Hezbollah: We should not build Syrian refugee camps

Hezbollah’s No. 2 Sheikh Naim Qassem rejected Saturday the idea of establishing refugee camps for Syrians fleeing violence in their country, saying these would ultimately pose a threat to Lebanon and its neighbor. “We cannot accept refugee camps for Syrians in Lebanon because any camp ... will become a military pocket that will be used as a launchpad against Syria and then against Lebanon,” the Hezbollah deputy secretary-general said during a political conference in Ghobeiri in the southern suburbs of Beirut. “These sorts of groups pass into continents and countries and have no loyalty to any one country. They move holding several nationalities from one place to the next. What would Lebanon stand to gain by allowing some to turn it into a place to harm Syria and Lebanon at the same time?” the Hezbollah official asked. Qassem’s comments came a day after Lebanon pledged to prevent any attacks from its territory against its neighbor. Syria’s ambassador to Lebanon Ali Abdul Karim Ali has repeatedly demanded that Lebanon tighten security and prevent arms smuggling across the poorly demarcated, porous border. For his part, Baalbek-Hermel MP Marwan Fares said Sunday that there “are no refugees” in the Al-Qaa area of Hermel. “There are 10,000 Syrian workers in Mashraii al-Qaa working in agriculture,” Fares told a gathering in the Bekaa, according to the National News Agency. “They don’t need any humanitarian corridors, and there are no refugees in Al-Qaa. Only when Baba Amr [in Homs] fell, some terrorists came across the border, and the Lebanese Army dealt with them.” Fares was referring to an incident one week earlier, when an influx of refugees from the Homs Governorate generated conflicting estimates of their actual numbers of by government officials.