Situation in Syria creating new weakness for Hezbollah, Iran, says US envoy Hochstein

Doha (Reuters) – U.S. envoy Amos Hochstein said the situation in Syria, where rebels are pressing a rapid advance that is threatening President Bashar al-Assad’s grip on power, was creating a new weakness for militant Lebanese group Hezbollah and for Iran.

The U.S. envoy, who negotiated a U.S-brokered ceasefire agreement in the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah that went into effect on Nov. 27, said he believed Hezbollah was not yet eliminated but it was rather weakened.

Iran has been a backer of Assad in Syria’s long civil war, sending allied forces including Hezbollah and Iraqi militias to bolster the Syrian military.

Hochstein, speaking during a political conference in Doha, said the situation in Syria would mean it was going to be harder for Iran to supply Hezbollah with weapons there, adding that Iran appeared to be withdrawing its support from Syria, without clarifying how.

Iran has said it is pulling out embassy families but has denied a report by the New York Times that it was pulling out military personnel.

Hochstein added that Hezbollah “may not be strong enough to fight Israel or to support Assad but it doesn’t take a lot of strength to be a dominant presence in Lebanon so you can also be weakened and still strong at the same time when it comes to the Lebanese context”.

Hezbollah sent a small number of “supervising forces” from Lebanon to Syria overnight to help prevent anti-government fighters from seizing the strategic city of Homs, two senior Lebanese security sources told Reuters on Friday.

The Syrian army’s defeats in the past week were “not that big of a surprise”, Hochstein said, highlighting the army’s limited power in comparison with events during the country’s civil war 13 years ago when “it had two powers (Iran and Russia) coming to its aid in a very strong way”.

(Reporting by Nadine Awadalla; Writing by Menna Alaa El-Din and Federico Maccioni; Editing by Toby Chopra and Frances Kerry)