Afterword to the Paperback Edition
As Lebanese government and opposition figures negotiated in Doha in May 2008, the Union of the Disabled held demonstrations in Beirut with a theme that captured a widely held sentiment: “If you don’t agree, don’t come back.” Courtesy of Getty Images.
The tent city that Hezbollah and its Muslim and Christian allies erected in downtown Beirut in early December 2006 signaled the opposition’s resolve to topple the government of Prime Minister Fouad Siniora. Nightly rallies featured a who’s who of opposition notables. Initially, exuberant villagers enjoyed the novelty of riding free buses to rallies in upscale central Beirut, where some would stay for days at a time. One month later, and just two days before an international donors’ conference was to open in Paris, Hezbollah increased its pressure on the Siniora government by leading widespread demonstrations to protest the government’s failure to address the needs of those displaced by the war six months earlier, in July 2006, between Hezbollah and Israel. In a belligerent speech the night before the planned demonstrations, Nasrallah argued that the Paris conference would shackle Lebanon with political conditions and would threaten the country’s independence. He implied that the perfidy of the Siniora government was proven by its presence in Paris.
The next day scattered violence erupted around the campus of the Lebanese University, where an altercation sparked wider Sunni-Shiʿi clashes and several deaths. Lebanese police and especially the army performed admirably to curtail the clashes, but angry partisans were ready to fight. Nasrallah appeared on television and urged his followers off the streets, insisting that it was a religious duty for them to comply.
The clashes of January 2007 revealed how sharply the level of distrust had risen between Lebanese Shiʿa and Sunni since the July 2006 war. The tension has encouraged the growth of militant Sunni groups that viewed the Shiʿa with contempt. These groups are concentrated in the impoverished northern region of the country, and in the twelve Palestinian refugee camps, where living conditions are often miserable (there are more than four hundred thousand registered Palestinian refugees in Lebanon). This trend is compellingly described by the French scholar Bernard Rougier in his book Everyday Jihad (Harvard University Press, 2007). In Tripoli, the country’s second largest city, Sunni Islamist groups incited followers to attack rawafid (“rejecters,” a derogatory term for Shiʿi Muslims) following clashes with ʿAlawi allies of Hezbollah (ʿAlawis are a Shiʿi sect found mainly in Syria).
One militant Sunni group, Fatah al-Islam—based in the Nahr al-Barid refugee camp near Tripoli—attacked an army unit in May 2007, killing several soldiers. In the wake of this incident, the Lebanese army responded forcefully. The army launched an assault on Fatah al-Islam, which controlled several blocks of the sprawling camp. The group put up fierce resistance to the lightly armed army. It was only in early September 2007, after more than three months of fighting, that the militants succumbed. By then, 168 soldiers had been killed, scores of innocent Palestinians had lost their homes, and the camp had been devastated, with more than 250 dead—many of them civilians.
The army is one of Lebanon’s few revered national institutions. It enjoyed robust public support during the Nahr al-Barid fighting, but its limited capabilities were on display. Vietnam War–era helicopters were used to drop bombs because the Lebanese air force did not have a single airworthy combat aircraft. Early in the fighting the army ran out of ammunition and was able to continue the battle only because the United States airlifted munitions to Lebanon. For many Shiʿa, as I was reminded in discussions during my May 2008 visits to southern Lebanese villages, the army’s modest capacity lent substance to the argument that Hezbollah is more capable of defending Lebanon than the national army.
While the fighting was underway in the north, United Nations peacekeepers serving in the south with UNIFIL suffered a blow in late June 2007. A roadside bomb killed six UNIFIL peacekeepers. The attack was probably the work of a militant Sunni group, perhaps in retaliation for the Nahr al-Barid campaign. UNIFIL, beefed up as part of the arrangements for ending the Israeli-Hezbollah war in 2006, was charged with ensuring that Hezbollah did not reconstitute an armed presence adjacent to the Israeli-Lebanese border. Nonetheless, the June attack prompted several of the national military contingents in UNIFIL to quietly bolster informal liaison arrangements with Hezbollah in order to benefit from its well-oiled intelligence network and its help in forestalling future militant attacks. The threat remains palpable. In April 2008, Ayman al-Zawahiri renewed al-Qaeda’s call for attacks on “Crusaders and Jews,” specifically including UNIFIL.
The attacks on the peacekeepers came a few weeks after Walid Eido, a Sunni member of parliament and government supporter, was killed by a car bomb on Beirut’s popular seaside corniche, along with nine other victims. Lebanese politics continued to be a dangerous profession. In September 2007, Antoine Ghanem, a Maronite member of parliament and, like Eido, a supporter of the government, was blown up along with eight bystanders in Sin al-Fil, a respectable professional district in East Beirut. Ghanem was the fourth legislator killed in less than two years, a chain of killings widely, but not universally, ascribed by Lebanese to Syria.
The month before Ghanem’s death, a by-election was held in the Metn, the overwhelmingly Christian district that is a part of Mount Lebanon as well as the home base of former president Amin Gemayel. As noted in the conclusion, Amin’s son Pierre was assassinated in November 2006, and Amin was the odds-on favorite to win this election to fill his son’s vacant seat. Dr. Kamil Khoury, Amin’s obscure opponent, was endorsed by retired general Michel Aoun, the Christian opposition leader and opposition ally of Hezbollah. With more than 50 percent of eligible voters participating, Khoury won the election by a whisker of 418 votes out of about 78,000 cast. As the one-seat contest highlighted, factionalism often divides Lebanese Christians.
Many Lebanese hoped that the election of a new president would break the political stalemate, yet their hopes were thwarted. President Emile Lahoud left office in November 2007, but the presidential palace in Baabda remained vacant for the next six months. In Lebanon, the parliament is directly elected by the people, while the president is elected by a majority vote of parliament. Speaker Nabih Berri insisted that without the political consensus signified by a two-thirds quorum, there would be no election. The election was postponed nineteen times, to the frustration of the parliamentary majority. Only after Lebanon tottered on the brink of disaster was army commander General Michel Suleiman, who had long been the consensus choice, elected and sworn into office on May 25, 2008.
Suleiman’s candidacy was initially vetoed by the United States, which viewed him as too close to Syria and to pro-Syrian groups, including Hezbollah. Then, when Suleiman’s candidacy was embraced by the government (with U.S. assent) in November, he was nixed by the opposition. In January 2008, new opposition demonstrations led to deadly Sunni-Shiʿi clashes south of Beirut, and four Shiʿi demonstrators were killed by the army, evoking Hezbollah recriminations against the army and Suleiman specifically.
The prior month, the army’s renowned chief of operations, Brigadier General François al-Hajj, was assassinated en route to the army headquarters in Yarzi, near Beirut. Al-Hajj, who had directed the army’s assault at Nahr al-Barid, was a Maronite from the southern village of Rmeish. He was widely expected to replace Suleiman as army commander, and he was known to enjoy excellent relations with Aoun, who described him as “his candidate” to become commander of the army. He maintained good relations with the Shiʿi community, but he was also widely respected in Western circles as a consummate professional. The mastermind of the general’s assassination remains a mystery, and in addition to the usual suspects—including Syria and revenge-bent Islamists—it is plausible that other hands, Lebanese ones, were intent on preventing the rise of a nationalist officer as much at ease with opposition as with pro-government forces.
Damascus was the site for the fatal end of another career when on February 12, 2008, a man using the name al-Hajj Radwan died from a car bomb. He was better known as Imad Mughniyah (see chapter 4), and he earned infamy in his early twenties by playing a key role in the 1983 bombing of the marine barracks in Beirut and by masterminding the snatching and egregious imprisonment of foreign hostages in the 1980s, as well as other horrendous exploits. His funeral in al-dahiya had the feel of a state funeral and was attended by tens of thousands of Lebanese mourners and an official Iranian delegation, including the foreign minister, who heard Nasrallah praise Mughniyah in his eulogy as “the commander of the two victories”—Israel’s exit in 2000 and the July 2006 war. Nasrallah, who accused Israeli agents of masterminding the attack, also promised revenge against Israel for killing Mughniyah. Most Lebanese were surprised to learn that the notorious Mughniyah was so integral to Hezbollah’s battlefield successes, but they were later amply reminded by ubiquitous posters and even an over-the-top opera (The Scented Light) that celebrated Mughniyah’s exploits and his martyrdom.
