Abdullah Azzam Brigades Claim Majdal Anjar Blast, Vow to Turn Bekaa into 'River of Blood'
The Qaida-linked Abdullah Azzam Brigades on Thursday claimed responsibility for Tuesday's roadside bomb attack on a Hizbullah convoy in the Bekaa, vowing further attacks across Lebanon.
“We are the Abdullah Azzam Brigades. As part of the operations we have been recently staging in Lebanon … we targeted Tuesday a car belonging to one of the leaders of the Rafidah (a derogatory term for Shiites) in Majdal Anjar after we received information that the aforementioned car was carrying one of the leaders of Hizbullah and a number of their Iranian partners,” the group said in a statement.
“This operation is a message from us to Hizbullah and its Iranian masters,” the group added.
“As long as you continue to slaughter our children and brothers through your intervention in Syria, we will perform our duties and we will not stand idly by,” it said.
The group warned Hizbullah that Tuesday's attack was only one of the series of operations “that will be staged across Lebanon against Hizbullah and its Iranian associates.”
It vowed to turn the Bekaa region into a “river of blood during the month of Ramadan if Hizbullah does not immediately end its intervention and withdraw from Syria.”
The group also noted that operations against Hizbullah will not make it forget “the duty of liberating the holy land from the hands of the Jews.”
On Tuesday, a bomb hit a Hizbullah convoy traveling towards the Lebanese border crossing with Syria, killing one person and wounding three others, according to Agence France Presse.
The bombing is the fourth time that a vehicle has been targeted by an explosive device in the Bekaa region, which is a stronghold of Hizbullah.
On July 7, three people were injured, including two army troops when two bombs exploded in the area.
That attack followed a similar blast on June 28, when two small bombs hit a Hizbullah convoy in the area, detonating as four cars passed, a security source said.
Hizbullah has dispatched fighters to battle alongside the Syrian regime against rebels seeking the overthrow of President Bashar Assad.
The party had justified its intervention in Syria by saying it was backing popular committees defending Lebanese-inhabited towns in Syrian territory near Lebanon's border from attacks by rebels and extremists. It had also admitted that its fighters were guarding Shiite holy shrines in Damascus province.
But in a speech in May, Hizbullah chief Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah said his party will stay involved in the Syrian conflict, after having helped government forces recapture the key town of Qusayr from rebels.
"Where we need to be, we will be ... To defeat this very, very dangerous conspiracy (against Syria) we will bear any sacrifices and all the consequences," said Nasrallah.
"The alternative (to the Assad regime) is chaos and the rule of these groups," he said, referring to extremist Islamist rebel groups he said were part of an "American-Israeli-takfiri plot."
The conflict, pitting a Sunni-dominated rebel movement against Assad, has raised sectarian tensions in Lebanon and Lebanese Sunni fighters have also been killed while fighting alongside Syrian rebels.
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