War in The Middle East

[Davo88]

Re: War in The Middle East

Around 25,000 refugees are now located in Bourj Hammoud.. Here's a new video clip from aztagdaily.com

http://wms6.streamhoster.com/hairenik/WarInLebanon_0804_11.wmv

[Armenian]

Re: War in The Middle East

Some breaking news. Zinedine Zidane headbutts IDF reservists; 2 reported killed, dozens injured

[Armenian]

Re: War in The Middle East

Sheik Hassan Nasrallah

Arab World Finds Icon in Leader of Hezbollah

By NEIL MacFARQUHAR

DAMASCUS, Syria, Aug. 6 — The success or failure of any cease-fire in Lebanon will largely hinge on the opinion of one figure: Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, the secretary general of Hezbollah, who has seen his own aura and that of his party enhanced immeasurably by battling the Israeli Army for nearly four weeks.

With Israeli troops operating in southern Lebanon, Sheik Nasrallah can continue fighting on the grounds that he seeks to expel an occupier, much as he did in the years preceding Israel’s withdrawal in 2000. Or he can accept a cease-fire — perhaps to try to rearm — and earn the gratitude of Lebanon and much of the world. Analysts expect some kind of middle outcome, with the large-scale rocket attacks stopping but Hezbollah guerrillas still attacking soldiers so that Israel still feels pain.

In any case, the Arab world has a new icon.

Gone are the empty threats made by President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s official radio station during the 1967 Arab-Israeli war to push the xxxs into the sea even as Israel seized Jerusalem, the Golan Heights and the Sinai Peninsula. Gone is Saddam Hussein’s idle vow to “burn half of Israel,” only to launch limited volleys of sputtering Scuds. Gone too are the unfulfilled promises of Yasir Arafat to lead the Palestinians back into Jerusalem.

Now there is Sheik Nasrallah, a 46-year-old Lebanese militia chieftain hiding in a bunker, combining the scripted logic of a clergyman with the steely resolve of a general to completely rewrite the rules of the Arab-Israeli land feud. “There is the most powerful man in the Middle East,” sighed the deputy prime minister of an Arab state, watching one of Sheik Nasrallah’s four televised speeches since the war began, during an off-the-record meeting. “He’s the only Arab leader who actually does what he says he’s going to do.”

Days after the current war started, he ended a speech by quietly noting that Hezbollah had just attacked an Israeli warship off Lebanon, a feat considered inconceivable for his group. Those who rushed outside saw a glow visible from the damaged vessel offshore, setting off celebrations around Beirut. The departure represented by Sheik Nasrallah — his black turban marking him as a sayyid, a cleric who can trace his lineage back to the Prophet Muhammad — has been particularly evident in those speeches. He makes no promises to destroy Israel with its superior military might, but to make it bleed and offer concessions.

“When he says to the people: I am your voice, I am your will, I am your conscience, I am your resistance, he combines both a sense of humility and of being anointed for the task,” said Waddah Sharara, a Lebanese sociology professor and a descendant of Shiite clerics. “He’s like the circus magician who pulls the rabbit out of his hat and always knows exactly who is his audience.”

Some call it his “Disney touch.”

In many ways, this war is the moment that Sheik Nasrallah has been preparing for ever since he was first elected to run Hezbollah at age 32 in 1992, after an Israeli rocket incinerated his predecessor. In his broadcasts he appears tranquil, assured, sincere and well informed, in command of both the facts and the situation, utterly dedicated to his cause and to his men. He is aloof yet tries to lend his secretive, heavily armed organization an air of transparency by sharing battlefield details.

On Thursday, he offered to stop firing missiles if Israel halted its attacks, saying Hezbollah preferred ground combat. Hezbollah’s position on any cease-fire, echoed by the Lebanese government, is that none is possible as long as Israeli soldiers remain inside the country. “He has all the power; the government has no cards in its hand,” said Jad al-Akhaoui, the media adviser to a Lebanese cabinet minister. “He keeps saying that he supports the prime minister, but there has been no translation in the field, nothing has stopped. The decision is still Hezbollah’s decision.”

It is not even clear how such decisions are formulated. Even though Hezbollah has two cabinet ministers, proposals are passed through Nabih Berri, the head of the Amal Party and Hezbollah’s onetime rival as the voice of the Shiite Muslim working class. Lebanese officials said that once Mr. Berri passed on the proposals, nobody was quite sure what happened. Hezbollah officials are either unreachable or mum.

