Qusayr: Hezbollah’s Syrian ‘Fortress’ Collapses without Resistance

Mourners carry the flag-draped coffins of Hezbollah fighters who were killed in the recent war with Israel, during their funeral procession in the southern Lebanese village of Majdal Selm on December 6, 2024. (AFP)
Mourners carry the flag-draped coffins of Hezbollah fighters who were killed in the recent war with Israel, during their funeral procession in the southern Lebanese village of Majdal Selm on December 6, 2024. (AFP)
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Qusayr: Hezbollah’s Syrian ‘Fortress’ Collapses without Resistance

Mourners carry the flag-draped coffins of Hezbollah fighters who were killed in the recent war with Israel, during their funeral procession in the southern Lebanese village of Majdal Selm on December 6, 2024. (AFP)
Mourners carry the flag-draped coffins of Hezbollah fighters who were killed in the recent war with Israel, during their funeral procession in the southern Lebanese village of Majdal Selm on December 6, 2024. (AFP)

As the Syrian opposition swept through the Homs province last week, hours before they ousted President Bashar al-Assad, focus shifted to the Qusayr region, the Lebanese Hezbollah party’s stronghold in Syria.

Observers expected a fierce battle between the opposition and Hezbollah over the region, but instead the regime forces abandoned their posts, leaving the party fighters to fend off the advancing forces on their own. Instead of putting up a fight, the fighters retreated to Lebanon and Qusayr was seized by the opposition.

The residents of Qusayr have waited 11 years to learn what happened to their homes from which they were forced out of by Hezbollah and the regime. Entire villages in the region have been razed to the ground.

A source from the Syrian opposition told Asharq Al-Awsat that the regime and Hezbollah effectively surrendered Qusayr.

“The fighters who advanced on the region hail from Qusayr. The operation to seize the region didn’t take more than two hours,” it added, saying no one put up a fight because the majority of the Hezbollah fighters who were deployed there either fled to Lebanon or surrendered to the revolutionaries.

Little news has emerged about the thousands of Hezbollah fighters who had taken up base in Qusayr and its countryside. The region was the backbone for Hezbollah’s weapons’ smuggling to Lebanon.

In recordings circulated on social media, Hezbollah fighters could be heard saying that the Damascus regime has “betrayed and abandoned them on the field.”

Hezbollah leader Sheikh Naim Qassem had declared on Friday that the party “would not allow the fall of Syria in the hands of armed factions again,” adding that it was ready to support and defend it.

The opposition source revealed that hundreds of Hezbollah fighters had indeed headed to Qusayr to defend it as the anti-regime fighters advanced in Homs, but they were forced to flee.

“The influence of Hezbollah and all of Iran’s militias in Syria is over,” declared the source.

After Assad’s downfall, thousands of Syrians from Homs and Qusayr who were displaced to Lebanon, headed back to their hometowns to check on their properties.

A source close to Hezbollah told Asharq Al-Awsat that the party “had fought alongside the Syrian state and people.”

“If what happened falls in the favor the Syrian people, then so be it, that is their choice. The party was never at war with or the enemy of the Syrian people. Rather, it was fighting terrorist and takfiri groups that were terrorizing the Syrians,” it charged.



Scotland Awaits Famous Son as Trump Visits Mother’s Homeland 

A general view of the Trump Turnberry hotel and golf resort in Turnberry, on the west coast of Scotland, on July 21, 2025. (AFP)
A general view of the Trump Turnberry hotel and golf resort in Turnberry, on the west coast of Scotland, on July 21, 2025. (AFP)
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Scotland Awaits Famous Son as Trump Visits Mother’s Homeland 

A general view of the Trump Turnberry hotel and golf resort in Turnberry, on the west coast of Scotland, on July 21, 2025. (AFP)
A general view of the Trump Turnberry hotel and golf resort in Turnberry, on the west coast of Scotland, on July 21, 2025. (AFP)

Donald Trump will fly into Scotland on Friday for a private visit to the land where his mother was born and spent her childhood on the remote Isle of Lewis.

"It's great to be home, this was the home of my mother," he said when he arrived on his last visit in 2023.

Born Mary Anne MacLeod, Trump's mum emigrated to the United States when she was 18. She then met and married Fred Trump, kickstarting the family's meteoric rise that has led their son, Donald, all the way to the White House.

During his visit the current US president, who is six months into his second term, plans to officially open his latest golf course in northeastern Aberdeen -- making him the owner of three such links in Scotland.

Although Donald Trump has talked openly about his father Fred -- a self-made millionaire and property developer whose own father emigrated from Germany -- he remains more discreet about his mother, who died in 2000 at the age of 88.

She was born in 1912 on Lewis, the largest island in the Outer Hebrides in northwest Scotland, and grew up in the small town of Tong.

Trump visited the humble family home in 2008, pausing for a photo in front of the two-storey house. He has cousins who still live in the house, which has been modernized since Mary Anne MacLeod's time but remains modest, standing just around 200 meters (650 feet) from the sea.

Its slate roof and grey walls are a world away from Trump's luxury Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida, or his gold-adorned apartment in Trump Tower, New York.

According to the British press, which based its reports on local documents, Trump's grandfather was a fisherman.

MacLeod was the 10th and last child of the family, and her first language was Gaelic before she learnt English at school.

Life was tough on Lewis after World War I, which claimed the lives of many of the island's young men. Following in the footsteps of her older sister, and so many other Scots over the decades, she decided to emigrate to the United States.

MacLeod boarded the SS Transylvania from Glasgow in 1930, bound for New York.

- Pink Rolls-Royce -

On her immigration papers she wrote she was a "domestic" when asked about her profession. One of Trump's sisters recalled that MacLeod had worked as a nanny in a wealthy family.

But a few years later her life turned around when she reportedly met Fred Trump at an evening dance. They were married in 1936 in Manhattan's wealthy Upper East Side, and MacLeod became a US citizen in 1942.

As Fred Trump built and expanded his property empire in the city by constructing middle-class homes in districts such as Queens and Brooklyn, Mary Anne devoted herself to charitable works.

"Even in old age, rich and respected and with her hair arranged in a dynamic orange swirl, she would drive a rose-colored Rolls-Royce to collect coins from laundry machines in apartment blocks that belonged to the Trumps," the Times wrote this month.

Photos of her hobnobbing with New York high society show her with her blonde hair swept up in a bun, reminiscent of her son's distinctive side-swept coiffure.

She was "a great beauty", Donald Trump has gushed in one of his rare comments about his mother, adding she was also "one of the most honest and charitable people I have ever known".

And on X he has pointed to "great advice from my mother: 'Trust in God and be true to yourself'".

In 2018 then-British prime minister Theresa May presented Trump with his family tree tracing his Scottish ancestors.

Less than 20,000 people live on Lewis, and MacLeod is a common surname.

Residents tell how Mary Anne MacLeod regularly returned to her roots until her death, while one of the president's sisters won over the locals by making a large donation to a retirement home.

But Donald Trump has not impressed everyone in Scotland, and protests against his visit are planned on Saturday in Aberdeen and Edinburgh.

Earlier this year in April a banner fluttered from a shop in the port of Stornoway, the island's largest town. "Shame on you Donald John," it proclaimed.

Local authorities have asked for the banner to be taken down, but it is due to tour the island this summer with residents invited to sign it.