Hezbollah leader says he asked Assad for IS evacuation
Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah met Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in Damascus to request the evacuation of Islamic State fighters from their enclave on the Syria-Lebanon border.
As reported by the Reuters news agency, the evacuation convoy left the border area late on August 25 to take about 600 IS fighters and their family members to territory the group controls in eastern Syria, but it was blocked from entering IS areas on August 30 by US-led air strikes.
Hezbollah’s leader, a close ally of Assad during Syria’s six-year civil war, has not publicly discussed going to Damascus for a long time and his comments about the evacuation followed criticism of the deal.
According to Nasrallah, he asked Assad to approve the deal for Islamic State to leave for eastern Syria in order to discover the fate of Lebanese soldiers captured by the jihadists. Assad agreed.
According to Reuters, the evacuation was sharply criticised by Iraq, which is also fighting Islamic State and said it was “unacceptable” to ship jihadist fighters to Syrian territory near its borders.
Nasrallah said the United States threatened to stop arms supplies to the Lebanese army if it went ahead with the assault.
Source: neweurope.eu