One more death in town caught in bloodletting

The road to the Shia hill town of Hermel is flanked by lamp posts sporting solar panels, and portraits of Hizbullah martyrs hang from posts erected on the central divide.

Sun-faded and wind-tattered images of serious young men killed in the 2006 war with Israel are interspersed with fresh photos of those slain in the conflict in Syria 15km to the east.

Basking in the warm morning sun, Hermel seems a peaceful, unhurried place, but as the portraits of the martyrs show, it has been caught up in bloodletting for all too many years.

The martyrs are from this remote district, from which many youths fled in search of fortunes in Beirut, three hours’ drive from here.

Retaliation
Four rockets struck Hermel on Tuesday, believed to be in retaliation for Hizbullah's participation alongside the Syrian army in the campaign to drive Syrian rebels and foreign fighters from the strategic Syrian border town of Qusayr, a main route for smuggling into Syria arms and recruits for the rebel cause.

Two landed in the upper town: one damaged the balcony of an apartment but harmed no one, the other exploded in a stone built storeroom at the back of a house, setting alight four hectares of olive, fig, and pomegranate trees.

“It was an incendiary bomb. The fire it started was spread by the wind,” says Hussein, a local man who greets us at the edge of the burnt orchard, the limbs of the trees stripped of leaves and scorched.

“The rockets that came before made holes in the ground.” At least 70 have struck Hermel since the conflict in Syria began to spill over into Lebanon.

Banner marks site
On the road leading to the Sunni town of Arsal – which was rocketed by a Syrian army helicopter on Wednesday in retaliation for the Hermel attack, wounding several people – a yellow banner strung between two houses marks the site where 20-year-old Lulu Abdullah Awad died on Tuesday, perhaps by a missile fired by rebels in Arsal.

She had heard the sound of a mortar falling nearby and rushed to the roof of her cousins’ house across the street.

Lulu was hit by shrapnel from a second missile that demolished the upper portion of her own house.

Her 16-year-old brother, Muhammad Hussein, ushers us into the sparsely furnished salon where we are served tiny cups of bitter Arab coffee, traditional during mourning.

Girl in a blue dress
A large photo of Lulu, a pretty dark-haired girl in a blue dress, is on one wall, a second photo with her brother on the other.

Her father, Abdullah Awad, his worry beads slipping through his fingers, says: “My brother’s wife was wounded seriously and my sister lightly injured.

“Lulu was in her last year of hotel management studies at the Hermel institute.

“I had just two children, a girl and a boy. Now I have only one.

“When two rockets fell on Arsal, the president complained [to the Syrians] – but he said nothing about the four that hit Hermel.”