If the posthumous outing of Mughniyah was an occasion for adulation in Hezbollah circles, the party’s embrace of a renowned terrorist, who was also purported to be an officer in Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, underlined the Hezbollah “otherness” for its many Lebanese detractors. Hezbollah celebrated its links to Iran and promoted resistance to American influence in the Middle East, just as Iran’s hardline leaders do. Coupled with credible reports of Hezbollah officials working in league with Iran to train insurgents in Iraq, fear spread that the party’s domestic political pretensions were only camouflage to hide its wider regional pretensions.
Hezbollah’s domestic adversaries, still seething about the party’s devastating provocation of Israel in 2006, justifiably feared—despite repeated pledges to the contrary—that Hezbollah’s weapons would be turned against Lebanese, thus precipitating a new civil war. ʿAli Fayyad, the wellknown head of Hezbollah’s Studies and Documentation Center, emphasized Nasrallah’s frequent assurances that Hezbollah’s weapons would be used only to defend Lebanon (Fayyad 2006, 9). Nevertheless, in cooperation with some opposition allies, Hezbollah’s weapons were used with deadly effect against other Lebanese in May 2008.
In early May, Walid Jumblatt, the mercurial Druze leader, insisted that the government take action against Hezbollah by dismissing the pro-Hezbollah head of security at the airport and investigating an extensive fiber-optic phone network that Hezbollah claimed was integral to its security infrastructure. (It is very unlikely that the cabinet would have acted without significant outside encouragement, probably from the United States, but perhaps from Saudi Arabia.) After a long debate, the cabinet agreed and ordered the reassignment of Brigadier General Wafiq Shuqair, a Shiʿi from a small village in the south, and directed an investigation of the independent telephone system.
The Hezbollah response was quick in coming. The next day, May 7, demonstrators blocked the roads to the airport with the help of Jihad al-Binaʾ trucks, which dumped debris to make the route impassable. Hezbollah fighters were joined by unruly Amal and SSNP gunmen and seized control of West Beirut on May 8 and 9. Hezbollah succeeded in coercing the government to rescind the decisions that triggered the crisis, but an immediate casualty was the party’s oft-repeated pledge not to turn its weapons on fellow Lebanese. A private militia, funded by Saad al-Din al-Hariri, was brushed aside, and the state’s Internal Security Force, which is usually presumed to reflect Sunni interests, simply disappeared. Notably, government buildings were not attacked or occupied. As the opposition gunmen left their positions to return home in the ensuing days, the army competently assumed security, but only after days of standing aside rather than risking a fracture of the army.
The Hezbollah-led thrust was a brutal object lesson in power, but it also illustrated the limitations of power. In the Shouf, the region where the Druze predominate, seasoned Hezbollah fighters met their match. Followers of the rival Druze leaders, Talal Arslan and Walid Jumblatt, temporarily put aside their differences to strike blows against Hezbollah. In the far north of Lebanon, in the ʿAkkar town of Halba, Sunni gunmen affiliated with the Future Movement tortured and executed eleven members of the Syrian Social Nationalist opposition party, apparently while the army figuratively held the coats of the assailants. In all, eighty-one people were killed in a few days of fighting. Very gruesome videos of the violence—particularly of the Halba incident—circulated on the Internet and via cell phones, and within days almost all Lebanese knew of the images and most had seen the footage.
No feasible mediated solution would avoid returning to a government based on consensus between the major Lebanese players. The United States clung to the politically convenient fiction that a consensus government (with an attendant role for Hezbollah) could be avoided. The realities on the ground in May 2008 forced an adjustment in Washington’s thinking. As a result, when the Emir of Qatar offered to mediate between the Lebanese contestants in a hastily organized meeting in Doha, the United States grudgingly supported the effort.
To the relief of most Lebanese, particularly those with a living memory of the fifteen-year civil war that ended only in 1990, an agreement was reached on May 21 in Doha. The next morning at dawn, the opposition tents, erected in the heart of Beirut a year and a half before, were removed. The key components of the Doha Agreement included the election by parliament of Michel Suleiman as president, the creation of a consensus government in which the opposition would hold an effective veto, and the crafting of a new elections the following year, in June 2009. Suleiman was elected president and inaugurated on May 25, just in time to save the lucrative summer tourism season.
As is often the case in Lebanon, many of the underlying issues would remain unresolved. Local demands for Hezbollah to disarm would continue to resonate in Washington and Riyadh, Amman and Paris, where the group was viewed as a dangerous expression of Iran’s regional ambitions. However, the prospects for disarming the Shiʿi group were dimmer than ever. Sunni Islamists, who sometimes argue that the Shiʿa are not even authentic Muslims, have reacted to Hezbollah’s military prowess by upgrading their own militias. Although Hezbollah has tried to downplay the hostility of Sunni groups, it is noteworthy that the party’s attempts to reach a rapprochement with the most powerful Sunni Islamist groups ultimately failed.
Politics in Lebanon often are a patchwork of competing sectarian and personal interests, joined only by fraying threads of national identity. This was certainly the case in following the Doha Agreement, when it took five weeks of horse trading to assemble a cabinet to be headed by Fouad Siniora, who remained in office until after the 2009 election.
Israel and Hezbollah concluded successful indirect negotiations through German mediators to arrange for the exchange of prisoners and bodies, in July 2008. The exchange returned to Israel the bodies of the two soldiers whose capture two summers before precipitated the thirty-four-day war (both soldiers apparently died in captivity of wounds inflicted in the ambush). In return, four Lebanese captured in 2006 were repatriated and Samir Kuntar (see p. 134) was freed. Kuntar, a Druze, is much despised in Israel because two civilians died at his hands, including a four-year-old girl. One may easily imagine Israelis seething at the spectacle of Kuntar being greeted by the Lebanese government with fanfare and acclaim, as though he were a national hero. Turned out in a brand-new Hezbollah uniform, Kuntar was embraced by Nasrallah, who gloated that the prisoner deal validated the victory of 2006.
2009 Parliamentary Elections
Within Lebanon recrimination between Hezbollah and its adversaries accelerated in the run-up to the June 7, 2009, parliamentary elections. Electioneering featured politically-significant color-coding. Hezbollah ally General Michel Aoun and his Free Political Movement’s characteristically orange signs joined with Hezbollah’s yellow posters emphasized the party’s stand against corruption, indebtedness, and deprivation, as well as its stance of resistance. The opposing and predominantly Maronite Lebanese Forces (the chief rival to Michel Aoun’s party) produced posters featuring the horizontal red stripes of Lebanese national flag and emphasized that “our national colors will not change.” The Future Movement, the other Hezbollah adversary group led by Saad al-Hariri, son of the assassinated prime minister, offered a variety of symbolic references to the martyred Rafiq al-Hariri. Their bright red posters, proclaiming “I ♥ life,” invited comparison with Hezbollahis and their avowal of martyrdom and death.
The elections, competently organized under the leadership of Interior Minister Ziyad Baroud and observed by election monitors from the Arab League, the European Union, and the Carter Center, proceeded without incident, despite the persistence of vote buying, which remains common in Lebanon. (In and around the Beqaa valley city of Zahle, where the author was on the ground and where seven decisive seats were hotly contested, the going price for a vote was said to be $200.) The results reflected deep polarization, particularly between Sunni and Shiʿi voters.
The Hariri “Future” camp was extraordinarily successful in mobilizing Sunni voters, including Beduin tribespeople along with expatriate voters who were (legally) provided with free plane tickets to allow them to return to vote. I interviewed a family of at least four adults who had been flown all the way from Australia to cast their ballots. Expatriate Lebanese not fortunate enough to trace their roots to competitive electoral districts complained that they were not offered tickets.
It was widely remarked at the time that Saudi Arabia, intent on defeating Hezbollah and checking the power of the Shiʿi community and its Iranian patrons, transferred large sums to finance the campaign of the March 14 alliance.1
When the votes were counted, the March 14 forces carried the day, winning 68 seats as compared to 57 for the Hezbollah-dominated March 8 coalition (three seats were won by independents in the 128-member Chamber of Deputies). In Zahle, heretofore a stronghold for a pro-Syrian politician and his allies, all seven seats, including a single Shiʿi seat, were won by March 14 candidates.
Despite the seemingly decisive electoral victory of the March 14 coalition in these 2009 parliamentary elections, the next four years would be marked by repeated political deadlock. Five months passed before prime minister-designate Saad al-Hariri succeeded in assembling his cabinet. His eventual successors, Najib Mikati and Tamam Salam, would face similar delays due to long bargaining over cabinet composition.
