Middle East Violence Escalates As Rockets Bomb Beirut, Tension Building Between Shiites and Sunni

Violence, in the form of rocket blasts, continues to escalate in the Middle East between the Shiite's and Sunni's, and there seems no end to the conflict.

Two rockets hit Hezbollah strongholds in Beirut on Sunday, a day after the Lebanese group's leader pledged to lift President Bashar Assad to victory in Syria's civil war.

It was the first attack to apparently target Hezbollah's stronghold in the south of the Lebanese capital since the outbreak of the two-year conflict in neighboring Syria, which has sharply heightened Lebanon's own sectarian tensions, according to Reuters.

The strikes also make clear the potential backlash against Hezbollah at home for attaching its future to the survival of the Assad regime. That decision also threatens to pull fragile Lebanon deeper into Syria's bloody conflict.

Despite such risks, Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah made it clear there is no turning back. In a televised speech Saturday, he said Hezbollah will keep fighting alongside Assad's forces until victory, regardless of the costs, Reuters reported.

If President Assad falls, Hezbollah's supply line of Iranian weapons through Syrian territory would dry up and it could become increasingly isolated in the region.

At the same time, Hezbollah, a Shiite Muslim group, is raising the stakes in Lebanon by declaring war on Syria's rebels, most of them Sunni Muslims.

One rocket hit a car dealership in the Mar Mikhael district, wounding four Syrian workers, badly damaging two cars, and spraying others with shrapnel. Part of the rocket's main body was embedded in the ground, where a Lebanese soldier measured its diameter, according to Huffington Post.

The second rocket tore through a second-floor apartment in the Chiyah district, about two kilometers (one mile) away. It damaged a living room, but no one was hurt.

The United States and Russia have proposed an international peace conference to douse a civil war that has killed more than 80,000 people, driven 1.5 million Syrians as refugees abroad and raised the specter of sectarian bloodshed in the wider region.

Syria's government will "in principle" attend the talks tentatively set for June in Geneva and believes it will be an opportunity to resolve the crisis, Syrian Foreign Minister Walid al-Moualem said during a visit to Baghdad on Sunday.

But in an apparent rebuff of Western calls for President Bashar al-Assad to cede power as part of any deal on transition, Moualem said: "No power on earth can decide on the future of Syria. Only the Syrian people have the right to do so," reports Reuters.