Two rockets hit a Shi’ite Muslim district of southern Beirut, residents said, wounding several people, a day after the leader of Lebanese Shi’ite militant movement Hezbollah said his group would continue fighting in Syria until victory. One of the rockets landed in a car sales yard next to a busy road junction in the southern Chiah neighborhood and the other hit an apartment 300 meters away, wounding five people. There was no immediate claim of responsibility and the army said it was investigating who was behind the attack. A Lebanese security source said three rocket launchers were found, one of which had failed to launch, in the hills to the southeast of the Lebanese capital, about 5 miles (8 km) from the area where the two rockets landed. Syrian President Bashar Assad comes from the minority Alawite sect, an offshoot of Shi’ite Islam. He has been bankrolled by regional Shi’ite power Iran and now increasingly by Hezbollah, Tehran’s Lebanese proxy which was founded as a resistance movement to Israel. Violence from the Syrian conflict, which began as a peaceful protest movement but descended into civil war, has increasingly spilled over into Lebanon, particularly in the northern city of Tripoli.
By William Lam
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