Hezbollah chief Qassem says group lost its supply route through Syria

Beirut: Hezbollah head Naim Qassem said on Saturday that the Lebanese armed group had lost its supply route through Syria, in his first comments since the toppling of President Bashar al-Assad nearly a week ago by a sweeping rebel offensive.

Under Assad, Iran-backed Hezbollah used Syria to bring in weapons and other military equipment from Iran, through Iraq and Syria and into Lebanon. But on December 6, anti-Assad fighters seized the border with Iraq and cut off that route, and two days later, Islamist rebels captured the capital Damascus.

"Yes, Hezbollah has lost the military supply route through Syria at this stage, but this loss is a detail in the resistance's work," Qassem said in a televised speech on Saturday, without mentioning Assad by name.

"A new regime could come and this route could return to normal, and we could look for other ways," he added.

Hezbollah started intervening in Syria in 2013 to help Assad fight rebels seeking to topple him at that time. Last week, as rebels approached Damascus, the group sent supervising officers to oversee a withdrawal of its fighters there.

More than 50 years of Assad family rule has now been replaced with a transitional caretaker government put in place by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, a former al Qaeda affiliate that spearheaded the rebel offensive.

Qassem said Hezbollah "cannot judge these new forces until they stabilise" and "take clear positions", but said he hoped that the Lebanese and Syrian peoples and governments could continue to cooperate.

"We also hope that this new ruling party will consider Israel an enemy and not normalise relations with it. These are the headlines that will affect the nature of the relationship between us and Syria," Qassem said.

Hezbollah and Israel exchanged fire across Lebanon's southern border for nearly a year in hostilities triggered by the Gaza war, before Israel went on the offensive in September, killing most of Hezbollah's top leadership.