Dickering over cabinet portfolios is a familiar feature of all parliamentary systems, but in Lebanon the tough horse-trading stems from intense mutual distrust and rival strategic visions. For Hezbollah’s rivals, the bitter memory of the May 2008 Hezbollah-led armed incursion into West Beirut remains fresh. They feared the group and insisted that Hezbollah must disarm. For its part, Hezbollah blocked any effort to impede its military capabilities and pressed for control of two ministries, Interior and Telecommunications.
In a speech on June 8, 2009, the day following the election, the Hezbollah secretary general Hasan Nasrallah announced that he accepted the results “with sportsmanship and a democratic spirit,” but then added that there was a difference between a parliamentary majority and a popular majority. He was alluding to the fact that the cumulative total of votes won by Hezbollah and its allies exceeded by more than 100,000 the votes by the other side (nearly 840,000 votes versus over 690,000).
Nasrallah promised democratic compromise but at the same time signaled obduracy. In addition to the aforementioned attempt to claim two key ministries, Hezbollah and its allies sought to block cabinet action on critical matters, including in particular cooperation with the Netherlands-based Special Tribunal for Lebanon (STL), tasked by the United Nations with bringing to trial the accused perpetrators of the killing of Rafiq al-Hariri and twenty-one others who died with him on February 14, 2005. Hezbollah’s goal was to attain a “blocking third.” (In Lebanon, a coalition government that loses more than one-third of its members is considered to have been toppled.)
The thirty-member cabinet was finally formed in November 2009. Fifteen cabinet seats were accorded to the anti-Hezbollah March 14 coalition, while Hezbollah and its allies held ten. The remaining five seats were occupied by Shiʿi Muslims politically aligned with President Michel Suleiman and in tune with political currents in the Shiʿi community—i.e. largely (but not always) supportive of Hezbollah. Hezbollah thus easily attained its “blocking third” goal. However, it failed to gain the coveted post of interior minister, which went to much-respected Ziyad Baroud, a presidential appointee. The Telecommunications Ministry was awarded to economist Charbel Nahas, a supporter of Hezbollah ally Michel Aoun.
A joint ministerial declaration marking the formation of the new government restated the long-standing official position of Lebanon that emphasizes the right of the army and “the resistance” to defend the country and to recover territory that remains occupied by Israel (including the Shebaa Farms; see pp. 90–92, above). Five cabinet members from the March 14 coalition dissented from the declaration.
A Change of Tone and a Tweaking of Ideology
On November 30, 2009, Hezbollah released an ideological declaration, the first such document published since 1985. To underline the importance of the new manifesto, Hasan Nasrallah read it via a video link to a live audience in al-dahiya.2 In contrast to the 1985 document, the language in the new paper was subdued in style and in substance and emphasized the Lebanese roots and commitments of the organization: “Lebanon is our homeland and the homeland of our fathers, ancestors. It’s also the homeland of our children, grandchildren, and the coming generations. It is the country to which we have given our most precious sacrifices for its sovereignty and pride, dignity and liberation.” This differs from the 1985 Open Letter, in which the Lebanese political system was dismissed with contempt and Lebanese Christians were told, in no uncertain terms, that they must submit to a life under a system of Islamic law. The 2009 statement decried sectarianism (as many Lebanese often do) and also insisted on the importance of a national dialogue, a reform, and improvement of the state. “We want Lebanon for all Lebanese alike, and we want it unified.”
If this manifesto reflected a degree of political maturity and rhetorical restraint, there still remained considerable continuity with the 1985 Open Letter, especially in its strong emphasis on liberating Palestine, its confrontational stance toward the domination of the United States, and its call to combat Israeli expansionism and aggression. In fact, the country most frequently mentioned in the 2009 manifesto is Israel, whereas the Hezbollah patron, Iran, was mentioned only once, as a major Islamic state that provided a model of revolutionary action. If one were to draw only on the evidence of this document, one would never have guessed just how close the relationship between Iran and Hezbollah had become, or how willing Hezbollah was to jeopardize Lebanese security in order to preserve these ties.
The Special Tribunal for Lebanon—and Lebanese-Syrian Relations
The Special Tribunal for Lebanon (STL), authorized by the UN Security Council following the assassination of Rafiq al-Hariri and twenty-one others, began its work in 2009. In the spring of 2009, the German news magazine Der Spiegel predicted that members of Hezbollah would likely be indicted for playing a role in the assassination.3 According to the article in Der Spiegel, the indictment would heavily rely on mobile phone data revealing that members of Hezbollah had coordinated with one another on mobile phones purchased in Tripoli weeks before the attack and that had been used only in conjunction with the assassination (with the exception of a single errant call by a Hezbollahi to his girlfriend, which provided a vital clue). Captain Wissam Eid, a terrorism investigator in the Lebanese Internal Security Force, connected the dots and identified the initial streams of cellular data to establish Hezbollah’s complicity. He did not live to see the end of the investigation; on January 25, 2008, he was assassinated by a car bomb, presumably intended to put an end to his investigative efforts.
During this period, when both Hezbollah and its Syrian ally were deeply preoccupied by the activity of the STL, Lebanese prime minister Saad al-Hariri decided that it was in his country’s best interest to assuage Syrian apprehensions about STL’s investigations while, at the same time, focusing on Hezbollah’s role in his father’s assassination. (Although it is unlikely that the killing would have gone forward without Syrian assent, if not its complicity, indeed, many Lebanese believe to this day that Syrian President Bashar al-Asad had a controlling hand in the killing of Saad’s father.)
In December 2009, Prime Minister al-Hariri made an official visit to Damascus and was hosted by President Bashar al-Asad. Syria had long insisted that its ties with “sisterly” Lebanon were so close that there was no need for usual diplomatic relations, a stance that Lebanese nationalists often took to mean that Syria did not truly acknowledge Lebanon as an independent state. (Only in March 2009 did the “sister states” Syria and Lebanon exchange ambassadors and open embassies in their respective capitals, sixty-five years after each country gained its independence from France.)
Al-Hariri’s agenda included pursuing inquires about the more than six hundred Lebanese who remain missing in Syria after being arrested or seized during the civil war, when Syria was the dominant power in Lebanon, and addressing border disagreements and anomalies. The visit was not particularly successful in substantive terms, although there were cosmetic improvements in bilateral relations. Most important, the meeting signaled that Syria was not being held culpable for the killing of al-Hariri’s father, a striking accomplishment for Bashar al-Asad. The extent of al-Asad’s victory became even more evident in an extraordinary interview given by Saad al-Hariri to the London-based al-Sharq al-Awsat, on September 5, 2010:
I have opened a new page in relations with Syria since the formation of the government. . . One must be realistic in this relationship and build it on solid foundations. One should also assess the past years, so as not to repeat previous mistakes. Hence, we conducted an assessment of errors committed on our behalf with Syria, [and] I felt for the Syrian people, and the relationship between the two countries. We must always look to the interests of both peoples, both countries and their relationship. At a certain stage we made mistakes. We accused Syria of assassinating the martyred premier, and this was a political accusation.
He then promised that the tribunal would only look at evidence, not pursue political agendas as, it might be added, Hezbollah and its allies accused the March 14 movement of doing.
However, these assurances did not mitigate Hezbollah’s concerns. Despite backing down where Syria was concerned, Prime Minister al-Hariri continued to insist on a weapons-free Beirut, where only the army and police would be armed, and he refused to disavow the STL, as Hezbollah had insisted he do. Hezbollah officials, including Hasan Nasrallah in widely publicized speeches, made accusations of Israeli complicity in the 2005 assassination, noting evidence of Israeli surveillance on February 14, 2005, while pointing to about seventy Israeli spies who had been unearthed in Lebanon since 2008, including forty who were in custody by the end of 2010. Al-Hariri and his cabinet allies insisted on sticking with the STL.
During a visit to Washington, D.C. in January 2011, the Lebanese prime minister was hardly out of the White House Oval Office after a meeting with President Barack Obama when he learned that his government had fallen. On January 12, all ten Hezbollah-aligned members resigned and were joined by one of the five cabinet members appointed by President Suleiman.
In the Lebanese parliament, the Druze bloc (representing about 7 percent of the Lebanese population), accompanied by a couple of Armenian deputies, also shifted sides and broke with al-Hariri’s government. Druze leader, Walid Jumblatt, known among his people by the honorific “Walid Baik,” has always enjoyed a well-earned reputation for anticipating changes in political currents and shifting position accordingly.
