Inside Syria soldiers seized a key town near Damascus from rebels following weeks of fierce clashes, a monitoring group said, and each side blamed the other after fighting destroyed the minaret of Aleppo’s ancient Umayyad mosque.
In an open letter Wednesday, Syria’s leading opposition figure Ahmad Moaz al-Khatib called on Lebanon’s Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah to withdraw his fighters to avoid the conflict degenerating into a sectarian war.
“Hezbollah’s intervention in Syria has complicated matters deeply, and I expected you, given your political and social stature, to play a more positive role” said Khatib in a letter posted on Facebook.
The message was also filmed and posted on YouTube.
Iran-backed Hezbollah, a close ally of President Bashar al-Assad’s regime, has denied Syrian opposition accusations that it has sent its elite troops into Syria to support regime troops battling insurgents.
It says Syrian rebels have targeted Shiite areas of Syria inhabited by Lebanese and that Shiites in Syria have a right to self-defence.
But the accusations against Hezbollah have multiplied as fighting escalated this week in the Qusayr area near the Lebanon border.
“The claim of defence for Shiite villages is unacceptable,” said Khatib, who on Sunday quit as head of Syria’s main opposition National Coalition in protest at what he said was world inaction over Assad’s onslaught on the rebels.
“There is a cunning plan to drag the Islamic world into sectarian conflict pitting Sunnis against Shiites, starting from Syria and Lebanon, only then to engulf all countries in the region, including Iran and Turkey,” he added.
But nobody could win in such a conflict, he said.
Khatib, a moderate Sunni sheikh who has widespread support in Syria, made his appeal just two days after radical Sunni sheikh Ahmad al-Assir called for Lebanese fighters to join insurgents seeking to oust Assad.
But the main rebel group, the Free Syrian Army, rejected the call to jihad in a statement Wednesday.
“We reject any presence of foreign fighters, regardless of where they are from,” FSA political and media coordinator Louay Muqdad told AFP.
“We have said that what we are missing in Syria is weapons, not men.”