By Laila Bassam, Suleiman Al-Khalidi and Parisa Hafezi
BEIRUT (Reuters) – The Lebanese armed group Hezbollah sent a small number of “guidance troops” from Lebanon to Syria overnight to help prevent government fighters from taking over the city of Homs, two senior Lebanese security officials said on Friday.
“Homs must not fall,” one of the sources told Reuters, adding that officials were deployed at night to monitor some Hezbollah fighters who have been in Syria near the border with Lebanon for years.
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The Syrian army chief and regional officials close to Tehran also told Reuters that Hezbollah forces had crossed over from Lebanon and taken positions in Homs.
The move marks a dramatic shake-up on Syria’s battlefields since Monday, when sources close to the group said Hezbollah was not ready to deploy into Syria yet.
At the time, a rebel group led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, a former al-Qaeda affiliate, had taken over the northern Syrian city of Aleppo. But on Thursday, they had taken Hama – a city in the middle of Syria – and were attacking Homs.
Homs, Syria’s capital, borders Lebanon, Iraq and Jordan and provides important transit routes for Iran to supply weapons to Hezbollah in Lebanon. Lebanon’s security attorney said Homs is important as a “warehouse” for Hezbollah and other Iranian-backed armed groups.
The loss of the city of Homs would cut off the capital Damascus from the Syrian government strongholds on the west coast.
Western officials told Reuters that Hezbollah fighters feared they would be attacked by Israel if they were deployed to Syria, where Israel’s air force has carried out several strikes against Iranian-allied assets.
Hezbollah and Israel exchanged fire across Lebanon’s southern border for nearly a year in a conflict fueled by the Gaza war, before Israel launched an offensive in September, killing Hezbollah’s top leadership.
The war ended with a cease-fire that went into effect on Nov. 27, the same day that the rebel attack in Syria began.
(Reporting by Suleiman al-Khalidi in Amman, Laila Bassam in Beirut, Parisa Hafezi in Dubai; Additional reporting by Alex Cornwell in Doha; Writing by Maya Gebeily, William Maclean)