Lebanese army finds anti-aircraft missiles in Daesh cache

Lebanon’s army found anti-aircraft missiles among with a cache of weapons in an area abandoned by Daesh militants, it said on Monday.

The arms cache also included mortars, medium and heavy machine guns, assault rifles, grenades, anti-tank weapons, anti-personnel mines, improvised explosive devices and ammunition.

On Saturday Lebanon’s army began an operation to dislodge Daesh from its small enclave in the mountains straddling the border with Syria.

Read: Lebanon: More than half of Daesh-held region recaptured

The Syrian army and Lebanon’s Shi’ite Hezbollah group are conducting a simultaneous but separate operation against the same pocket from inside Syria.

A Hezbollah offensive last month forced militants from the Nusra Front group, formerly al Qaeda’s official Syrian branch, to quit an adjacent enclave on the border for a rebel-held part of Syria.

On Friday, the Lebanese army said it had discovered surface-to-air missiles in a weapons cache left by the Nusra militants in an area captured by Hezbollah and then taken over by the army.