These developments set the stage in late January 2011 for a Lebanese parliamentary vote for leadership of the new government. The major political beneficiary of the new administration was General Michel Aoun and his Free Patriotic Movement, which secured seven seats for itself in a cabinet completely dominated by Hezbollah-affiliated March 8 elements. Najib Mikati, a wealthy businessman from Tripoli who headed a brief caretaker government following the 2005 assassination of Rafiq al-Hariri, defeated the incumbent Saad al-Hariri for the post of prime minister by a vote of 68–60. Mikati has a reputation for being close to Syria, but, like most Sunni politicians in contemporary Lebanon, he strives to stay on good terms with Saudi Arabia. Mikati is commonly described as an accomplice of Hezbollah, but after assuming the prime ministry, he thwarted Hezbollah on several key issues, most notably the payment of Lebanon’s contribution for the funding of the STL, which the party opposed.
In November 2011, despite intense pressure from Hezbollah to drop support for the tribunal, Mikati arranged for the payment of the full Lebanese contribution of $34 million (€24 million) without seeking government approval. Western powers, including the United States and France, were left little doubt of the dire consequences should Lebanon fail to support the STL. Equally important, non-payment would have thrown Lebanon into chaos. Mikati avoided having to address the issue at the cabinet level by drawing on an account independently controlled by the prime minister’s office. By doing so, he was able to keep the peace with Hezbollah while placating the country’s western allies. In the end, Hezbollah head Nasrallah and his colleagues were not willing to face the consequences of the turmoil that would have ensued if its demands for defunding the STL had been met.
The first half of 2011 saw plenty of turmoil in Lebanon, as the Syrian civil war increasingly spilled over into Lebanon. Evidence of Hezbollah’s growing role in the Syria fighting became irrefutable, as the Hezbollahi casualty numbers mounted. Criticism, not to mention ridicule of Hezbollah’s hypocrisy mounted. On March 19, 2011, when the “Arab Spring” was still in its early days, Nasrallah made a speech applauding the inherent authenticity and justice of the Arab Spring: “These popular revolutions are real. They came from the people and the political parties followed. They express awareness, enthusiasm and willingness to sacrifice. This should not be forgotten by the regimes that are facing these peoples.” Yet, in addressing Syria, he adopted a different perspective by extolling the wise leadership of Bashar al-Asad and commending his reform agenda. Meanwhile, fears of violence grew in Lebanon. Deadly Sunni-ʿAlawi clashes in Tripoli punctuated 2012, and anti-Hezbollah demonstrations led by the Salafi Shaikh Ahmad al-Assir grew increasingly militant. Along the Lebanese-Syrian border, Lebanese Sunnis intent on joining the fighting in Syria were sometimes interdicted by the Lebanese army. In May 2012, Shaikh Ahmad ʿAbd al-Wahid, a leading Lebanese Sunni adversary of the Baʿthist regime in Syria, was killed at an army checkpoint in the ʿAkkar when he and his driver allegedly refused to stop.
The country was already a tangle of exposed nerves when Major General Wissam al-Hassan was assassinated by a planted car bomb in October 2012. The general was close to Saad al-Hariri and headed the intelligence bureau of the Internal Security Forces. Al-Hassan was cooperating closely with the STL, and it was one his officers, the late Captain Wissam Eid, who had discovered the electronic evidence that was integral to the STL’s investigation.
Two months prior to al-Hassan’s death, in August 2012, Michel Samaha, a former information minister who was famously close to the Syrian regime, was arrested after being caught red-handed on surveillance video and audio recordings accepting a $170,000 payment to direct bombings against opponents of Syria in Lebanon’s northern ʿAkkar province. The physical evidence included twenty-four explosive devices found in the trunk of his car. The head of Lebanon’s Internal Security Forces (ISF), Major General Ashraf Rifi, describes the case as “airtight.” There has been much speculation about the reasons for al-Hassan’s assassination, including the possibility that it was in retaliation for Samaha’s arrest. The jailed minister faces a possible death sentence if convicted. His trial was scheduled to resume in late 2013, but did not. Despite the “airtight” evidence, the outcome of the trial is hardly assured. Bashar al-Asad’s fortunes and the outcome of the civil war in Syria are widely expected to influence Samaha’s fate.
Mikati’s tenure as prime minister continued to be driven by the “security portfolio.” In March 2013, he pushed for the extension in office of ISF head Ashraf Rifi, despite Rifi’s having reached the mandatory retirement age of fifty-nine. Among Lebanon’s three major security institutions—the army, General Security (al-amn al-ʿamm), and the ISF (quwa al-amn al-dakhali)—the ISF has been most resistant to the influence of March 8 elements, including Hezbollah. Mikati also sought to extend his term, in conjunction with an extension of the term in office for General Jean Kahwaji, the commander of the Lebanese armed forces. He failed for two reasons: first, and most obviously, Hezbollah and its allies wished to put in place an ally in the ISF; second, Michel Aoun was not anxious to the see the army chief’s term extended because he was pushing for his own candidate, Brigadier General Shamel Roukoz, to be given the job. Roukoz just happens to be Aoun’s son-in-law, as well as the commander of the esteemed Commando Regiment (fawj al-mughawir).4 In Lebanon, the sweetest plums are shared with family.
As a result, Prime Minister Mikati resigned in March 2013, but continued to serve as a caretaker for months while his successor attempted to assemble a government. His designated successor, Tamam Salam, is a familiar Beirut figure, and his father Saeb Salam frequently served as prime minister in Lebanon’s pre–civil war years. Tamam Salam has been sometimes described as aligned with March 14, but that is arguable. He has walked a careful path sustaining cordial relations with Syria and respectful ties to Saudi Arabia, and he is the consummate diplomat who calibrates his political stances with the deftness of a tightrope walker. He was approved nearly unanimously by the parliament (124–4) yet by January 2014 his government was still in formation.
With only a caretaker government in place in July 2013, and little prospect for agreement on a new military commander, the term in office of General Kahwaji was extended for two years by Defense Minister Fayez Ghosn, an assertion of dubious authority that was promptly challenged by Michel Aoun.
Parliamentary elections should have been held in June 2013, but were rescheduled for November 2014. Wrangling over the electoral law, particularly the drawing of electoral districts, caused the delay. This is a common occurrence and one that typically is driven by gerrymandering that would be familiar to any student of U.S. politics. Hezbollah, and the Shiʿi community in general, tend to prefer a proportional representation formula for elections, which would benefit the large Shiʿi community. Many non-Shiʿi politicians prefer smaller districts and majoritarian criteria. As a compromise, the 2014 elections are certain to be organized with a mixed system of proportional and majoritarian criteria and electoral districts of widely variant sizes.
Since the elections are scheduled well after the May 2014 expiration of the president’s six-year term, it is likely that Michel Suleiman’s term of office will be extended. According to the Lebanese Constitution the president is limited to a single six-year term, but the Chamber of Deputies nevertheless extended the incumbencies of both the previous two presidents (Elias Hrawi and Emile Lahoud) for three years, and the same “exception” may occur in the case of Michel Suleiman. President Suleiman is often viewed by Hezbollah’s adversaries in Lebanon as a steady partner of the Shiʿi group, but he has become increasingly critical of Hezbollah’s heavy involvement in the Syrian fighting, which bolsters the argument for his extension in office among the March 14 supporters.
Sunni-Shiʿi Tensions
The respect Hezbollah gained in the Arab world for its ability to go toe-to-toe with Israel in 2006 has since been supplanted by animosity and suspicion. Except within Shiʿi communities, the luster of Secretary General Hasan Nasrallah’s reputation has been badly tarnished.
The shift reflects transnational factors, including waves of populism and rising sectarianism unleashed by the Arab awakenings that began in late 2010, which played out against a decade of geopolitical jousting between leading Arab states and Iran. The 2003 invasion of Iraq, which hugely benefited Iran and which made possible the rise to power of the Iraqi Shiʿi majority, exacerbated sectarian tensions and prompted an us-versus-them mentality in a variety of predominantly Sunni Arab states, including Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and the smaller Gulf states. Local detail or nuance has been ignored in favor of a simple-minded focus on an alleged Shiʿi threat said to be orchestrated by Iran. This is certainly true in Lebanon, where the Sunni community sees Hezbollah as an extension of Iran’s quest for hegemony.
Polling in the region conducted in late 2012 confirms both a polarization between Arab Sunnis and Shiʿa and a plummeting of support for Iran among Sunni Arabs.5 Whereas Iran enjoyed favorability ratings of over 70 percent in Jordan and Morocco and over 90 percent in Egypt in 2006, six years later the numbers had fallen to between 20 and 30 percent. When former Iranian President Ahmedinejad visited Cairo in February 2013, shoes were thrown at him, an indignity previously reserved for U.S. President George W. Bush, who had dodged shoe leather five years earlier in Baghdad. The Cairo shoe-throwing protester was angered by Iran’s support for the Baʿathist regime in Damascus.
