Hezbollah has recruited Shiite radicals from inside Europe to travel to Syria and fight on behalf of the Bashar al-Assad regime, according to reports published in Lebanese media earlier this week and conveyed Monday by the Jerusalem Post.
According to an article in the Beirut- based The Daily Star last week, officials from March 14 – a largely pro-Western Lebanese political coalition opposed to Assad’s interference – had received security information about new Eastern European mercenaries arriving at the Rafik Hariri International Airport, in groups, on their way to Syria, presumably to fight alongside Assad’s regime.
“According to the one Eastern European country’s intelligence unit, most of these fighters have professional military experience and have fought in Chechnya.”
If confirmed the development has the potential to affect a range of policy debates and calculations. Inside the European Union, there is a long-standing and ongoing reluctance to designating Hezbollah as a terrorist entity. The Iran-backed organization was definitively linked to a terrorist attack in Bulgaria, on E.U. soil, that killed five Israelis and a Bulgarian, the latter being an E.U. citizen. Even under those conditions – and after months of contentious diplomacy – the E.U. limited itself to labeling Hezbollah’s military wing a terrorist entity and sparing the group’s political wing, despite explicit statements from top Hezbollah leaders deriding the notion that there is a distinction between the two wings. Regarding Syria, Western capitals have expressed pitched concerns over the possibility that Sunni fighters from Europe are traveling to participate in the country’s nearly four year war, and that they may eventually return further radicalized and battle-hardened. The controversy has been mobilized to highlight the dangers posed by jihadists, and even to suggest that the West and the regime’s backers have a shared interest in battling terror groups. Evidence that the Assad regime is availing itself of European fighters risks complicating that position.
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