But Sheik Nasrallah is definitely in touch. He gloats over the evident confusion reflected in the Israeli news media about their military offensive. He is known to have read the autobiographies of Israel’s prime ministers. He always calls Israel “the Zionist entity,” maintaining that all xxxish immigrants should return to their countries of origin and that there should be one Palestine with equality for Muslims, xxxs and Christians.

In the past, when Israel advanced into Lebanon against Palestinian fighters, the Palestinians would defend fixed positions, then retreat toward Beirut as each line fell. Analysts say Sheik Nasrallah’s genius was to train hundreds of grass-roots fighters — school teachers and butchers and truck drivers — then to use religion to inspire them to fight until death, with a guaranteed spot in heaven.

Sheik Nasrallah outlined some tactics in Thursday’s speech.

“It is not our policy to hang on to territory; we do not want all our mujahedeen and youths to be killed defending a post, hill or village,” he said, sitting in a studio with the flags of Lebanon and Hezbollah behind him. The idea is to lure elite Israeli soldiers into a trap by having them walk into villages before his guerrillas open fire. In a world where fathers are known by the name of their eldest son, Sheik Nasrallah is known as Abu Hadi or father of Hadi, after his eldest son, who died in September 1997, age 18, in a firefight with the Israelis. The name instantly reminds everyone of his personal credibility and commitment to the fight.

On that September day, Sheik Nasrallah was scheduled to deliver a speech in Haret Hreik, the unkempt southern Beirut suburb dense with apartment houses that Israel has just turned largely to rubble. But he said nothing of his loss until the crowd started chanting for him to speak about the “martyrs.” He eulogized Hadi as part of a great victory.

In interviews, he said that he would not give his enemies the satisfaction of seeing him weep publicly but that he mourned privately. He has a daughter and two surviving sons. The eldest, Jawad, around 26, is believed to be fighting in southern Lebanon. Sheik Nasrallah takes obvious pride in standing up to Israel on the battlefield. All his wartime speeches have been laced with references to restoring lost Arab virility, a big sell in a region long suffering from a sense of impotence. He called the three southern villages where the fiercest clashes erupted “the triangle of heroism, manhood, courage and gallantry.”

He can be by turns avuncular and menacing.

Walid Jumblat, the chieftain of the Druse sect and one of Sheik Nasrallah’s more outspoken critics, said he found the combination unsettling. “Sometimes the eyes of people betray them,” Mr. Jumblat said in an interview in his mountain castle. “When he’s calm, he’s laughing. He’s very nice. But when he’s a little bit squeezed, he looks at you in the eyes fiercely with fiery eyes.”

In the hierarchical rankings of Shiite Muslim clergy, Sheik Nasrallah is a rather ordinary hojatolislam, one step below an ayatollah, and far below being a mujtahid, or “source of emulation” to be followed as a guide. Yet the Shiite faithful in Lebanon revere him, both as a religious figure and as a leader who gained for them a modicum of respect in the country’s sectarian political system long dominated by Christians and Sunni Muslim barons. Families who evacuated their homes in Beirut’s southern suburbs seemed invariably to leave behind an open Koran with Sheik Nasrallah’s picture propped up nearby, in the hope that the holy verses would protect their homes and their leader.

He is believed to live modestly and rarely socializes outside Hezbollah’s ruling circles. He avoids the telephone for safety reasons, but has met thousands of constituents and dispatches personal messengers to congratulate them for weddings and births. Aside from Hezbollah’s secretive military operations, the state within a state that he helped build with Iranian and expatriate financing includes hospitals, schools and other social services.

Sheik Nasrallah is a powerful orator with a robust command of classical Arabic, yet he makes himself widely understood by using some Lebanese dialect in every speech. He has coined numerous popular phrases, like calling Israel “more feeble than a spider’s web.” He comes across as far less dour than most Shiite clerics partly due to his roly-poly figure and slight lisp. But he also — very unusually — cracks jokes.

Prof. Nizar Hamzeh, who teaches international relations at the American University of Kuwait and has written a book on Hezbollah, recalled a Nasrallah speech from last year, given while Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was in the region. A helicopter happened to clatter overhead at some point while he was criticizing United States meddling, and the sheik quipped, “You might be able to catch a glimpse of her now; I hope she sees us as well.” The crowd roared.

