Residents of Syria’s Raqqa celebrate Dahiyeh explosion

Source : http://www.jforum.fr/forum/internat...

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Residents of Syria’s Raqqa 
celebrate Dahiyeh explosion

A video uploaded Thursday night shows residents of the rebel-held city of Raqqa celebrating the devastating car bomb that struck Hezbollah’s Beirut-stronghold of Dahiyeh.

The YouTube video shows a Syrian resident offering sweets to passers-by and holding a banner reading: “Distributing sweets on the occasion of the explosion in Beirut’s Dahiyeh.”

Raqqa—the only provincial capital in Syria outside regime control—is largely under the control of Al-Qaeda-linked fighters.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reporting earlier in the week that that fighters from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant had taken over positions controlled by the Ahfad al-Rasul Brigade, a part of the mainstream Free Syrian Army.

A car bomb late Thursday afternoon went off on the main road between the Al-Roueiss and Bir al-Abed areas of Beirut's Hezbollah-stronghold of Dahiyeh, leaving at least 18 dead and over 200 injured.

The video comes amid the growing conflict between Lebanon’s Shiite Hezbollah party—which is fighting on the side of the Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria—and Sunni groups rebelling against the Syrian regime.

After Hezbollah-fighters and regime troops seized the rebel-held town of Al-Qusayr in May, Hezbollah in Beirut’s Dahiyeh handed out sweets to congratulate their party’s military victory.

A number of Syrian rebel groups have vowed to take their fight against Hezbollah to Lebanon, and a number of security incidents have targeted the Shiite party in the country, including a series of IED attacks and rocket strikes in the Beqaa as well as a Grad-rocket attack in Beirut’s Dahiyeh in May.

A group of masked men dubbing themselves the “Aisha, Mother of the Believers, Brigades for Foreign Missions” on Thursday claimed responsibility for the Dahiyeh attack as well as the July 9 car bomb that hit the Beirut area.