Syria Live Coverage: Airstrikes Continue Around Damascus
Tuesday, April 16, 2013 at 5:45 | James Miller in EA Live, EA Middle East and Turkey, Middle East and Iran 
Photo: AFP1942 GMT: Fighting Near Border with Lebanon.
NOW Syria reports from the border village of al-Qasr, just inside Lebanon, where insurgent fire hit for the first time:
Al-Qasr [did not] feel like a place hit by lethal rocket fire just two days ago. Despite an army statement Sunday declaring its increased presence in the area, there wasn’t so much as a routine checkpoint impeding our entrance. In the village center, all shops were open; adults and children alike going about their business as usual. It could have been anywhere in the Beqaa.
Except, of course, for the two crumbled walls near the main mosque, results of an unprecedented series of rockets fired Sunday by Syrian rebels that, for the first time, left one resident dead and up to nine injured (another was killed by the same attack in Hosh al-Sayyid Ali, a nearby village on the Syrian side of the border). The blood of 23-year-old Ali Hassan Qataya, light brown by now, still spans the width of the street where he died.
“He was just visiting,” said a local resident who did not give his name. “He lived in Beirut, and came here to visit his fiancée.”
Why, then, was Qataya killed? The Syrian National Coalition, the opposition body recognized by over a dozen countries as the representative government-in-exile, said Monday that “the Free Syrian Army was forced to respond to [the] repeated aggressions” of Hezbollah, whom it accused of carrying out “military operations on Syrian territory.”
