BEIRUT, March 13: The head of Lebanon’s Hezbollah warned Washington on Thursday that its forces would be met with suicide attacks, and not flowers, if it invaded Iraq.

“Don’t expect the people of this region to receive you with flowers and perfume,” Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah said while addressing a sea of people who filled the streets of Beirut’s southern suburbs for an Ashura meeting.

“The people of this region will receive you with rifles, blood, arms, martyrdom and martyrdom operations,” he said.

Nasrallah’s comments came in response to remarks from officials in Washington that Iraqi citizens would welcome a U.S. invasion to topple President Saddam Hussein. They also came as the U.N. Security Council remained deeply divided over a new resolution to disarm Iraq and the prospect of war grew.

Nasrallah, whose group helped drive Israel out of southern Lebanon in 2000 after a 22-year occupation, said the Iraqi people would fight U.S. forces in their region as the Lebanese had done before them.

“In the past, when the (US) Marines were in Beirut and their fleets were in the Mediterranean Sea, we screamed in the southern suburbs, ‘Death to America’,” Nasrallah said.

“Today, the region is being filled with hundreds of thousands of American soldiers and fleets and ‘Death to America’ was, is and will stay our slogan...it is a policy,” he told men, women and children dressed in black in observance of the Ashura.

In the southern port city of Tyre, some 10,000 people marched in the streets waving Palestinian and Hezbollah flags, among them hundreds of barefoot young men beating their chests.—Reuters