict between the ISIL and the Iraqi government, militants took over neighborhoods of Tal Afar, a Shi’ite Turkmen town between the city of Mosul and the Syrian border, residents and officials said. For their part, the Iraqi government said that it is making progress by retaking territory from the extremists, who currently control most of the four provinces to the north of Baghdad. Iraqi security forces will combine with volunteers who were called up to arms by Shiite cleric Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani.
The Hezbollah leader lauded al-Sistani’s call to arms, saying that it “aims at protecting Iraq and not just a single sect”. He also hinted that a few of their regional neighbors were involved in the conflict in Iraq. “Who is benefiting from what’s going on there?” he asked. Nasrallah also raised doubts about America’s stance on the issue as it weighs the possibility of drone strikes in Iraq. He also expressed relief regarding the improvement of the situation in Lebanon; he however warned that “this does not mean things have gone back to normal”.
“We should always take precautions”, he said, reiterating the need to choose a President who “does not stab the resistance in the back”. Lebanon has not had a President since Michel Suleiman’s six-year term expired on May 25th – the Parliament could not elect a successor to Suleiman over differences between the March 8 and March 14 alliances.