A senior military Hezbollah figure was buried in Lebanon's Bekaa Valley after he was killed, local sources said, near a Syrian border town where rebels are battling President Bashar al-Assad, an ally of the Shi'ite Muslim militant group. Syrian rebels have frequently accused the Lebanese Hezbollah of supporting Assad's forces battling the 18-month-old uprising, saying Hezbollah fighters have been deployed mainly along the frontier inside Syria. A statement on Hezbollah's website said "the martyr leader Ali Hussein Nassif (who) died while performing his jihad duties" was buried on Monday in Baalbek, the main town in the northern Bekaa Valley that is a stronghold of the Shi'ite militants. Hezbollah gave no details about Nassif's death but sources in Baalbek said he and two other Hezbollah men were killed near a Syrian border town where rebels are fighting Assad's forces. They said the three died when a rocket hit the room where they were staying. They did not say what happened to the bodies of the other two men. Syrian rebels in the area where Nassif is believed to have been killed have not claimed responsibility for any attack on Hezbollah in recent days. The website of Hezbollah's political foes, known as March 14, said Nassif and a number of other Hezbollah fighters died on Sunday when Syrian rebels ambushed their convoy near al-Qusair. Syria's uprising, which started off as peaceful demonstrations for reform, has transformed into an armed insurgency by mainly Sunni Muslim rebels trying to overthrow Assad, from the Alawite minority close to Shi'ite Islam. The rebels are supported by Sunni regional powers including Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, and have attracted Islamist fighters from across the Middle East to their cause. Assad is supported by his main regional allies Iran and Hezbollah. Activists say more than 30,000 people have been killed, including 7,000 soldiers and members of the security forces, since protests first broke out in March last year.