He has never pushed hard-line Islamic rules like veils for women in the neighborhoods that Hezbollah controls, which analysts attribute to his exposure to many of Lebanon’s 17 sects. Born in 1960 in Beirut, Sheik Nasrallah grew up in the Karanteena district of eastern Beirut, a mixed neighborhood of impoverished Christian Armenians, Druse, Palestinians and Shiites.

His father had a small vegetable stand, but the 1975 eruption of the civil war forced the family to flee to their native southern village. The oldest of nine children and long entranced by the mosque, he decamped for the most famous Shiite hawza, or seminary, in Najaf, Iraq. He fled in 1978 one step ahead of Saddam Hussein’s secret police, returning to Lebanon to join Amal, then a new Shiite militia. He became the Bekaa Valley commander in his early 20’s.

But he considered the Islamic Revolution in Iran led by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1979 to be the real model for Shiites to end their traditional second-class status and moved to Hezbollah as it coalesced in the early 1980’s. He studied in a seminary in Qum, Iran, briefly in 1989. How much a religious figure can appeal to Lebanon’s generally cosmopolitan population has never been clear, and it is particularly murky now that he has provoked a war. Some Lebanese say he has sold his soul to Damascus and Tehran.

“I used to think of Nasrallah as the smartest politician in Lebanon, but this last operation changed my mind,” said Roula Haddad, a 33-year-old administrative secretary, shopping at the upscale ABC mall in the predominantly Christian Ashrafiyeh neighborhood. “It was a huge mistake and he is solely responsible for all the destruction. He proved that he does not care about Lebanese interests; he revealed his true Iranian skin.”

Political analysts said that Lebanon should have seen it coming, but that Sheik Nasrallah proved a rather skillful hypnotist. “Lebanese politics, especially since Nasrallah carved out his role, has become his very own circus,” said Professor Sharara, the Lebanese sociologist. “He built this circus on a foundation of pageantry, lies, fear, crazy hopes and unreal dreams.

“He sold Lebanese on the certainty that he would not abandon them, he would not undertake anything that would cause them harm or destruction, and at the same time he instilled fear, fear of himself,” Professor Sharara said. “He has known this was going to happen for the past 15 years. How can you believe someone who says, ‘Don’t worry, I won’t do anything,’ even while he was building this hellish machine? He knew people would be credulous, would be seduced.”

Hassan M. Fattah contributed reporting from Beirut, Lebanon, for this article. -- New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/07/wo...rtner=homepage

[Armenian]

Re: War in The Middle East

A Disciplined Hezbollah Surprises Israel With Its Training, Tactics and Weapons

By STEVEN ERLANGER and RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr.

JERUSALEM, Aug. 6 — On Dec. 26, 2003, a powerful earthquake leveled most of Bam, in southeastern Iran, killing 35,000 people. Transport planes carrying aid poured in from everywhere, including Syria. According to Israeli military intelligence, the planes returned to Syria carrying sophisticated weapons, including long-range Zelzal missiles, which the Syrians passed on to Hezbollah, the Shiite militia group in southern Lebanon that Iran created and sponsors.

As the Israeli Army struggles for a fourth week to defeat Hezbollah before a cease-fire, the shipments are just one indication of how — with the help of its main sponsors, Iran and Syria — the militia has sharply improved its arsenal and strategies in the six years since Israel abruptly ended its occupation of southern Lebanon. Hezbollah is a militia trained like an army and equipped like a state, and its fighters “are nothing like Hamas or the Palestinians,” said a soldier who just returned from Lebanon. “They are trained and highly qualified,” he said, equipped with flak jackets, night-vision goggles, good communications and sometimes Israeli uniforms and ammunition. “All of us were kind of surprised.”

Much attention has been focused on Hezbollah’s astonishing stockpile of Syrian- and Iranian-made missiles, some 3,000 of which have already fallen on Israel. More than 48 Israelis have been killed in the attacks — including 12 reservist soldiers killed Sunday, who were gathered at a kibbutz at Kfar Giladi, in northern Israel, when rockets packed with antipersonnel ball bearings exploded among them, and 3 killed Sunday evening in another rocket barrage on Haifa.

