The Israel Defense Force is refusing to comment on what appears to be serious defections from its allied South Lebanon Army (SLA), Israeli’s chosen instrument to maintain order and prevent terrorist infiltration of the narrow security belt in south Lebanon, just north of the Israeli border.
The IDF is also mum on reports that it has been engaged in joint operations with the SLA. Officially, the last Israeli soldiers departed from Lebanon in the first week of June.
Fears have been expressed, however, that increasing numbers of SLA soldiers are defecting to the Shiite Moslem militia, Amal, a bitter foe of the SLA and generally hostile to Israel.
The deserters are presumed to be Shiites who are a minority in the mainly Christian Phalangist SLA commanded by Gen. Antoine Lehad. Israel was seriously embarrassed last month when it upheld Lehad’s charge that II of his men had been “kidnapped” by a Finnish contingent of the United Nations Interim Force in Leb- anon (UNIFIL) which handed them over to Amal. It turned out that the II were in fact defectors, as were 28 other SLA soldiers who switched to Amal a week earlier.
An IDF spokesman declined to comment on reports from Beirut that Israeli and SLA troops raided Kantara village in the security zone last Friday and arrested seven men after a Shiite force overran an SLA outpost in the village and captured its 12-man garrison. Unofficially, IDF sources denied Israel was involved in the Kantara raid.
The sources maintained that incidents involving the SLA are an “internal affair of the SLA which the IDF will not relate to.”
UNIFIL troops who arrived at the Kantara outpost after the reported attack by Shiites found the garrison empty and assumed its people had defected to Amal. The Lebanon State Radio yesterday quoted the garrison commander, Ali Koteish, as saying he had been forced to join the SLA and wanted to return to Amal.
UNIFIL spokesman Timor Goksell said an SLA unit lobbed mortar shells and fired machinegun rounds into Yater village in south Lebanon yesterday after the SLA post there was hit by rocket-propelled grenades and machinegun fire.
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