The apparently fraudulent Iranian elections in 2009 exposed Iran to close scrutiny when it clamped down harshly on demonstrators protesting the reelection of President Ahmedinejad. This played poorly in Arab media across the region. More recently, Iran’s continuing support for the Baʿathist regime in Syria, a longtime ally, has been widely disparaged in Sunni Arab circles. Iran’s unfettered flights through Iraqi airspace to deliver armaments to Syria have only served to validate suspicions about the Shiʿi-dominated government in Baghdad and its friendly relations with Iran.
Saudi Arabia has contributed to the deepening sectarian divide by underwriting anti-Shiʿi diatribes in the many print and electronic media outlets that it controls or influences. Riyadh’s formula has been to denounce groups that it opposes—especially Hezbollah and other Shiʿi groups or communities, such as Yemen’s Houthi movement and Bahrain’s Shiʿi majority—as agents of Iranian influence.
Even where the evidence for Iranian meddling is flimsy, notably in Bahrain, Saudi officials are undeterred. Charges from the Bahraini and Saudi governments that Iran was behind the demonstrations that began in 2011, were countered by U.S. officials who pointedly noted that the charges were not supported by evidence. (In fact the majority Shiʿi population in Bahrain has long been moderate, and surprisingly so given the systematic discrimination that routinely confronts Bahraini Shiʿa. The risk is that the Bahraini Shiʿa will be radicalized, and that charges of foreign meddling by Iran will prove to be self-fulfilling.)
Worsening Relations with Egypt
As noted above, Hezbollah gained many admirers across the Arab world following its 2006 war with Israel, and Egypt was no exception. Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood applauded the Shiʿi group’s success, as did many secular professionals. These warm feelings chilled by early 2009. When Israel launched a punitive campaign against the Gaza-based Palestinian Islamist group Hamas in December 2008 and January 2009, Hasan Nasrallah called on the Egyptian people to “take to the streets in the millions.” The Egyptian government of the day, not unhappy to see Hamas pummeled, was livid. The Mubarak regime and many Egyptian media commentators close to the regime condemned Hezbollah for trying to foment an uprising. Foreign Minister Ahmad Abu-al-Ghayt depicted Hezbollah as a puppet of Iran. He declared: “Iran and its followers in this region want to turn Egypt into the maid of honor or the page for the crowned Iranian queen when she enters the Middle East. Egypt can never be the maid of honor for anyone because it itself is the crowned lady in this region.” (al-sharq al-awsat, April 14, 2009.)
These remarks were made in April 2009, when Egyptian authorities announced the arrest of twenty-five people, including Muhammad Mansour (also known as Sami Shehab), whom Hasan Nasrallah acknowledged as a member of Hezbollah. Nasrallah revealed that he had dispatched him to Egypt to facilitate the smuggling of weapons to Hamas in Gaza. In 2010, Egypt sentenced Mansour and twenty-one others, including at least one other Hezbollah member (Hassan al-Manakhly), to prison for espionage and illegal possession of weapons. Mansour escaped captivity in 2011 in the chaos of Egypt’s “January 25 Revolution” and resurfaced in Lebanon in February 2011.
Widening Rifts within Lebanon
Within Lebanon itself, Sunni-Shiʿi mistrust has intensified for several reasons. Leading the list is the alleged complicity of Hezbollah in the assassination of former prime minister Rafiq al-Hariri. As noted above, accusations of Hezbollah’s complicity in the killing began in 2009 with the expose in the German newsweekly Der Spiegel. The Special Tribunal for Lebanon formally indicted four Hezbollah members for their role in the assassination in July 2012. The accused remain at large to this day, and Hezbollah has vowed that the STL will never be allowed to apprehend them.6 While Hezbollah’s campaign to discredit the STL still resonates with its core supporters, the party’s opponents see it as proof of the organization’s culpability—even as they dread the disorder that a trial and guilty verdict would bring. The four accused Hezbollahis will be tried in absentia, with the trial scheduled to convene in early 2014. In October 2013, a fifth man linked to Hezbollah was named by the STL as a suspect.
Recent memories of the 2006 war with Israel also remain a source of mutual embitterment. Hezbollah’s opponents continue to hold it responsible for provoking the war and for the attendant destruction. They fear that Hezbollah will ignite new military conflicts in the South in retaliation for a possible U.S. and/or Israeli attack on Iranian nuclear facilities, or simply in order to reinforce its reputation as the symbol of “resistance” in the region. For Hezbollah’s part, its leaders have long suspected that during the 2006 conflict its Lebanese rivals surreptitiously encouraged Israel in its campaign to destroy Hezbollah’s military capacity. Classified U.S. diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks in 2011 lend veracity to the accusation. One such cable recounted a wartime meeting between U.S. ambassador Jeffrey Feltman, UN envoy Terje Larsen, and several Lebanese political leaders. Among the Lebanese present was the mercurial Walid Jumblatt, the Druze leader and then an ally of the anti-Hezbollah March 14 coalition. The cable paraphrases Jumblatt: “Although March 14 must call for a cease-fire in public, it is hoping that Israel continues its military operations until it destroys Hezbollah’s military capabilities.”7 These irrefutable WikiLeaks transcripts of anti-Hezbollah comments in discussions between western diplomats and leading political figures, including then prime minister Fouad Siniora, inflamed Lebanon’s Shiʿa community.
Hezbollah’s public image within Lebanon has also taken a beating of late from self-inflicted wounds. Unfortunately for a party that has cultivated a reputation of being untainted by corruption, a 2009 financial scandal struck at the core of the organization and affected a number of Shiʿi investors, particularly prosperous emigrants who retain strong ties to southern Lebanon. Salah Izz al-Din, a “son of the South” with close ties to the party, was charged with fraud for bilking investors, including close advisors to Nasrallah, out of as much as a billion dollars. Described as a “Lebanese Bernie Madoff,” he benefited from close ties to influential figures and the glow of legitimacy gained by generous donations to local institutions. His pyramid scheme offered outsize returns from investments in minerals and other natural resources. The scandal was a source of enormous embarrassment to the party. While there have been other charges of corruption against Hezbollah, this case unleashed unprecedented anger and public debate.
There is little question that Hezbollah, along with its former rival and present ally Amal, still dominates the politics of the Lebanese Shiʿi community. At the popular level, however, support is tenuous. Resentment of Iran’s often heavy hand in Lebanon is strongly felt within Amal, and across the Shiʿi community fears of broadened conflict, stemming either from Syria or from a new war with Israel, are common. Pious Shiʿi youths who respect the sacrifices of their parents to liberate Lebanon from occupation and to end the deprivation and marginality of the Shiʿa, are not necessarily ready to emulate them.8 This waning of zeal is a matter of concern for Hezbollah’s leaders.
In some regions, especially in the Beqaa valley in the vicinity of Baalbek and Hirmil, tribes (‘ashira, plural: ‘asha’ir) remain strong. Despite their support for Hezbollah, the tribes remain fiercely autonomous from both the party and the Lebanese government. Tribes are large extended families, often organized through government-chartered family associations, and they must be treated with deference. This was illustrated in August 2013 when the al-Miqdad clan, with roots in Baalbek but also a strong presence in the dahiya, kidnapped more than forty people, including members of the Free Syrian Army, in retaliation for the capture of a Miqdad in Syria. The captives were later freed by the Lebanese army (reportedly with help from Hezbollah), but the episode illustrates the limits of Hezbollah’s influence and control, especially at a time when challenges are coming from many different directions.9
A number of Hezbollah’s critics have become increasingly vocal, particularly as the party became an active combatant in Syria. Former secretary general Subhi Tufayli often accuses Hezbollah of being an instrument of Iranian ambition and argues that Hezbollahis who die in Syria are not martyrs but victims of a party that is supporting the wrong side in Syria. Tufayli retains a respectable following in the northern Beqaa valley, which he has long accused both the government and Hezbollah of neglecting. Similarly critical are Shaykhs Hani Fahs and Ali al-Amin; Ahmad al-Asʿad, scion of a famous zaʿim; and Ibrahim Shams al-Din, son of the late Ayatollah Muhammad Mahdi Shams al-Din. The legacy of Shams al-Din is important, since the late ayatollah was known for his advocacy of inter-sectarian tolerance and dialogue, as well as for his commitment to reform and integration within the context of shariʿa. He was a formidable critic of Iran’s agenda in Lebanon and was often a thorn in the side of Hezbollah.
