BEIRUT, Lebanon — Islamist fighters from Syria killed 10 Lebanese soldiers and appeared to have captured more than a dozen others in an armed offensive that left them in a tense battle for control of a Lebanese border town, Lebanon’s army chief said Sunday.
The new toll was reported one day after fighters from Syria — who included members of rebel brigades, an affiliate of Al Qaeda and the extremist Islamic State in Iraq and Syria — carried out a series of attacks on army checkpoints that left them largely in control of the town of Arsal.
The two-day clash was the most recent spillover into Lebanon from the civil war in neighboring Syria. The two countries share a complex web of political and sectarian ties that have made the violence in Syria resonate in its smaller neighbor, where street clashes, car bombs and political deadlock related to the war in Syria have been common.
Residents, aid workers and Syrian rebels reached in Arsal on Sunday said that insurgents had seized the town but that it was surrounded by the Lebanese Army, which was shelling it.
Speaking to reporters on Sunday, Gen. Jean Kahwaji, Lebanon’s army chief, said that insurgents had launched what appeared to be a well-prepared, coordinated attack on the town.
“This terrorist attack that was launched yesterday wasn’t an accident,” he said, “but was prepared in advance and it seems a long time ago, waiting for the right time.”
General Kahwaji said that the army was fighting back with mortar and artillery fire and fighter jets, and that 10 Lebanese soldiers had been killed and 25 others wounded. Thirteen were missing and were believed to have been captured.
Supporting that theory, a video that purports to show the captured members of the security forces was posted Sunday on YouTube. It showed seven soldiers in camouflage and eight police officers in blue uniforms crowded into a living room. One by one, they held up their identification cards and said they were defecting to the rebels. Then an unidentified man in brown camouflage served them candy.
It was not possible to determine whether the defections were genuine.
The clashes in Arsal began early Friday, after the Lebanese Army arrested Imad Ahmad Jomaa, who was said to be the commander of an Islamist rebel group in Syria.
An aid worker who entered Arsal on Sunday said the fighting had worsened conditions for the town’s residents and for the many Syrians who had fled there to escape the civil war in their country. Lebanese soldiers were nowhere to be seen, and men in black masks were running checkpoints on the main roads, the aid worker said, speaking on the condition of anonymity so as not to endanger her work.
Qassem Zein, a doctor in a makeshift hospital in Arsal, said that 14 Syrian refugees had been killed and dozens wounded since the fighting started. He said he had also treated rebel fighters from Syria and other Arab countries.