Though cross-border gunfire between Syria and Lebanon seems to have paused for now, the tensions are still rising, with a number of Syrian Shi’ites having fled into Lebanese border towns, and Syrian Army soldiers loyal to the Islamist government raiding Shi’ite towns and villages across the area.
The Syrian government is now announcing that, having “swept” the border areas with Lebanon, they are in the process of planting landmines at every road and crossing that heads into their neighboring country. They termed these “illegal” border crossings.
In practice, the border is historically not strictly enforced between Syria and Lebanon everywhere, and some towns, like Haweek, just plain span both sides of the border, with Lebanese and Syrian residents living side by side.
Syria’s Hayat Tahrir al-Sham’s (HTS) crackdown in Haweek was the start of this border crisis last week. HTS raided the mostly Shi’ite town as it had so many others, but faced substantial resistance from Lebanese clans living there, leading to clashes and the killing and capture of multiple HTS members. HTS responded by having the army invade Lebanon’s town of Hermel.
Syrian officials are trying to brand this crackdown and the mining of the border as something to do with the war on drugs, accusing Hezbollah of being behind the drug trade between Lebanon and Syria. The clans involved in the recent clashes have indeed been accused of being involved in the Captagon trade as well.
But in the grand scheme of things, the HTS crackdowns around the Lebanon border have mostly been sectarian moves against Shi’ites in general and Alawites in particularly. The HTS was branding these measures as being about Assad remnant forces before, and has only started rebranding them as a drug war now that they’re going after Lebanese Shi’ites who were plainly not affiliated with the Assad government in any way.
