Lieutenant Guillaume’s patrol was cancelled on Friday 20 September. Despite the calm around the Deir Kifa base, where 600 men from the French contingent of the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) are stationed, the alert level has been raised and exits have been prohibited along the border with Israel, where French soldiers were to patrol about fifteen kilometres away in a straight line.
The order was given by the UN headquarters in Naqura, alerted by the Israelis, through the liaison mechanism, of possible operations in Lebanese territory, after a night of intense bombardment. “Patrols are cancelled once or twice a month, depending on the period. But, in general, our mission is little affected by the tension that can result from escalations.”says Lieutenant Guillaume, who leads nine men from the 1Ahem The Valencia Spahis regiment (cavalry), like much of the French contingent, is currently on its four-month mission.
The exchanges of fire intensified during the day. From Deir Kifa, in the early afternoon, only a single barrage of rockets fired by Hezbollah could be seen with the naked eye from about 4 kilometres away, without disturbing the routine of the French contingent, accustomed to such scenes. The assassination in the southern suburbs of Beirut of Ibrahim Aqil, a senior Hezbollah executive, at the end of the afternoon is, moreover, a harbinger of more intense exchanges of fire throughout the intervention zone south of UNIFIL. of the Litani River, an area equivalent to two French departments in which 10,000 men of forty nationalities operate.
“Degraded security context”
“For the past two weeks we have seen an escalation in the level of beatings and violence, which carries the risk of slipping and losing control. This week, the volume of fire we have detected has doubled or even tripled, and we have approximately the same order of magnitude for airstrikes.”“This rapid reaction mission throughout the UNIFIL zone is specific to the French contingent,” said Colonel Maurin, commander of the UNIFIL Force Commander Reserve (FCR).
The 700-man battalion, made up of a variety of units (infantry, reconnaissance, engineers, firefighters) has unique capabilities for monitoring the airspace within UNIFIL, thanks to a Cobra radar module. It also participates, through patrols, in the interposition mission that has been assigned to the UN force under resolution 1701 since the end of the war between Israel and Hezbollah in 2006.
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