Battle for Qusair highlights Hizbollah’s dilemma

The battle raging in al-Qusair, about 15km east of Lebanon’s northern border, looks ominously like a turning point in Syria’s civil war. If the Assad regime can recapture this strategic corridor from the rebels, it will, on the face of it, be a morale-boosting triumph.

It will also almost certainly flatten the few remaining barriers to this bloody conflict turning into an out-and-out sectarian fight between Sunni and Shia that will graft an uncontrollable regional dimension onto what began as an Arab Spring struggle for freedom from tyranny.

Militarily, the narrow corridor between Homs and the Lebanese border is a great prize for both sides. The Homs Gap, as it is sometimes called, has always been the natural gateway from the Syrian coast to the interior; not for nothing did the Crusaders build a line of castles there (including the magnificent Krak des Chevaliers, reportedly already damaged by regime shelling).

In the present conflict, its strategic importance is essentially twofold. For the rebels, predominantly from Syria’s Sunni majority, it is a vital supply line from north Lebanon to the city of Homs. For President Bashar al-Assad, it is vital to clear this path from Damascus to the coast, heartland of his minority Alawites (an offshoot of Shi’ism, and the backbone of his crumbling security state), including as a bolthole should he lose the capital.

That explains why the city of Homs itself, much of which now lies in rubble, became a regime fixation once the Assads so brutalised what began as a civic insurrection that it turned into an armed insurgency.

Yet Assad loyalists, with heavy firepower but limited manpower, have made five attempts to subdue the city and retake the corridor – and they have failed.

Now, by employing Hizbollah, their potent Shia paramilitary ally from across the border in Lebanon, they are making headway in the Homs Gap, and starting to outflank the rebels in al-Qusair – albeit facing ferocious rebel resistance that has killed around 30 Hizbollahis. This town, normally holding some 40,000 people, looks destined to become a tragic emblem of the war.

Victory for the regime in al-Qusair will, however, not so much break Syria’s stalemate as cement it. That the Assads needed Hizbollah, which is probably acting on the orders of Iran’s Shia theocracy, will not add to the lustre of the regime or its prospects of long-term survival. What it will do, without a doubt, is trigger a surge of sectarianism across Syria and the region.

It is still a puzzle why Hizbollah has allowed itself to get sucked so far into Syria, or why Iran, its principal patron, would want to risk its strategic asset in the Levant. In two recent speeches, on April 30 and May 9, Hassan Nasrallah, Hizbollah’s paramount leader, made two essential points: it was vital to keep Lebanon, with its own history of sectarian strife far from resolved, out of the Syrian war; and that he and Iran would not allow the Assad regime to be overthrown. The contradiction should be obvious – one cannot commute to war and expect no blowback across the border – but there would appear to be a different logic at work here.

Nasrallah claims his forces are deployed in two main ways: to protect Lebanese Shi’ites in a border region where people have never had much use for borders; and to defend the Shia shrine to Sayyida Zeinab south of Damascus. The latter reason is no small matter.

This holy shrine, to the granddaughter of the Prophet Mohammed and daughter of Ali, the Fourth Caliph and the founder and first imam of the Shia, is of incalculable resonance. One need but recall the destruction in February 2006 of the golden-domed al-Askari shrine in Samarra – which housed the tombs of the 10th and 11th Shia imams – and the apocalyptic sectarian carnage between Sunni and Shia that then engulfed Iraq.

But neither reason squares with the offensive deployment of up to thousands of fighters alongside the Assads, not just near Homs but in Damascus. In the past, Hizbollah could claim it was its resistance that ended Israel’s occupation of Lebanon, and that it stood its ground against “the Zionist entity” in the five week-war of 2006. It fought alongside Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi army against the US occupation of Iraq in the 2004 siege of Najaf – one of Shia Islam’s holiest cities – where it lost 84 martyrs. This is different.

Nasrallah has started to sketch a third reason for his protagonism in Syria – to protect the Shia and other minorities from fanatical Sunni jihadists. For the Shia, who remember how al-Qaeda in Iraq – given its chance by the Anglo-American invasion – spent more time slaughtering them than fighting the occupation, this is also no small matter. But the consequences are huge.

* Hizbollah has cast its lot in an increasingly regional conflict alongside the Syrian tyranny and Iranian theocracy. The Party of God, the social media refrain goes, has become the Party of Satan.

* It has taken this fateful step just as the Syrian regime is morphing into a sectarian militia, while the Syrian conflict is going regional (from Israeli air strikes to car bombs on the Turkish border).

* Reprisals for al-Qusair are almost guaranteed. Jabhat al-Nusra, the al-Qaeda-linked jihadi front that has made much of the running on the rebel side since last autumn and specialises in car-bombing cities, has warned Michel Sleiman, Lebanon’s president, it will “set fire to Beirut” unless he somehow forces Hizbollah to withdraw (the Nusra front, according to one report, has just been taken over by Iraqi al-Qaeda).

Hizbollah continues to believe Lebanon – where it is by far the most powerful actor – can somehow be kept separate from Syria. That is probably delusional.

The paradox is that it is Hizbollah that is primarily responsible for keeping the peace in Lebanon – “in alliance with the Lebanese army” as one European securocrat delicately puts it. Its deepening and overt involvement in the war across the border will limit its ability to continue to keep the lid on, unless – and here’s the rub – it takes control of the country.

It would be the imperative of survival rather than the temptation of absolute power that impelled them to do this. Nasrallah, the leader who turned Hizbollah into the most formidable politico-military force in the modern Arab world, long ago concluded that no faction inside Lebanon could impose itself on the others. By choosing to roll the dice outside Lebanon in this way, he has erased this distinction.