Lebanese army advances into sectarian flashpoint of Arsal

The Lebanese army advanced on Monday into a border town attacked by radical insurgents over the weekend in the most serious spillover of the three-year-old Syrian civil war into Lebanon. The Beirut government, meanwhile, said the deadly assault would not go unpunished.

With army reinforcements arriving in Arsal, Prime Minister Tammam Salam, himself a Sunni Muslim, said there could be no "political solutions" with the Sunni radicals identified as members of the Nusra Front and the Islamic State, which has seized wide areas of Syria and Iraq.

"The only solution proposed today is the withdrawal of the militants from Arsal and its environs," said Salam, the most senior Sunni in Lebanese government. Flanked by the rest of the cabinet, Salam accused the insurgents of seeking to "move their sick practices to Lebanon."

"We confirm that the attack on Lebanese national dignity will not go unpunished," he said.

Lebanon, still rebuilding from its own 1975-1990 civil war, has been buffeted by violence linked to the Syrian conflict including rocket attacks, suicide bombings and gun battles.

But this was the first major incursion by hardline Sunni insurgents who have become leading players in the Sunni-Shia violence unfolding across the Levant, destabilizing Lebanon by inflaming its own sectarian tensions.

Soldiers advancing into Arsal found the bodies of 50 insurgents, a Lebanese security official said. The army said 14 soldiers had been killed, with 22 others missing and 86 injured in the fighting which erupted after security forces arrested a Syrian Islamist rebel commander, Emad Jumaa, on Saturday.

More than a dozen other members of the security forces have been taken hostage. The army described the Islamists' incursion as a long-planned attack. Local politicians say it marks an attempt to extend the Islamic State's footprint into Lebanon.

The insurgents have been beaten back in the border area in the past year by Syrian government forces backed by Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shia Muslim political and military movement. Some 3,000 fighters are estimated to be in the border zone.

Arsal is a mainly Sunni town located on the Lebanese side of the border between Syrian government-controlled territory and Lebanese Shia areas sympathetic to Hezbollah.

More than 100,000 Syrian refugees are estimated to be living in and around Arsal. Syrian activists in the area say refugee camps have been heavily damaged during the fighting. "The humanitarian situation is very bad. There is no place of refuge for the refugees," said one Syrian activist in the area reached by text message. "The residents are terrified."

Al Jazeera and Reuters