The Hezbollah members fighting in the area south of the Litani River are the sons of the area's villages and towns, supported by fighters from the Bekaa Valley and other regions, including foreigners, a media report said.
"These fighters moved to the battle zones after the start of the war on Iran, and they arrived without weapons," the Nidaa al-Watan newspaper quoted a Lebanese official as saying.
"This point is crucial: where did the weapons come from? How could illegal Iranian weapons appear in an area that the army claimed to have brought under its control? The state offers justifications, arguing that Hezbollah did not cooperate with the Lebanese Army and did not hand over maps of weapons deployment," the daily said.
"Furthermore, the south is vast, and it appears that this practice of storing weapons in homes has been going on for over 40 years, with Lebanese security agencies lacking sufficient data. Since the era of President Emile Lahoud and the Israeli withdrawal from the south in May 2000, the state has been largely absent," the newspaper added.
Hezbollah didn't need to transport fighters with their weapons; they simply went to the south and deployed to areas where weapons were already present, especially after the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps had restructured them and the party had rebuilt its infrastructure, the report explained.
"Consequently, Hezbollah's installations weren't limited to the tunnels that had been seized and booby-trapped, but extended to homes and fields," it said.
| Copyright © 2012 Naharnet.com. All Rights Reserved. | https://www.naharnet.com/stories/en/319201 |