MOSCOW, August 24 (RIA Novosti) - The al-Nusra Front, a branch of Al-Qaeda has posted a video of kidnapped Lebanese police officers calling on the Hezbollah movement, which sides with Bashar al-Assad’s forces to withdraw its fighters from Syria, according to AP.
Al-Nusra Front, which largely operates in Syria, also demands the release of their members held in Lebanon, some of whom were charged over bombings that killed and injured dozens of people over the past 12 months, Lebanese media reports.
The nine men shown in the video are part of a 24-member security personnel team still held by jihadists after fierce fighting broke out on August 2 in the Lebanese border town of Arsal, now home to tens of thousands of Syrian refugees.
Speaking apparently under duress, the captives call on their families to stage demonstrations and block roads in Lebanon to protest Hezbollah's involvement in Syria.
However, Hezbollah, which joined the war in Syria in 2013, is not likely to meet the pleas, as its leader Hassan Nasrallah had earlier vowed to stand up to the Sunni extremists as long as needed, according to AFP.
The most recent update on the Syrian conflict arrived as the army successfully resisted Islamic State attacks on the Tabqa air base, the last government-held post in the province of Raqqa. The troops halted the offensive that began on Friday night with a suicide truck bomb, with left nearly 100 IS fighters dead and over 350 wounded, AP quotes the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
"We killed large numbers of them," an officer told the Syrian state TV, making a vow to regain all parts of Raqqa. "We will only rest when we liberate all parts of Raqqa."
According to the UN data, more than 191,000 people have been killed since Syria's crisis began in March 2011.