Another ayatollah who inspired enormous respect in Arab Shiʿi communities, Muhammad Hussein Fadlallah, died in July 2010. Unlike Hezbollah, he rejected the Iranian model of a supreme clerical authority (wilayat al-faqih), and he offered a rational, modern, and often scientific approach to piety that appealed to his following, especially younger, educated Shiʿa in Lebanon and well beyond. The esteem in which Fadlallah’s memory is held remains worrisome to Hezbollah’s leadership precisely because he directly challenged the centrality of Iran to contemporary Shiʿism.
Since the death of Ayatollah Fadlallah, his son, Sayyid ʿAli Fadlallah, has assumed leadership of the ayatollah’s widespread institutional legacy: an array of schools, charities, and service agencies that rival the Hezbollah-dominated infrastructure. Based in Beirut, Sayyid ʿAli now occupies his late father’s offices in al-dahiya. Like his late father, he has emphasized diversity within Shiʿism, rejected the idea that Iran should play a privileged leadership role for the Shiʿa, and has spoken out against the brutal al-Asad regime in Damascus.
Syrian Entanglement
On June 11, 2012, the National Committee of Dialogue, under the chairmanship of President Suleiman, issued the Baabda Declaration, which was an attempt to revive the flagging dialogue of rivals that began in March 2006. The declaration promotes Lebanese neutrality in regional conflicts, supports UN Security Council resolutions calling for the disarming of militias, and, with specific reference to Syria, states that Lebanon “cannot be used as a base, corridor or starting point to smuggle weapons and combatants.” This position is often referred to as a policy of “disassociation” from the Syrian civil war.
But Lebanon is deeply entangled with Syria. The sectarian parameters of the civil war in Syria have provided a fertile space for confessional recruitment, for instance in the northern and predominantly Sunni city of Tripoli, where the Free Syrian Army opposing Bashar al-Asad has found a strong base of support. Tripoli has been the site of many deadly clashes between the resident ʿAlawi community (which aligns with brethren in Syria in support of the ʿAlawi-dominated regime) and the adjacent Sunni urban quarter. The city has become the epicenter for militant Salafism, and Hezbollah’s involvement in northern Lebanon has spurred Sunni recruitment.
The easily infiltrated northern and northeastern border that Lebanon shares with Syria has been crossed by hundreds of thousands of refugees, and by early 2014 the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) placed the total number in Lebanon at more than one million. The UNHCR predicts that the refugee population in Lebanon is likely to reach 1,500,000 by the end of 2014, or nearly 40 percent of the four million Lebanese citizens living in the country. Many of the Syrians who have fled to Lebanon have found sanctuary with extended family members or have depended on the generosity of Lebanese villagers. The Lebanese government has opposed the establishment of formal refugee camps that would likely become autonomous bases for the Syrian opposition forces or permanent entities, as happened in the case of Palestinian refugee camps. Allies of the Syrian regime, notably Hezbollah, have deployed forces in the north to attempt to interdict the flow of arms and fighters across the border with limited success.
The stakes for Hezbollah in Syria are not hard to fathom. Syria has offered the resistance strategic depth and a conduit for arms shipments. Particularly since the elevation of Bashar al-Asad to the Syrian presidency in 2000, a close working relationship developed between Nasrallah and the president. Moreover, Hezbollah was enormously popular in Syria for its role in ending the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon in 2000 and for its conduct of the 2006 war. The days of reverence for Hezbollah have ended, however, as Hezbollah has become progressively entangled in the civil war.
The first significant deployment of Hezbollah fighters to Syria, in the summer of 2012, was south of Damascus to protect a revered religious site: the mosque and mausoleum of Sayyida Sitt Zainab, the revered daughter of Imam ʿAli and sister of Imam Hussein (see p. 57). Since the 1970s the area has enjoyed growing pious tourism by Shiʿa. Sitt Zainab, as the area is called, is the site of religious schools (hawzas) established by Hasan al-Shirazi, Muhammad Hussein Fadlallah, ʿAli Khamenei and others, as well as a focal point for Iraqi Shiʿi refugees fleeing the rampages of violence that followed the American invasion of Iraq in 2003. Not unexpectedly, hundreds of Shiʿi volunteers converged in 2011 on Sitt Zainab to aid in its defense, many of them comprising the multi-national al-Abbas Brigade. Iran’s Revolutionary Guard has reportedly played a role in arming the al-ʿAbbas force, which contains recruits from Lebanon, Iran, Iraq, the small Syrian Shiʿi community, and Afghanistan. A Hezbollah contingent has been active in Sitt Zainab for years, and it was expanded after a June 2012 car bombing damaged the shrine.
After the June 2012 bombing, Hezbollahi militiamen have deployed widely in Syria, often in coordination with the Iranian Quds Force. Initially, Hezbollah’s involvement was limited to the offering of technical advice and training. By the autumn of 2012, Hezbollahi armed formations were operating in Syria, especially along the border, and in twenty-three villages inhabited by Lebanese Shiʿa, including Lebanese citizens whose villages are actually within Syria or difficult to reach except from the Syrian side of the international boundary. Party media began to memorialize Syrian-based fighters who were “fulfilling jihadist duties.” In late 2012 and early 2013, the militia extended its campaigns to Sunni border villages in Lebanon and Syria, and clashes and causalities increased in number, including veteran militia leaders such as ʿAli Hussein Nassif, who was killed in October 2012. Reliable Hezbollah casualty figures are not available, but credible estimates point to nearly two hundred dead Hezbollahis by late 2013, a sizable number considering that many of the deaths have been among its experienced frontline fighters. The full-time Hezbollah force, which is strengthened significantly by an extensive network of reserve fighters, numbers about two thousand.
The watershed moment came in April 2013 when Hezbollah graduated from a shadow participant on the geographic margins to a major combatant in the Syrian civil war. Hezbollah fighters were in the vanguard that month as Syrian government forces fought to retake al-Qusayr, a strategic border town that commands access to the contested city of Hims, which is twenty miles to the northeast and a short drive from the Lebanese city of Hirmil, a Hezbollah stronghold. Al-Qusayr had been controlled by the Free Syrian Army (FSA) since April 2011, and Syrian army forces put the city under siege in November 2011 but were unable to recapture it until May 2013. The Hezbollah offensive decimated al-Qusayr, which was an enormous blow for the FSA. Hezbollah’s role was angrily condemned in Europe, the United States, and in much of the Middle East, and certainly in many Lebanese circles.
On May 25, 2013, “Resistance and Liberation Day”—the thirteenth anniversary of the liberation of south Lebanon from occupation—Nasrallah made a direct reference to Hezbollah’s intervention, emphasizing the critical importance of Syria to Lebanon and especially to Hezbollah. It would be “stupid,” he said, given the potential threats from Syria for Hezbollah, to remain on the sidelines. In this speech Nasrallah also made numerous references to the threat posed by “takfiri” elements that are the dominant forces in the Syrian opposition. The term “takfiri” is often used to refer to Sunni Salafists who espouse an essentialist conception of Islam and typically view the Shiʿa as polytheists and apostates who deserve to be slaughtered. A cynic might gloss Nasrallah’s focus on takfiris as a none too subtle appeal to Western policymakers, but it is fair to note that the prospect of living cheek by jowl with a larger neighbor dominated by takfiri militants would inspire unease in many places, not just Hezbollah’s command center.
Incredibly, Nasrallah suggested to his fellow Lebanese that life should go on normally in Lebanon and that whatever violence occurs in Syria should stay in Syria (where over 100,000 people had died in the civil war as of August 2013). He argued:
You are fighting in Syria and we are fighting in Syria. Let us fight there. Do you want frankness more than this? Let us fight there. Let us put Lebanon aside. Why should we fight in Lebanon? There are different viewpoints, different visions, and different diagnosis of duty. That is OK; but let us keep Lebanon away from the fighting, conflict, and bloody confrontations.
