3 Hurt as Rockets from Syria Hit Brital, ISIL Claims Attack

Several rockets fired from the Syrian side of the border landed on Friday on the town of Brital in the Bekaa Valley, the Lebanese army and the state-run National News Agency reported.

The military said in a terse communique that three rockets hit Brital and its surrounding areas.

One of them caused material damage after hitting the house of a soldier, it said.

MTV identified him as Abbas Najah Ismail. At least three people were lightly injured in the attack, it said.

NNA said one rocket hit the area of Wadi Shalah near the residence of the former Brital municipal chief, Ali Ghannam Ismail.

A second rocket hit Kafra, without causing any material damage, the agency said.

Around an hour later, another barrage of four rockets landed on the heights of Brital, NNA said.

It was not clear why there was a discrepancy in the number of rockets mentioned by the army communique and the news agency.

Later on Friday, the Qaida-inspired Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) claimed responsibility for the rocket attack, saying “the lions of the Islamic State bombarded the bastions of the party of Satan (Hizbullah) with three Grad rockets that hit the Brital region.”

It noted that the attack was in retaliation to the deadly “ambush against our people in (Syria's) Otaybeh and the party of Satan's practices against Sunnis everywhere.”

More than 170 Islamist rebel fighters, including Saudis, Qataris and Chechens, were killed Wednesday in a Syrian army ambush near the village of Otaybeh in Damascus' Eastern Ghouta region, Syria's state news agency SANA reported.

For its part, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said "dozens of Islamist fighters were killed and wounded in an ambush by loyalist troops, with the help of (Lebanon's) Hizbullah, near Otaybeh village in the Eastern Ghouta area.”