The leader of the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah acknowledged on Saturday that its supply route through Syria had been cut off by rebels who toppled the government last weekend, dealing another blow to Hezbollah and its patron, Iran.
Before its collapse, the Syrian government had provided a land corridor for Iran to supply weapons and materiel to Hezbollah in Lebanon, bolstering the militant group’s power and Iran’s influence as its main backer.
“Hezbollah has lost the supply route coming through Syria at the current stage, but this is a small detail and may change with time,” the Hezbollah leader, Naim Qassem, said Saturday in a televised speech.
He added that Hezbollah — which recently agreed to a cease-fire with Israel after months of war — would look for alternate means of getting supplies or see if its Syria route could be re-established under “a new regime.”
He did not specifically mention the coalition of rebel forces that swept into Damascus, the Syrian capital, last weekend, or Syria’s deposed president, Bashar al-Assad, who had for years relied on help from Hezbollah and Iran in his country’s civil war.
Hezbollah’s loss of its supply route through Syria, which remains fractured, is another setback for the militant group after a year of conflict with Israel and several months of all-out warfare. In a string of blows from September until late last month, when the cease-fire took effect in Lebanon, Israel detonated the group’s wireless devices, bombarded it with intense air raids, attacked its positions with a ground invasion and killed many of its commanders.
Mr. Qassem took over as the group’s secretary general in October, a month after its leader of three decades, Hassan Nasrallah, was assassinated in Israeli airstrikes south of Beirut.
So far, the cease-fire has appeared to hold despite periodic exchanges of fire. Hezbollah entered into its terms badly battered by the war: Hezbollah’s arsenal, once thought by weapons analysts to be one of the world’s largest in the hands of a nonstate armed group, was largely destroyed, according to Israeli officials.
The lack of access to Syrian territory is also a blow to Iran, which had long propped up Mr. al-Assad and used Syria as a hub to network and supply its proxies in the region, including Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen and militias in Iraq.
Hezbollah and Iran intervened in Syria’s 13-year civil war to bolster Mr. al-Assad’s troops, but, sapped by the last year of conflict with Israel, were unable or unwilling to come to his defense as rebels raced to Damascus in a sudden offensive this month. Russia, another supporter of the regime that has been focusing on battles elsewhere, was similarly disinclined to get involved this time.
Mr. Qassem said Saturday that he hoped for cooperation between the people and governments of Lebanon and Syria — positioning Hezbollah as open to working with whoever takes over, much as regional and global powers have done in the past week. (The United States has been in direct contact with the leading rebel group, the secretary of state said on Saturday, despite the group’s designation as a terrorist organization.)
The Hezbollah leader also expressed concern that the new government in Damascus might normalize relations with Israel after decades of hostility under Mr. al-Assad.
Mr. Qassem defended the decision to abide by the cease-fire, saying that it did not mean the end of the group’s “resistance” but was necessary to “stop the aggression” of Israel in southern Lebanon. He added that Hezbollah’s survival in the war was itself a triumph.
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