How the Arab World Turned against Hizballah https://mosaicmagazine.com/picks/politics-current-affairs/2020/10/how-the-arab-world-turned-against-hizballah/

October 12, 2020 | Lizzie Porter
About the author:

In 2000, the Iran-backed Lebanese militia Hizballah was the darling of Arabs throughout the Middle East and beyond. While most Arab rulers talked a big game about opposing Israel, the terrorist group had been fighting the IDF since the early 1980s (not to mention murdering Jews in Latin America), and had just driven it from southern Lebanon. Now, thanks to Hizballah’s blood-soaked role in maintaining Bashar al-Assad’s power in Syria, all of that has changed, and even Lebanese Shiites—the organization’s base—have begun to resent it. Lizzie Porter, drawing on a series of interviews, writes:

Though it has faded from Western television screens, the Syrian war will have raged for a decade by March next year. It has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives and forced millions of people from their homes. . . . With the militants of Islamic State (IS) and their extreme form of Sunni Islam often dominating the headlines, Hizballah’s role in the conflict remains underexamined. But without its armed intervention in Syria—the exact timing is unclear, but fighters’ bodies were returning to Lebanon as early as 2012—it is unlikely the Assad regime would have survived.

Hizballah’s commanders have trained and led multiple Iran-backed forces from Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, fighting across the Iraq-Syria border. The group’s violations of humanitarian law in the conflict may not have been as openly gruesome as those by IS, but they are real, and in combination with the propping up of a hated dictator have alienated many previously sympathetic Syrians, Lebanese, and Palestinians.

In the nineteen interviews conducted for this article, Syrians, Lebanese, and Palestinians described growing feelings of unease towards the group—and sometimes predating its Syrian intervention. In May 2008, its militants took over central Beirut by force, following a Lebanese government proposal to curb their private communications networks. . . . “They took control of streets, squares, and they prevented people from going out and protesting. It was bad behavior,” [one interviewee] recalled. “For me, that was the turning point, where I started to see the other side of Hizballah.”

Read more on Prospect: https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/how-the-arab-world-turned-against-hezbollah