Mona Alami

Special for USA TODAY

175 rebels were killed in Ghouta%2C east of Damascus

Mountainous area is a supply route

Rebel forces are holding on in Yabroud

BEIRUT — Forces of the U.S.- designated terrorist group Hezbollah say they are winning battles to defeat a three-year rebellion against Syrian dictator Bashar Assad by pouring fighters into remote regions where the Sunni Muslim rebels have been strongest.

The latest may be in Ghouta, a region just east of Damascus where 175 rebels were killed in an ongoing battle, according to SANA, the Syrian state-controlled news agency.

"Hezbollah was the main group that implemented the ambush," said Rami Abdulrahman, head of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a British-based group opposed to Assad.

The group said its contacts inside Syria report that the fighting was led by Hezbollah in tandem with Syrian government forces. A Hezbollah commander interviewed by USA TODAY confirmed that the group is taking the lead now in many battles in Syria.

"We have recaptured about 70% of the Qalamoun territories," said Abou Ali, a Hezbollah commander on a brief respite in Beirut.

Refugees and wounded fighters who side with the rebels have been limping into Lebanon from Qalamoun, a region about 50 miles from the Lebanon border and north of the Syrian capital of Damascus that has been the site of intense fighting between rebels and Hezbollah.

The mountainous area is important to the rebels, Assad and Hezbollah because it is where the major M5 highway runs between Damascus and the rebel stronghold of Homs farther north. Homs is where rebels obtain supplies from routes coming in from Sunni Muslim areas of eastern Lebanon.

It is here amid the mountains and valleys where Syria's Assad hopes to do lasting daamge to the insurgency against him, a spot Abou Ali calls "The next big Syria battle."

In pursuing peace talks that failed yet again earlier this month, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and President Obama have refused pleas from rebels for heavy weapons, insisting that there is "no military solution" to the Syria war.

But Assad and his backers don't believe it, said James Jeffrey, a fellow at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

"The war will continue and the damage to any rational world order will grow," said Jeffrey, a longtime diplomat who served as ambassador to Albania.

"Assad and his friends do not appear to believe that there is no military solution," he says. "If that is the direction the Syrian conflict is going, then Washington will eventually face a de facto military victory in the very center of the Middle East by an Assad rump state, Iran, Hezbollah and Russia, on top of the humanitarian tragedy and attrition of U.S. global prestige."

Hezbollah, whose name means "Party of God," is a militia based in southern Lebanon that is heavily armed and financed by Iran. Both Hezbollah and Iran's ruling mullahs are Shiite Muslims, traditional adversaries of the Sunni Muslims who rule in the oil-rich Gulf states and who make up a majority of Syria's population.

Syria's ruling Alawite party is an offshoot of Shiite Islam, and it is being supported in its fight to survive by Iran and Hezbollah. The Sunnis in Syria have received backing from Sunnis from other countries, some of which are aligned with al-Qaeda, a largely Sunni terrorist group.

Hezbollah is also blamed for killing hundreds of Americans. It is the largest bloc in the Lebanese parliament, has fought two wars with Israel to its south, and has thousands of fighters and missiles in its arsenal.

In Syria, an estimated 5,000 Hezbollah fighters according to rebel accounts have prevented a rebel takeover of Damascus and now appear to be tipping the scales of the war elsewhere in Assad's favor.

Assad's military is accused of indiscriminately bombing whole cities and killing as many as 140,000 civilians, the Syrian Observatory said.

Yabroud is one of the largest battles taking place today, agrees the rebel command, but the rebel forces are holding on.

"The regime has thrown its weight behind Hezbollah to take the control of Yabroud but rebels have managed to reclaim some of the lost territory, more specifically around the town of Sahel," said Ammar Hassan, a member of the rebel military council.

The city, previously home to both Christian and Sunnis, is now a major base for the Free Syrian Army, a rebel force made up of deserters from Assad's military and others. Also there are Islamist fighters from the Nusra Front and other Islamic factions supporting the rebels, Hassan says.

It is in Yabroud where Sunnis base part of their fight to Hezbollah targets inside Lebanon and Syria, say fighters.

The rebels resupply themselves from Lebanon and have established weapons factories there from which they smuggle car bombs into Lebanon. In the last two months, several bombings have targeted Hezbollah in cities including Hermel and the capital Beirut, bombings claimed by the Nusra Front.

Abou Ali said Hezbollah has hundrreds of fighters in the Qalamoun region and they have cornered the rebels using sophisticated methods of artillery targeting with weaponry supplied by Russia and Iran, both of which back Assad's regime.

Rebels had been using the rough terrain of peaks and valleys to avoid confrontations but Hezbollah is forcing them out with the artillery that the rebels do not possess. Abou Ali said he believes there are as many as 10,000 rebel fighters in the area.

"Our strategy focused on encircling the rebels in each sector while leaving them with one exit road toward another specific village. This is the case now of Yabroud, from which most of the fighters are fleeing to Fleeta, and from there to Ersal ( in Lebanon)," he said.

Among the Hezbollah arsenal are Dushkas, or Soviet heavy infantry machine guns that can be moved about on a two-wheeled mount, Iranian-made Raad rockets that have a range of 30 miles and powerful Zalzal rockets with a range exceeding 100 miles.

"To have the upper hand, we need to have control over strategic positions such as mountain tops," Abou Ali said.

Apart from occasional bombing runs by the Syrian air force, the fight is entirely Hezbollah's he said. And in other battles, Syrian troops are under Hezbollah commanders and being trained by the group, Abou Ali said.

Other Shiite militant groups are here as well, he said, including from Iraq. The Free Syrian Army has said as many as 40,000 Shiites from outside Syria are here fighting, a number Abou Ali says is too high.

Free Syrian Army commander Hassan said the battle for Yabroud may decide the future of the rebellion.

"A truce cannot be considered in Yabroud," he says. "Its conquest or destruction can alone enable regime forces to take (full) control of the border separating Syria from Lebanon."