LONDON — The head of Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shi’ite militant group whose armed followers are fighting in Syria on the side of President Bashar Assad, pledged Thursday that his forces would remain there as long as necessary.
The leader, Hassan Nasrallah, spoke at a Shi’ite Muslim ceremony in his stronghold in southern Beirut, held to observe Ashura, one of the most important holidays on the Shi’ite religious calendar. It commemorates the killing of Imam Hussein, a grandson of the Prophet Mohammed.
Nasrallah’s fighters joined the civil war in Syria earlier this year to recapture a border town, and Assad’s foes say they have also been deployed on other fronts in the south near Damascus, the capital, and Aleppo in the north.
“As long as the reasons remain, our presence there will remain,” Nasrallah told thousands of his followers.
“Our fighters, our mujahedeen, are present on Syrian soil,” Nasrallah declared, adding that they were in Syria also to support Lebanon and Palestinian causes, “to confront all the dangers of the international, regional, and takfiri attack on this country and on this region.” Takfiri refers to the extremist Sunni Muslim fighters aligned with Al Qaeda who have joined the attempt to overthrow Assad.
The Syrian leader is a close ally of Shi’ite-led Iran, Hezbollah’s patron, and is from the minority Alawite sect, an offshoot of Shi’ite Islam. The civil war, which has claimed more than 110,000 lives and forced millions of Syrians to flee their homes, has deepened the polarization between Sunnis and Shi’ites in many parts of the Middle East.
Nasrallah’s remarks seemed to be directed specifically at the fighting within Syria and was not seen as a general call to arms, analysts said.
He also said Hezbollah, the dominant force in Lebanese politics, would not yield to demands from political rivals to pull out of Syria as a condition for resolving the impasse that has left Lebanon adrift under a caretaker government. He told his audience he would not trade what he termed an existential fight in Syria for seats in the Lebanese Cabinet.
As a security precaution, Nasrallah sometimes appears before his supporters by video link, reflecting Hezbollah’s concerns that he could be the target of an attack by Israel. In 2006, Hezbollah forces battled Israeli troops in a 34-day war.
But Nasrallah made his remarks in person Thursday, protected by bodyguards and other measures, including a ban on vehicles in the area where he spoke. It was his second public appearance in two days and his third this year.
His comments seemed likely to further buoy government forces. On Wednesday, loyalist troops recaptured a suburb south of Damascus and pressed other offensives outside Aleppo in what appeared to be a big push to regain territory ahead of proposed internationally sponsored peace talks.
While no date has been formally announced for the negotiations, Al Watan, a Syrian newspaper that supports the government, reported that Dec. 12 had been set for a conference in Geneva. The newspaper cited a Western diplomatic source in Paris. The paper also quoted a Syrian source as saying that the country was still consulting with its ally Russia on final plans for the conference.
On Wednesday, state news media showed government troops entering Hujeira, the latest in a string of suburbs south of Damascus where the government has made inroads in recent days, trying to sever supply lines between rebel-held towns that form an arc around the capital.
Despite rebel claims to be tightening a noose around the seat of power, and government claims that the army will soon push rebels out of the suburbs, the front lines around the capital have changed little during the past year, with rebel and government forces dug in within a few hundred yards of each other in many places.
The war has also frequently threatened to draw in Syria’s neighbors.
The latest such episode came Thursday when security officials told Associated Press that at least seven rockets fired from Syria landed in a Hezbollah stronghold in eastern Lebanon.
Syrian military helicopters were also in action in the border area, the report said.