BEIRUT — Former Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri called on the militant Hezbollah group on Saturday to withdraw from Syria, saying its involvement in the civil war next door has backfired into Lebanon.
Hariri returned earlier in the day to Lebanon from self-imposed exile to mark the 10th anniversary of his father’s assassination, a slaying that sharply divided Lebanon.
Rafik Hariri was killed with 21 others in a truck bombing on a Beirut seaside road Feb. 14, 2005.
Hariri is a harsh critic of Hezbollah and Syrian President Bashar Assad, whom he accused in his speech Saturday of “destroying Syria on the heads of Syrians.”
Hezbollah has sent fighters to Syria to back Assad’s forces against rebels trying to remove him from power. The armed intervention in Syria earned the Shiite group the enmity of Syria’s predominantly Sunni rebels. Assad is a member of the Alawite sect, an offshoot of Shiite Islam.
“Withdraw from Syria. Stop dragging the fires from Syria to our country, at times from terrorism and at other times from the Golan and tomorrow from we don’t know where,” Hariri said, referring to a wave of bombings that hit Lebanon over the past year.