Is Syria Cheating on Pullout to Create New Shabaa Quarrel?

Is Syria Cheating on Pullout to Create New Shabaa Quarrel?
April 30, 2005Naharnet.comA military outpost still held by Syrian troops on the Lebanese side of the common border at the Bekaa town of Deir Al Asha'ir suggests the Assad regime is cheating on the evacuation and may be scheming to create another Shabaa farms controversy, An Nahar reported on Saturday. It carried a page-one photo of the Syrian-held position a few hundred meters from the Syrian border inside Lebanese territory and said "it stands in a Lebanese stretch of land called al-Qibbe," on a western landscape of the Bekaa. "The presence of Syrian soldiers is not a problem because they keep strictly to themselves," wrote An Nahar's Danielle Khayyat, reporting from Zahleh, provincial capital of the Bekaa. "But there are fears that when U.N. verifiers arrive at the scene, the ambiguous position in Deir El Asha'ir would lead to a new Shabaa farms on another side of the Lebanese border," Khayyat wrote. The original Shabaa farms on south Lebanon's border with Israel had long constituted the last active Arab-Israeli warfront after Egypt and Jordan signed peace treaties with Israel and Syria refrained from any hostilities across its occupied Golan Heights. Hizbullah uses the Shabaa farms enclave as an alibi to maintain effective control of the Lebanon-Israel border, occasionally setting it afire to justify its refusal to disarm.