REPORT: Calm overshadows Arsal as negotiations to release kidnapped soldiers continue

Calm prevailed Friday over the northeastern town of Arsal, after security sources confirmed that all the gunmen had withdrawn from the town.

Accordingly, Arsal residents returned to their homes after they were displaced due to the clashes that had erupted between armed men and the Lebanese Armed Forces last Saturday lasting five days.

In this context, sources from the Association of Muslim Scholars told LBCI that they were able to indirectly contact the armed groups through a senior Syrian cleric, who is well-connected with the Islamic State and the al-Nusra Front.

The sources stressed that the mediator will deliver a list of demands to the Muslim Scholars, who in turn will deliver it to the Lebanese authorities, in order to release the captive security forces and LAF members.

Clashes erupted in Arsal on Saturday afternoon when Syrian gunmen deployed across the region after the Lebanese Armed Forces arrested Syrian national Imad Ahmad Jomaa at a checkpoint.

The army said 17 soldiers have been killed, with at least 30 other ISF and LAF soldiers missing and 86 injured in the fighting.

Lebanese security officials say the fighters include members of al Qaeda's Syria branch, the Nusra Front, and an al Qaeda splinter group, the Islamic State, which has seized swathes of land in Syria and Iraq.

Militant Islamists have mostly withdrawn from a Lebanese border town they seized at the weekend, taking with them captive Lebanese soldiers, militant and security sources said on Thursday, as a truce to end the deadly battle appeared to hold after 5 days of fighting.

Muslim clerics who had been mediating an end to five days of fighting in Arsal said they would negotiate for the release of remaining captives held by militants whose incursion into Lebanon marked the most serious spillover of Syria's three-year-old civil war into Lebanese territory.

An operation mediated by a nun and supported by the Lebanese Army Intelligence, a convoy carrying 1,800 Syrian refugees headed from Arsal for Syria via the al-Masnaa crossing point where the refugees spent their night.

The taking of Arsal was the first major incursion into Lebanon by hardline Sunni militants - leading players in Sunni-Shi'ite violence unfolding across the Levant - which threatens the stability of Lebanon by inflaming its own sectarian tensions.

Arsal is a Sunni Muslim town at the border where tens of thousands of refugees have taken shelter from the war in neighboring Syria. Their refugee camps have been badly damaged in the fighting, Syrian activists have reported.