Loveday Morris and Souad Mekhennet
Washington Post, Apr. 12, 2025
“There is a huge stockpile in Syria that Hezbollah is trying to move out of Syria. They know where those are, and they are working with Syrian networks to get them out.”
From the front seat of a black GMC truck, Maher Ziwani, the Syrian army commander overseeing this stretch of the border with Lebanon, radioed ahead to check the safety of the dirt track stretching to the frontier. But before he got a response, Syrian fighters on a motorbike sped past his window, shouting a warning.
“Hezbollah, Hezbollah!” one yelled. “Hezbollah shot one of our guys!”
A car followed, its interior smeared with blood. A patrol had come under fire, soldiers said.
In recent weeks, Syrian government forces have been trying to choke off smuggling routes that cross the rugged 233-mile border with Lebanon. These routes are the last vestiges of the “land bridge” — a network traversing the breadth of Syria — used by Iran and its allied militias to ferry weapons, cash, drugs and fuel. These had helped prop up the ousted government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and represented vital support for the regime’s powerful ally, the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, including in its confrontation with Israel.
A soldier searches a house in Hawsh al-Sayyid Ali.
Maher Ziwani, the Syrian army commander who oversees its operation on part of the Syrian-Lebanese border.
Today, it’s a dramatically different picture after Islamist militants overthrew Assad in December, dealing a major setback to Iran’s regional power and largely cutting it off from Hezbollah.
From the border smuggling hubs like Hawsh al-Sayyid Ali, still smoldering from clashes when Ziwani visited last month, to the abandoned Shiite Muslim militia bases in the war-ravaged cities of Qusayr and Palmyra to the east, waypoints once used by Iran and its proxies are in tatters. A recent reporting trip by Washington Post journalists to these once-vital nodes in the smuggling network found abundant evidence of a hasty exit. …SOURCE