One of the fiercest and perhaps the most consequential regional response to Hezbollah’s high-profile intervention came from Shaikh Yusif al-Qaradawi, the influential Doha-based cleric who reaches millions of Arab Muslims via al-Jazeera, the satellite TV station. On May 31, 2013, al-Qaradawi, who had previously defended Hezbollah when it was under fire from Saudi Arabia, now confessed that he had been wrong: “It seems that the clerics of Saudi Arabia were more mature than me.” Al-Qaradawi now declared that “every Muslim trained to fight and capable of doing that [must] make himself available” to support the Syrian rebels. Referring to Iran and to the Hizb al-Shaytan (the party of the devil), he argued that their intention was to massacre Muslims, and every able Muslim has a personal duty (fard ʿayn) to join the fight. Al-Qaradawi’s call to action will not only bolster efforts to fight Hezbollah, but also further undermine the more secular wing of the Syrian opposition. Given al-Qaradawi’s standing, it is a major development.
In June 2013, followers of Shaikh Ahmad al-Assir, a longtime critic of Hezbollah, clashed with Hezbollah supporters near the Abra district in Saida, which is less than 30 miles south of Beirut. The clashes included an ultimatum that supporters of Hezbollah vacate their apartments. The army attempted to quell the fighting but suffered sixteen deaths at the hands of the shaikh’s followers, which prompted intervention by army commandos and elements linked with Hezbollah. The army eventually established control, but the shaikh and many of his followers escaped. A reliable Lebanese observer and lifetime resident of Saida noted that he and others were happy to see the firebrand cleric vanquished, but he also complained about the behavior of the Hezbollah forces, including the looting of valuables from the apartments of innocent bystanders to the clashes. This is a striking detail because Hezbollah has taken great pains to preserve the image of their forces as being highly disciplined and not corruptible. In reaction to the incident, several Salafist shaikhs in Tripoli called for a jihad against Hezbollah and the Lebanese army, an indication that the subversion of public order within Lebanon will continue.
The blowback from Syria also reached the heart of Hezbollah’s support, namely, the southern Beirut neighborhoods of al-dahiya, in the form of rocket fire in May 2013. Car bombs are hardly a novelty in Lebanon, and these opprobrious devices for killing, maiming, and terrorizing civilians have been a staple in the arsenals of combatants in Syria and Iraq. Unfortunately, the frequency and lethality of car bombings in Lebanon is rising. On the first day of Ramadan in July 2013, a car bomb exploded in Bir al-ʿAbd adjacent to a supermarket, wounding fifty-three people. The following month a deadlier car bomb nearby killed twenty-seven people. Hezbollah’s deputy secretary general Naʿim Qassem insinuated that Israel was responsible for the blasts, but within Lebanon the perpetrators were widely understood to be elements within the Syrian opposition who were, presumably, making good on their promise to bring the war to Hezbollah in Lebanon. Although the Free Syrian Army (FSA) condemned the July bombing, a component of the FSA claimed credit for it within days and promised more to come. In Syria, elements of the FSA handed out candies to celebrate the attacks, which underlined the futility of Nasrallah’s wishful suggestion to keep the Syrian fighting away from Lebanon.
In response to these attacks, Nasrallah lashed out by promising payback: “our hands will reach you.” He suggested that Hezbollah would vastly expand its forces in Syria. Later in August 2013, two car bombs detonated adjacent to mosques in predominantly Sunni Tripoli as Friday prayers were underway. Nearly fifty people were killed. It was no accident that the targeted mosques were associated with shaikhs known to be hostile to Hezbollah. One of them, Shaikh Salem al-Rafiʿi, an ally of Ahmad al-Assir, earlier had issued a fatwa in which he called on Muslims to join the battle in Syria and against Hezbollah. The Unification (al-tawhid) Movement, which has long enjoyed good relations with Iran, and in recent years with Syria, carried out the bombing. Lebanese police arrested two Lebanese clerics affiliated with al-tawhid in connection with the Tripoli bombings, one of whom, Ahmad al-Gharib, reportedly confessed to a role and implicated Syrian security agents.
In early December 2013, Hassan al-Laqis, an important Hezbollah official who played a key role in the acquisition of arms and technology, was assassinated as he arrived home in Beirut suburb of Hadath. A Baalbek-based Sunni group claimed that the killing was in revenge for Hezbollah’s intervention in Syria, but, given the assassins’ tradecraft, Israel’s involvement was strongly suspected. Al-Laqis was targeted by Israel in 2006, but his son was killed instead. As 2013 was drawing to a close and Beirut’s renewed Central District was festooned with Christmas decorations, a second prominent figure was murdered right at the historic epicenter of Lebanon. Former finance minister and former ambassador to the United States Muhammad B. Shatah, along with seven other victims, died when a car bomb was driven into his convoy. Shatah, a prospective prime minister, was an articulate critic of the Syrian regime and a leading opponent of Hezbollah. Violence continued less than a week later, on January 2, 2014, when a car bomb killed five people in Hezbollah’s stronghold in al-dahiya. Credit was claimed by ISIS (the Islamic State Iraq and Syria, the powerful al-Qaeda-linked group), which promised more of the same.
Sadly, violent reverberations from the civil war next door will continue. Nothwithstanding the expressed preference of many Lebanese, including Hezbollah, for a negotiated settlement in Syria, the country is likely to be unsettled for years to come with a government in Damascus, whether Baʿthist or not, unable to control all of its territory. Iran and Hezbollah will be able to find local allies in an environment of fractious political competition among warlords and emerging political elites. Ideological difference, power struggles, and sectarian division plague the Syrian opposition. Many years ago, the late Ghassan Tueni, a Lebanese public intellectual, published a widely read account of the Lebanese civil war titled, Une guerre pour les autres (The War of Others). Although many Lebanese died savagely at the hands of other Lebanese, Tueni argued that outside powers propelled the war by sponsoring rival militias, exploiting venal and corrupt power brokers, and using Lebanon as battlefield for their proxy wars and geopolitical jousting. Unfortunately, Syria seems well on its way to experiencing the agonies of its own bitter civil war.
The Lebanon-Israel Front
Always looming, in addition to the dangers associated with implication in Syria’s civil conflict, is the prospect of another round of war with Israel. Since 2006, the southern border between Lebanon and Israel has remained quiet, but both Hezbollah and its Israeli adversary continue to prepare for a new engagement, which both sides vow will be more extensive, deadly, and decisive than the last. Hezbollah’s bête noire insists that it remains arm’s length from the fighting in Syria. However, despite official silence, there is little doubt that the Israeli armed forces have launched significant air or missile strikes on five occasions in 2013 (January 29, April 27, May 4, July 5, and October 30), and intend to do the same in the future with a view to further degrading the ability of Syria to improve its air defenses and to transfer arms to Hezbollah. Arguably, barring a war on Iran by Israel or the United States, the tacit choreography of move and countermove in southern Lebanon would seem less likely to turn to violence than a further unraveling of the security environment in Syria, which might find Israel and Hezbollah going at one another.
The Economic Picture
Lebanon always seems to be in the permanent grip of crisis, and yet the Lebanese reveal a capacity to endure, and even prosper, during some of the darkest moments. But prosperity eludes many Lebanese today, particularly younger adults. Youth unemployment is estimated at 24 percent and shows little sign of improving. Expatriate Lebanese regularly return large sums of hard currency to their native villages, towns, and cities where nominal state services are typically far from adequate, but these monies only supplement rather than replace salaries.
Influxes of funds from the Gulf, particularly from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, have helped to maintain stability in the well-managed banking sector. In fact, the official Central Bank enjoys statutory autonomy from the endemically corrupt and often dysfunctional political system. Even so, the banking sector suffers when Lebanon is on the brink of conflict, if not in the grip of widespread violence. In 2013, several of the prosperous Gulf Arab states announced that Lebanon was unsafe and urged their citizens to stay away.
As the number of guests dwindles, some hotels have been forced to shut their doors. Arabs, who account for the bulk of visitors, are visiting less frequently, as governments in the Gulf have warned their citizens away following a spate of sectarian kidnappings. Americans, Asians, and Europeans are steering clear too. Even the Lebanese diaspora, who outnumber those at home and generally visit regularly, returned in smaller numbers in 2012.
In good years, affluent tourists flood into Lebanon, buttress the economy, fill hotels and restaurants to capacity in summer months, and leave large deposits in Beirut’s banks. Tourism normally accounts for as much as 22 percent of national income, and the arrival rate of tourists is a barometer of the country’s political stability and economic health. In times of conflict or disorder, however, these same well-heeled guests—and their cash—leave quickly. It comes as no surprise that foreign direct investment in Lebanon has almost disappeared since 2011. Among the other Arab states, only Libya is the recipient of less foreign investment. The troubled economy is only made worse by the humanitarian burden confronting Lebanon as a result of the massive influx of refugees.