But Iran and Syria also used those six years to provide satellite communications and some of the world’s best infantry weapons, including modern, Russian-made antitank weapons and Semtex plastic explosives, as well as the training required to use them effectively against Israeli armor. It is Hezbollah’s skillful use of those weapons — in particular, wire-guided and laser-guided antitank missiles, with double, phased explosive warheads and a range of about two miles — that has caused most of the casualties to Israeli forces.

Hezbollah’s Russian-made antitank missiles, designed to penetrate armor, have damaged or destroyed Israeli vehicles, including its most modern tank, the Merkava, on about 20 percent of their hits, Israeli tank commanders at the front said. Hezbollah has also used antitank missiles, including the less modern Sagger, to fire from a distance into houses in which Israeli troops are sheltered, with a first explosion cracking the typical concrete block wall and the second going off inside.

“They use them like artillery to hit houses,” said Brig. Gen. Yossi Kuperwasser, until recently the Israeli Army’s director of intelligence analysis. “They can use them accurately up to even three kilometers, and they go through a wall like through the armor of a tank.” Hezbollah fighters use tunnels to quickly emerge from the ground, fire a shoulder-held antitank missile, and then disappear again, much the way Chechen rebels used the sewer system of Grozny to attack Russian armored columns. “We know what they have and how they work,” General Kuperwasser said. “But we don’t know where all the tunnels are. So they can achieve tactical surprise.”

The antitank missiles are the “main fear” for Israeli troops, said David Ben-Nun, 24, an enlisted man in the Nahal brigade who just returned from a week in Lebanon. The troops do not linger long in any house because of hidden missile crews. “You can’t even see them,” he said. With modern communications and a network of tunnels, storage rooms, barracks and booby traps laid under the hilly landscape, Hezbollah’s training, tactics and modern weaponry explain, the Israelis say, why they are moving with caution. The Israelis say Hezbollah’s fighters number from 2,000 to 4,000, a small army that is aided by a larger circle of part-timers who provide logistics and storage of weapons in houses and civilian buildings.

Hezbollah operates like a revolutionary force within a civilian sea, making it hard to fight without occupying or bombing civilian areas. On orders, some fighters emerge to retrieve launchers, fire missiles and then melt away. Still, the numbers are small compared with the Israeli Army and are roughly the size of one Syrian division. The Iranian Revolutionary Guards have helped teach Hezbollah how to organize itself like an army, with special units for intelligence, antitank warfare, explosives, engineering, communications and rocket launching.

They have also taught Hezbollah how to aim rockets, make shaped “improvised explosive devices” — used to such devastating results against American armor in Iraq — and, the Israelis say, even how to fire the C-802, a ground-to-ship missile that Israel never knew Hezbollah possessed. Iranian Air Force officers have made repeated trips to Lebanon to train Hezbollah to aim and fire Iranian medium-range missiles, like the Fajr-3 and Fajr-5, according to intelligence officials in Washington. The Americans say they believe that a small number of Iranian operatives remain in Beirut, but say there is no evidence that they are directing Hezbollah’s attacks.

But Iran, so far, has not allowed Hezbollah to fire one of the Zelzal missiles, the Israelis say. The former Syrian president, Hafez al-Assad, was careful to restrict supplies to Hezbollah, but his son, Bashar, who took over in 2000 — the year Israel pulled out of Lebanon — has opened its warehouses. Syria has given Hezbollah 220-millimeter and 302-millimeter missiles, both equipped with large, anti-personnel warheads. Syria has also given Hezbollah its most sophisticated antitank weapons, sold to the Syrian Army by Russia.

Those, General Kuperwasser said, include the Russian Metis and RPG-29. The RPG-29 has both an antitank round to better penetrate armor and an anti-personnel round. The Metis is more modern yet, wire-guided with a longer range and a higher speed, and can fire up to four rounds a minute. Some Israelis say they believe that Syria has provided Hezbollah with the Russian-made Kornet, laser-guided, with a range of about three miles, which Hezbollah may be holding back, waiting for Israel to move farther into southern Lebanon and extend its supply lines. Despite Israeli complaints to Moscow, “Russia just decided to close its eyes,” a senior Israeli official said.

