Al-Khatib calls on Hezbollah to withdraw its fighters from Syria

In a letter directed to the General Secretary of Hezbollah – Lebanese Shi’ite Hassan Nasrallah – on Wednesday, Syrian opposition leader Ahmad Mouaz Al-Khatib urged Nasrallah to withdraw all of his fighters from Syria to ensure that what is happening in the country does not turn into a factional war.

Al-Khatib, former President of the Syrian National Coalition, said in a message posted on his Facebook page “the interference of Lebanese Hezbollah in Syria has greatly complicated matters, and I personally expected that considering your political and social influence, you would be a positive factor in putting an end to the bloodshed of our people.”

Al-Khatib added “I urge you to withdraw Hezbollah forces from all parts of Syria.”

The Syrian resistance consider Hezbollah’s involvement in the battles in Syria as a “waging of war” against the Syrian people, while the Lebanese opposition against Damascus severely criticised this interference due to the consequences it had on Lebanon, which suffers from a sensitive political and factional structure.

Whereas the movement allied with the Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad’s regime considered its involvement in the battle in Syria as a “national duty” to defend the Lebanese people living in Syrian villages.

According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, members of Hezbollah’s elite forces are joining the regime forces in the continuous fight against rebels in the region of Qusayr in the province of Homs, bordering Lebanon.

Al-Khatib called on Nasrallah to “start communicating with the revolutionists in all Shia villages to secure everyone’s safety,” considering “the alleged claim of the defence of Shia towns in Syria is unacceptable; have they ever been under any threat in the past hundreds of years?”

He also stressed “there is a scheming plot to drag the Islamic world into a Sunni-Shia war igniting in Syria, then moving on to Lebanon and then to the rest of the region including Iran and Turkey.”

Khatib then reminded the General Secretary of Hezbollah that the Syrians welcomed hundreds of thousands of Lebanese refugees during the July 2006 war waged by Israel on the Shi’ite organisation, and said “the Syrian people opened their homes and their hearts for the Lebanese resistance despite our various doctrinal differences.”