Troops of Gen. Michel Aoun captured a strategic town Saturday that was a stronghold of rival Christian forces and opened a new front in the war for control of Lebanon's Christian region, police said.
A communique from Aoun's command said his soldiers took 34 prisoners in the attack on Kleiat, 15 miles northeast of Beirut in the mountainous province of Kesrouan. The rival Lebanese Forces militia claimed its fighters counterattacked and drove back Aoun's men."The battle for Kesrouan has begun," said a police spokesman who could not be named under standing rules. "Kleiat's capture opens the way for Aoun's army to punch deep into the region."
If Aoun's forces are able to oust the Lebanese Forces from Kesrouan, that would enable them to attack the important port of Jounieh from Dbaye in the south and Kesrouan in the north. Aoun fighters seized Dbaye last week.
Jounieh is the largest Lebanese Forces base in the embattled Christian enclave and the militia's main harbor.
There was no updated word on casualties. Before the news from Kleiat, the toll from the 12-day confrontation between Aoun's army and the Lebanese Forces militia of Samir Geagea was 433 killed and 1,684 wounded.
The intra-Christian fighting is the worst in Lebanon's 15-year-old civil war.
Aoun and Geagea both have been at odds with Syria, which maintains 40,000 troops in Lebanon under a 1976 peacekeeping mandate, but Aoun has accused Geagea of trying to enforce an Arab League-brokered peace plan that he opposed.
Aoun attacked the pact because it set no date for the withdrawal of the Syrian troops.
Geagea's headquarters said his militiamen in Kleiat retreated Saturday "to draw in and contain Aoun's attacking force and then counterattacked."