In its early years, Hezbollah specialized in suicide bombings and kidnappings. The United States blames it for the suicide attacks on the American Embassy in Beirut and a Marine barracks in 1983. The group became popular in the Shiite south and set up its mini-state there, as well as reserving to itself a section of southern Beirut, known as Security Square. Until 2003, Timur Goksel was the senior political adviser to Unifil, the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon, which monitors the border. He says he knows Hezbollah well and speaks with admiration of its commitment and organization.

After fighting the Israelis for 18 years, “they’re not afraid of the Israeli Army anymore,” he said in a telephone interview from Beirut. Hezbollah’s ability to harass the Israelis and study their flaws, like a tendency for regular patrols and for troop convoys on the eve of the Sabbath, gave Hezbollah confidence that the Israeli Army “is a normal human army, with normal vulnerabilities and follies,” he added. Now, however, “Hezbollah has much better weapons than before,” he said.

Mr. Goksel describes Hezbollah much as the Israelis do: careful, patient, attuned to gathering intelligence, scholars of guerrilla warfare from the American Revolution to Mao and the Vietcong, and respectful of Israeli firepower and mobility. “Hezbollah has studied asymmetrical warfare, and they have the advantage of fighting in their own landscape, among their people, where they’ve prepared for just what the Israelis are doing — entering behind armor on the ground,” Mr. Goksel said.

“They have staff work and they do long-term planning, something the Palestinians never do,” he said. “They watch for two months to note every detail of their enemy. They review their operations — what they did wrong, how the enemy responded. And they have flexible tactics, without a large hierarchical command structure.” That makes them very different from the Soviet-trained Arab armies the Israelis defeated in 1967 and 1973, which had a command structure that was too regimented.

In 1992, when Sheik Hassan Nasrallah took over, he organized Hezbollah into three regional commands with military autonomy. Beirut and the Hezbollah council made policy, but did not try to run the war. Sheik Nasrallah — said to have been advised by the secretive Imad Mugniyeh, a trained engineer wanted by the United States on terrorism charges — thereby improved Hezbollah’s security and limited its communications. It set up separate and largely autonomous units that live among civilians, with local reserve forces to provide support, supplies and logistics. Hezbollah commanders travel in old cars without bodyguards or escorts and wear no visible insignia, Mr. Goksel said, to keep their identities hidden.

Hezbollah began by setting up roadside bombs detonated by cables, which the Israelis learned to defeat with wire-cutting attachments to their vehicles. Then Hezbollah used radio detonators, which the Israelis also defeated, and then cellphone detonators, and then a double system of cellphones, and then a photocell detonator — like the beam that opens an automatic door. Now, Mr. Goksel said, Hezbollah is working with pressure detonators dug into the roads, even as the Israelis weld metal plates to the bottom of their tanks.

Hezbollah, Mr. Goksel says, has clear tactics, trying to draw Israeli ground troops farther into Lebanon. “They can’t take the Israelis in open battle,” he said, “so they want to draw them in to well-prepared battlefields,” like Aita al Shaab, where there has been fierce fighting. He added: “They know the Israelis depend too much on armor, which is a prime target for them. And they want Israeli supply lines to lengthen, so they’re easier to hit.” Israeli tanks have been struck by huge roadside bombs planted in expectation that Israeli armor would roll across the border, said one tank lieutenant, who in keeping with military policy would only give his first name, Ohad.

At least two soldiers from his unit have been wounded by snipers who are accurate at 600 yards. The Hezbollah fighters “are not just farmers who have been given weapons to fire,” he said. “They are persistent and well trained.” Another tank company commander, a captain who gave his name as Edan, said that about 20 percent of the missiles that have hit Israeli tanks penetrated the Merkava armor or otherwise caused causalities.

Col. Mordechai Kahane, the commander of the Golani brigade’s Egoz unit, first set up to fight Hezbollah, told the Israeli newspaper Yediot Aharonot of one of the worst early days, when his unit went into Marun al Ras in daylight, and lost a senior officer and a number of men. “Hezbollah put us to sleep” building up its fortifications, he said. “There’s no certainty that we knew that we were going to encounter what it is that we ultimately encountered. We said, ‘There is going to be a bunker here, a cave there,’ but the thoroughness surprised us all. A Hezbollah weapons storeroom is not just a natural cave. It’s a pit with concrete, ladders, emergency openings, escape routes. We didn’t know it was that well organized.”

