Hezballah having to adapt to insurgency warfare in Syria

NY Times:

The procession was small as Hezbollah funerals go, just a few hundred people winding past wind-tossed olive trees through this remote Bekaa Valley village. Still, the mourners honored the fighter killed in Syria with the usual solemn choreography: the coffin draped with a flag, the uniformed Boy Scouts bearing his portrait, the women carrying babies and wreaths of roses.

But to the traditional prayers and chants – praising the leaders of Iran and Hezbollah, denouncing Israel and America – the mourners added a new barb, for the gunmen battling the Syrian government who, they said, had killed him: “Death to the Free Army.”

The funeral on Wednesday at once encapsulated Hezbollah’s cohesion and the new uncertainties and anxieties its followers face as it fights a new kind of war, more intimate and ambiguous than the group’s founding conflict with Israel.

Hezbollah’s increasingly open military intervention in Syria, against fellow Arab Muslims, is framed by its followers here in the northern Bekaa Valley less as a galvanizing mission than a regrettable necessity.

“We are fighting with them, but we dislike this fighting,” one resident, a man who accompanied journalists to the funeral and asked to be identified as a Hezbollah supporter, said at the party’s headquarters after the ceremony.

The fighting has severely altered life here. It has left the Shiite Muslims of Hermel afraid to visit nearby Sunni villages in Lebanon and Syria, cutting them off from jobs, friends and business dealings. Soldiers now check cars entering the village, fearing bombs. a new wariness has crept up between some Syrian workers and their employers here.

“Unfortunately, we don’t know who our enemy is today,” one villager, Abu Hassan, said as the family of the fighter, a young father with a wispy beard named Ahmed Awad, crowded, some weeping, around the grave.
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But as Hezbollah poured fighters across the border last month to help the Syrian army retake the nearby town of Qusayr -- its white buildings, where Hermel residents used to shop, visible in the distance from the cemetery – rebels increasingly clashed directly with Hezbollah and attacked its civilian areas in Lebanon. Hermel has lost four residents to rocket attacks from Syrian rebels, and about seven Hezbollah fighters, the mayor, Mustafa Taha, said.

Residents fear worse. An obstetrician from Hermel recently got a call from her boss at a clinic in Arsal telling her it was unsafe for her to come to work anymore.
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There is more.

The militia does not have counterinsurgency skills and is taking casualties because of its style of fighting.  Unlike the Israelis, the insurgents don't have a distinctive uniform making it harder to determine who is fighting you.  I suspect this war is going to get worse for Hezballah the longer it goes on.  That creates a strategic dilemma for Iran which is counting on Hezballah to attack Israel when its nukes are hit.  Iran is in effect bleeding it reserve forces in Syria.