Fighting calms on Lebanon-Syria border after deadly clashes

Fighting erupted overnight into Monday along the border with Lebanon, Syria's state media said.

This came after the Syrian interim government accused militants from Lebanon's Hezbollah of crossing into Syria on Saturday, kidnapping three soldiers and killing them on Lebanese soil.

Syrian News Channel, citing an unnamed Defense Ministry official, said the Syrian army shelled "Hezbollah gatherings that killed Syrian soldiers" along the border. Hezbollah denied any involvement in a statement on Sunday.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based war monitor, said five other Syrian soldiers were killed during Monday's clashes. Footage broadly circulated online and on local media showed Lebanese families fleeing the shelling toward the village of Hermel.

Violence has recently spiked in the area between the Syrian military and armed Lebanese Shiite clans closely allied with the government of ousted Bashar Assad, based in Lebanon's Al-Qasr border village.

Lebanese media and the observatory say clans were involved in the kidnapping that sparked the latest clashes, which largely calmed before sunrise.

Lebanon has been seeking international support to boost funding for its military as it gradually deploys troops along its porous northern and eastern borders with Syria as well as its southern border with Israel.

The Lebanese and Syrian armies said they have opened channels of communication to ease tensions. Lebanon's military also said it returned the bodies of the three killed Syrian soldiers and that large numbers of Lebanese troops have been deployed in the area.

Lebanese media reported low-level fighting at dawn after an attack on a Syrian military vehicle. The number of casualties remains unclear.

Early Monday, four Syrian journalists embedded with the Syrian army were lightly wounded after an artillery shell fired from the Lebanese side of the border hit their position on the other side of the border. They accused Hezbollah of launching the attack.

Meanwhile, senior Hezbollah legislator Hussein Haj Hassan in an interview with Lebanon's al-Jadeed television accused fighters from the Syrian side of crossing into Lebanese territory and attacking border villages there. His constituency is the northeastern Baalbek-Hermel province, which has borne the brunt of the clashes.