BEIRUT (Reuters) – Three soldiers in Syria’s new army and seven Lebanese were killed in border clashes the last two days, the Syrian defence ministry and Lebanese health ministry said while their foreign ministers met to discuss maintaining respect for the sovereignty of the two countries.
Fifty-two people on the Lebanese side were wounded, the health ministry said.
The mountainous frontier has been a flashpoint in the three months since Islamist rebels toppled Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, an ally of Tehran and Iran-backed Lebanese armed group Hezbollah, and installed their own institutions and army.
Lebanon’s Foreign Affairs Minister Youssef Raji met his Syrian counterpart Asaad al-Shibani in Brussels to discuss the cross-border developments, and agreed to maintain contacts, the Lebanese state news agency NNA reported.
Late on Sunday, Syria’s defence ministry accused Hezbollah of crossing into Syrian territory and kidnapping and killing the three members of Syria’s new army. Hezbollah denied any involvement.
A Lebanese security source told Reuters the three Syrian soldiers had crossed into Lebanese territory first and were killed by armed members of a tribe in northeastern Lebanon who feared their town was under attack.
Syrian troops responded by shelling Lebanese border towns overnight, according to the Syrian defence ministry and the Lebanese army.
Residents of the town of Al-Qasr, less than one kilometre from the border, told Reuters they fled further inland to escape the bombardment.
Lebanon’s army said in a statement on Monday that it had handed over the bodies of the three killed Syrians to Syrian authorities, and that it had responded to fire from Syrian territory and sent reinforcements to the border area.
Syria’s army sent a convoy of troops and several tanks to the frontier on Monday, according to a Reuters reporter along the border. Syrian troops fired into the air as they moved through towns on the way to the border.
“Large military reinforcements were brought in to reinforce positions along the Syrian-Lebanese border and prevent any breaches in the coming days,” said Maher Ziwani, the head of a Syrian army division deploying to the border.
(Reporting by Maya Gebeily and Laila Bassam in Beirut and Menna Alaa El-Din and Muhammed Al Gebaly in Cairo; Editing by Angus MacSwan and Howard Goller)
