December 22, 2016 – Hezbollah militants in Syria are using American armored personnel carriers originally supplied by the U.S. to the Lebanese army, World Tribune citing a senior military officer.
In an intelligence briefing to foreign reporters on Dec. 21, the senior Israeli officer showed a photograph of Iran-backed Hezbollah military vehicles, which he said included U.S.-made armored personnel carriers (APCs).
“These APCs are of the Hezbollah, while fighting in Syria, that they took from the Lebanese armed forces,” he said.
“We shared this information with other countries, including the U.S. of course, and I can even say that we recognized these specific APCs with some specific parameters that we know … these were given to the Lebanese armed forces. It’s not an assumption,” said the officer, who under the rules of the briefing could not be identified by name, rank or position.
The U.S. State Department said last month that the American embassy in Beirut was working to investigate images posted on social media sites that purportedly showed Hezbollah, which supports President Bashar Assad, displaying U.S. military equipment in Syria.
Those images were widely reported to have been of U.S.-made M113 armored personnel carriers, which the State Department said were common in the region.
The officer said Hezbollah has 8,000 fighters in Syria where more than 1,700 of the Iran-backed group’s combatants have been killed since 2011.