Hezbollah’s media wing al-Manar has reported an ambush around the Lebanese border town of Arsal, with Hezbollah fighters catching an al-Qaeda convoy near the border and killing nine of them, including a “senior commander” identified as Abou Firas al-Jebbeh.
Al-Qaeda’s Jabhat al-Nusra has been increasingly active on the Syria-Lebanon border in recent months, and a separate incident was reported later in the afternoon in which another group of Nusra fighters got in a clash with the Lebanese military. Casualties were not reported.
Hezbollah has served as the first line of defense for a lot of fights against infiltrating Islamist factions from Syria, though indeed much of the infiltration is explicitly done to confront Hezbollah for its involvement in the Syrian Civil War.
This renewed fighting comes just a week after the Lebanese government made a prisoner exchange deal with al-Qaeda to secure the release of 16 security forces who were kidnapped back in August of 2014.
