Hizbullah chief Hassan Nasrallah on Saturday vowed "victory" in Syria, where members of his Lebanese Shiite movement are fighting alongside regular troops against rebels trying to topple the regime.
"I say to all the honorable people, to the mujahedeen, to the heroes: I have always promised you a victory and now I pledge to you a new one," in Syria, he said at a ceremony marking the 13th anniversary of Israel's military withdrawal from Lebanon.
Nasrallah said Hizbullah would always stand by its allies in the Syrian regime of President Bashar al-Assad, stressing that its own interests were at stake.
"We will continue along the road... bear the responsibilities and the sacrifices," he said in a videolink of a speech delivered live on a huge screen.
"This battle is ours... and I promise you victory," he said.
"We do not know what the enemy's next move will be,” he added. “The Resistance that defeated Israel in the Second Lebanon War has trained and it is ready for confrontation. We are protecting Lebanon and Palestine and Syria. Israel is threatening war every say and it has high preparedness.”
"If Syria falls into the hands of the United States, Israel, or all of its vassals, the Resistance will lose out and Israel will enter Lebanon and force its terms. If Syria falls to them, Palestine will be lost.
"Syria is the rear guard of the resistance (Hizbullah's fight with Israel), its backbone, and the resistance cannot stay with its arms folded when its rear guard is exposed.
"We are idiots if we do not act," said Nasrallah who avoids appearing in public for security reasons.
The intervention of hundreds of fighters of Hizbullah has given the regime the upper hand in Qusayr, a strategic central town in Syria across the border with Lebanon, that had been in rebel hands.
Syrian forces launched an assault on Qusayr almost a week ago but are still meeting with fierce resistance from the rebels, for the town provides an important supply line for arms and volunteers from Lebanon.
Qusayr is a key prize for Assad's forces because of its strategic location between Damascus and the Mediterranean coast, the Alawite heartland of the embattled president's regime.
Nasrallah ruled out any alliance with the mostly Sunni Muslim rebels battling the Syrian regime.
"Hizbullah cannot be in the same trench as the United States, Israel, the takfirist (radical Muslims)... who disembowel, behead and desecrate tombs," he said of reports that rebels had vandalized the shrine of a venerated Shiite saint.