International Ostracism of Hezbollah
After years of resisting U.S. and Israeli efforts to stigmatize Hezbollah as a terrorist group, the European Union (EU) compromised in July 2013 by declaring Hezbollah’s “military wing” to be a terrorist organization. A majority of EU members have long held that Hezbollah is a legitimate political party in Lebanon, but several events have contributed to a rethinking of that presumption. In July 2012, a suicide bomber attacked a bus carrying Israeli tourists in Burgas, Bulgaria, resulting in the deaths of five Israeli passengers and the Bulgarian bus driver. The Bulgarian government linked two conspirators with dual citizenship (Australian-Lebanese and Canadian-Lebanese) to Hezbollah, and gathered (or was provided with) additional evidence implicating Hezbollah in the attack. Other anti-Israel plots linked to Hezbollah (presumably, in retaliation for the Israeli assassination of Imad Mughniyya in 2008) have been thwarted or discovered in India, Thailand, Azerbaijan, and Africa. The Burgas attack was, however, the first of its kind on European soil. Just a few months before the EU designation, in March 2013, a Lebanese man was convicted in Cyprus of conducting surveillance of Israeli flights at Larnaca Airport. Further impetus for the EU’s action was provided by Hezbollah’s decisive armed intervention in al-Qusayr in April 2013.
As a practical matter, it is not at all clear how the EU will implement its decision. Hezbollah does not reveal the identities of militia cadre and its military wing depends heavily on a system of volunteer reservists who move fluidly between military and civilian life. The influential leader of Hezbollah’s parliamentary delegation, Muhammad Raʿad, cynically noted, “The Hezbollah military wing is a lie invented by the Europeans because they feel the need to communicate with us and they want to make a delusional separation between the so-called military and political wings.”10 In anticipation of the EU decision, Hasan Nasrallah dismissively suggested that the EU dip the paper in water and drink the ink.11
Nasrallah was being cavalier however. The EU designation further erodes Hezbollah’s credibility in the Arab world and encourages its regional adversaries, particularly the Arab Gulf states, to continue steps to isolate and weaken the organization. Following the al-Qusayr intervention of 2013, the six Arab states comprising the Gulf Cooperation Council declared an economic and political boycott of Hezbollah, and individual members, especially the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia, expelled scores of alleged supporters of Hezbollah.
With Iran’s economy and currency in decline under the pressure from U.S.- and UN-mandated economic sanctions, the ability of the Islamic Republic to sustain its large subsidies to Hezbollah and the range of institutions that it superintends is in question. Steps such as those taken by the EU and the GCC, as well as sanctions imposed by the U.S. Department of Treasury on Hezbollah financiers and officials, threaten to further reduce the flow of funds to Hezbollah at a time when the organization is stretched thin.
The victory of Hasan Rouhani in the Iranian presidential elections of June 2013 introduces another variable into the discussion. President Rouhani’s efforts to engage the United States and its allies diplomatically, with the apparent blessing of Iran’s Supreme Leader ʿAli Khamenei, suggest that productive negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program may be feasible. If progress is made to guarantee that Iran will not seek to develop a nuclear weapons arsenal, there may be beneficial spillovers to international efforts to end the bloodshed in Syria and prevent the country from collapsing into chaos. At earlier junctures in Iran’s national politics, for instance in the late 1980s, the Islamic Republic recalibrated its interests in Lebanon, including its heavy investment in Hezbollah. Were that to happen again, Hezbollah might have to rethink its present course of heavy engagement in Syria.
As we have seen in this Afterword, Hezbollah’s response to its adversaries has been to double-down. Nasrallah threatens to deploy more fighters in Syria in response to armed attacks within Lebanon. However, there are very real practical limits to the party’s ability to maintain its “deterrence” of Israel—the core rationale for its armaments and military formations—and its capacity for upping the ante in Syria. The organization’s ability to sustain heightened levels of mobilization, whether in terms of manpower, public support, or matériel resources, will be severely tested. In the context of Lebanese politics, external pressure insures that Hezbollah will remain keen on maintaining a “blocking third” of cabinet seats. The continuing support of avowed and tacit allies will be crucial, of course, and there is shakiness to Hezbollah’s partnership with General Michel Aoun and his Free Patriotic Movement. This was evidenced in the summer of 2013 by the ever-ambitious Aoun’s overtures to Saudi Arabia and his poisonous relationship with Speaker Nabih Berri.
Equally important, President Suleiman’s periodic calls for Hezbollah’s disengagement from Syria grew increasingly pointed when he suggested a reexamination of national security policy since, in his view, the primary mission of the Resistance is to defend Lebanon from Israel, not to fight in Syria.12
Hezbollah’s ability to retain broad support within Lebanon and to remain a major player in Lebanese politics may become increasingly difficult because of its insistence on becoming a major combatant in Syria.
And yet, Hezbollah remains, by far, Lebanon’s best-organized political party and most potent military force. Reviled by its many adversaries, both inside and outside Lebanon, it retains impressive support at home, especially within the Shiʿi community. Apart from its most diehard partisans, however, that support for the organization is far from unconditional. Hezbollah supporters assume that the organization will prevail over its enemies because of the wisdom of its leadership, the prowess of its militia, and the logic of its ethos of resistance. If instead these elements become an engine of calamity, all bets are off.
Sources Cited
Deeb, Lara, and Mona Harb. 2013. Leisurely Islam: Negotiating Geography and Morality in Shi’ite South Beirut. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Deeb, Lara, and Mona Harb. 2012. “Fissures in Hizballah’s Edifice of Control.” Middle East Report, October 30. http://www.merip.org/mero/mero103012.
Follath, Eric. 2009. “New Evidence Points to Hezbollah in Hariri Murder.” Der Spiegel, May 23.
Tueni, Ghassan. 1985. Une Guerre pour les autres. Paris: Jean-Claude Lattes.
Zogby, Zogby. 2013. Looking at Iran. Washington, D.C.: Zogby Research Services.
1 The March 14 alliance took its name from the date in 2005, one month after the assassination of Rafiq al-Hariri, when a coalition of political groups and individuals mounted a massive demonstration in Beirut to mark the assassination, demanded that the assassins be brought to justice, and called for an end to Syrian domination of Lebanon. The leading elements in the alliance included Saad al-Hariri’s Future Movement and a variety of Christian groups, of which the largest was Michel Aoun’s Free Patriotic Movement. Aoun later broke with the March 14 alliance and aligned with Hezbollah and the March 8 coalition. The March 8 coalition, for its part, takes its name from a very large and rival demonstration in 2005 composed of members of pro-Syrian groups who assembled to thank Syria for its role in Lebanon. In addition to Hezbollah and Amal, several predominantly Christian parties participated (see pp. 127–29 for more details).
2 In Arabic, the document was called a wathiqa siyasiyya (political paper), but Hezbollah officials have a styled it a “manifesto.” An English translation may be found at http://sns.sy/sns/?path=news/read/7187.
3 Eric Follath, “New Evidence Points to Hezbollah in Hariri Murder,” Der Spiegel, May 23, 2009, http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/break-through-in-tribunal-investigation-new-evidence-points-to-hezbollah-in-hariri-murder-a-626412.html.
4 The Commando Brigade was previously commanded by François al-Hajj, who was also close to Aoun and was assassinated in 2007 (see p. 167).
5 John Zogby, Looking at Iran. (Washington, D.C., Zogby Research Services, 2013), and for a summary of the survey see http://www.aaiusa.org/page/-/Polls/LookingatIran2013.pdf.
6 The accused include Mustafa Amin Badr al-Din, brother-in-law of the late Imad Mughniyah. Badr al-Din is thought to have replaced Mughniyah as the head of the External Operations Branch of Hezbollah, which is believed to have been responsible for a variety of terrorist attacks. The STL indictment may be downloaded at: http://www.stl-tsl.org/en/the-cases/stl-11–01/main/filings/indictments/f0007.
7 The meeting took place on July 16, 2006. See http://wikileaks.org/cable/2006/07/06BEIRUT2403.html.
8 See the excellent ethnography by Lara Deeb and Mona Harb, Leisurely Islam: Negotiating Geography and Morality in Shi’ite South Beirut (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013).
9 See the informative analysis by Lara Deeb and Mona Harb, “Fissures in Hizballah’s Edifice of Control,” Middle East Report, October 30, 2012, http://www.merip.org/mero/mero103012.
10 Al-Sharq al-Awsat, July 30, 2013.
11 From remarks on May 25, 2013, marking the liberation of Lebanon in 2000, and broadcast on al-Manar.
12 Suleiman’s remark were made in an Army Day speech on August 1, 2013.