BEIRUT — Lebanon’s President Michel Suleiman rejected calls to send fighters and weapons to Syria, the official National News Agency said, maintaining the country’s attempts to distance itself from its neighbors’ civil war.
Creating training camps inside Lebanon should also be banned, the agency cited Suleiman as saying.
Two Lebanese Sunni Muslim clerics yesterday called for a holy war to defend co-religionists in Syria from militiamen belonging to Lebanon’s Shiite, Iranian-backed Hezbollah accused of intervening in that country’s civil war.
The uprising against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has inflamed sectarian tensions in Lebanon and sparked clashes between supporters and opponents of the Syrian government. The fighting in turn reflects the sectarian nature of the conflict in Syria.
Assad belongs to the Alawite sect, whose religion is an offshoot of Shiite Islam, while Syria’s insurgents are predominantly Sunni.
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