Mansour to Arabs: Hizbullah Did a Preemptive Act in Qusayr, Vengeance Can't Pull Syria Out of Crisis

Caretaker Foreign Minister Adnan Mansour on Wednesday announced from Cairo that pulling Syrian out of its crisis can only be done through political dialogue, describing Hizbullah's military intervention in Syria's Qusayr as a “preemptive act.”

“Only weeks after the eruption of the clashes (in Syria), groups that came from beyond the border -- carrying destructive, Takfiri and extremist ideologies – started threatening Lebanon,” Mansour told an extraordinary meeting of the council of Arab foreign ministers.

The minister clarified that the aforementioned groups sought to “undermine the historic demographic mixture of the Syrian and Lebanese citizens who live in mixed areas in the Syrian town of Qusayr and the villages of its countryside which neighbors Lebanon.”

“The Lebanese residents of the Syrian towns suffered huge losses as a result of the acts of gunmen in Qusayr and its countryside,” Mansour said, adding that “the residents of those villages formed armed popular committees and appealed to their relatives in Lebanon to defend them.”

Mansour noted that “Hizbullah did not fight in Aleppo, Daraa, Deir Ezzor, Idlib or al-Qameshli … it rather openly declared that it sent groups of its fighters to Qusayr's countryside as a preemptive and preventative act, in order to protect their people, relatives and Lebanese sons from the armed groups that wanted to turn them into a prey for kidnapping, blackmail and killing.”

The minister also added that "if we as Arabs want to pull Syria out of its crisis, that cannot be done through vengeance and the settling of scores, but rather through political dialogie among the Syrian brothers, which alone can achieve Syria's interest and serve its present and future, without the elimination of any camp by another and away from overbidding and mutual accusations."

"Let us all go to Geneva and let the conference be our exit and Syria's exit," Mansour added.

The Syrian army vowed on Wednesday to trounce rebel fighters across Syria hours after recapturing Qusayr with the help of Hizbullah following a more than two-week assault on the strategic town on the border with Lebanon.

Both sides in the conflict value Qusayr, which lies along a land corridor linking two Assad strongholds, the capital of Damascus and an area along the Mediterranean coast that is the heartland of his minority Alawite sect.

For their part, Syria's rebels conceded they had lost the battle for the strategic town but vowed to fight “thousands of Lebanese mercenaries.”

Earlier, Syria state television said the army "totally controls" Qusayr, with the Britain-based Observatory, which relies on a network of activists and medics on the ground, also confirming that Qusayr had fallen.

Later on Wednesday, Hizbullah deputy chief Sheikh Naim Qassem said “Qusayr's achievement dealt a severe blow to the American-Israeli-Takfiri scheme.”

Hizbullah chief Nasrallah had previously justified the group's involvement in Syria by saying they were defending Lebanese-inhabited border villages inside Syria and Shiite holy sites.

But during a May 25 speech marking the 13th anniversary of Israel's military withdrawal from Lebanon, Nasrallah said the Takfiris are the “most prevailing group in the Syrian opposition,” warning against a defeat against them in the ongoing war in Syria.

He said: “If Syria falls in the hands of the Takfiris and the United States, the resistance will become under a siege and Israel will enter Lebanon. If Syria falls, the Palestinian cause will be lost.”