9 Hezbollah fighters killed in Syria’s Homs: Reports

By Wassim Saif al-Din

BEIRUT (AA) - At least nine Hezbollah fighters have been killed in Syria’s central Homs province, media outlets said Monday amid conflicting reports about the circumstances of the deaths.

According to the Hezbollah-linked Qawim website, one of the slain fighters -- a commander of the group’s elite Radwan Force -- was killed by an explosive device planted in his car.

The site provided neither an exact time nor location of the commander’s death.

According to other media reports, the nine fighters were killed in an airstrike that targeted a Hezbollah position in Homs’s eastern countryside.

This report, too, however, remains dogged by conflicting accounts. While some media outlets have attributed the deadly strikes to a Russian aircraft that acted in error, others have ascribed them to U.S. drone aircraft.

Since 2013, Lebanon’s Shia Hezbollah militia has fought alongside the Syrian regime, Iran and Russia against anti-regime armed opposition groups.

Syria has been locked in a devastating civil war since early 2011, when the Assad regime cracked down on pro-democracy protests with unexpected ferocity.

Since then, hundreds of thousands of people have been killed and more than 10 million displaced, according to UN figures. Syrian regime officials, for their part, put the conflict’s total death toll much lower.