General Kuperwasser, too, respects Hezbollah’s ability “to well prepare the battlefield,” but says, “We’re making progress and killing a lot of them, and more of them are giving up in battle now and becoming prisoners, which is a very important sign.”

Steven Erlanger reported from Jerusalem for this article, and Richard A. Oppel Jr. from Zarit, Israel. Mark Mazzetti contributed reporting from Washington.

New York Times - http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/07/wo...hezbollah.html

[skhara]

Re: War in The Middle East

I've a bunch more respect for Hezbollah. It is only recent that I learned about their vast social programs.

I definitly respect that these guys are not reckless with their lives, like the desperate Palestian gunment, and always talk in terms of reality.

[skhara]

Re: War in The Middle East

xxxs have a hayday with those salute photoes. They say look they are all NAZIs.

[Janavar]

Re: War in The Middle East

Hasn't Israel been bending over backwards for the last decade or so to try to make peace with these war-mongers?

No it hasn't. israel is the one doing all the war mongering since they know they have the unconditional support of the USA. israel is the one that doesn't want peace since they know that would mean giving up the water that they are stealing, removing their squatters and letting the Palestinians return to their homes. A perfect example is that so-called roadmap to peace where the israelis dictated numerous unacceptable changes so that the Palestinians would never accept such a deal that gave everything to israel and nothing to the Palestinians.

[ARK]

Re: War in The Middle East

Armenia's humanitarian aid has reached Beirut
29.07.2006 15:25

The humanitarian aid of Armenia has already reached Beirut and Armenian Ambassador to Lebanon Vahan Ter-Ghevondyan has already submitted it to the Council coordinating the humanitarian aid. The Ambassador told “Armenpress” that the 509 boxes included medicines and medical necessities. To remind, RA Government took the decision on July 27 to provide 20 million drams for humanitarian aid to Lebanon. According to Vahan Ter-Ghevondyan this step of the Armenian Government received positive feedback on the part of the Lebanese people and was largely covered by Lebanese media.

[ARK]

Re: War in The Middle East

Nasrallah's Stature Grows as Hezbollah Presses War With Israel
July 28 (Bloomberg) -- ``Pride stands here,'' reads a white sheet adorned with black Arabic script hanging near the ruins of Hezbollah's Beirut headquarters. ``Submission is not an option.''

That message of defiance, flying above buildings flattened by Israeli air strikes, is enhancing the standing of Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah's leader, among his Shiite Muslim followers at home and Islamic radicals elsewhere.

They don't blame Nasrallah for instigating fighting that has cost 400 Lebanese lives and forced 800,000 people to flee their homes. Instead, they see him as someone who deserves credit for making Israel end its 22-year occupation of southern Lebanon while suffering personal loss -- a son's death in a 1997 attack on Israeli forces -- in the struggle.

``What sets Nasrallah apart from other Lebanese and Arab politicians is that he won a war against Israel, and he lost one of his sons in the fight,'' said Walid Charara, co-author of the book ``Hezbollah, an Islamist-Nationalist Party.'' ``This gives him credibility that Arab leaders are bereft of.''

In a sign of his standing, he's commonly called ``Sayyid,'' a title given to people believed to be descendants of Prophet Muhammad's family. In June, riots broke out to protest a political comedy show on television that impersonated him.

Public Approval

About 70 percent of Lebanese approve of Hezbollah's capture of two Israeli soldiers in the July 12 raid that sparked Israel's offensive, according to a poll of 800 people published July 26 by the Beirut Center for Research and Information.

Nasrallah, 46, has spent his 14-year career as secretary general of Hezbollah juggling his role in Lebanon with his ties to Iran, the country that funds and arms his group, and to neighboring Syria, which controlled Lebanon for 29 years and backed Hezbollah's right to arms.

Trained in local Palestinian military camps, he studied theology in Iraq's Shiite holy city of Najaf and in Iran. He rose through Hezbollah's ranks by turning guerrilla fighters into a militia to battle the Israeli occupation.

Nasrallah has stage-managed Hezbollah's move into politics, making it a key player in ruling Lebanon, where decisions are taken by a cabinet made up of representatives of the various religious strands. The group's political arm has 14 members in the 128-seat parliament.

Charities and Hospitals

He has also built a network of charities and hospitals that ensures loyalty among Shiites, the largest and poorest of the 17 communities in the Mediterranean nation of 3.8 million people.

Nasrallah's opponents say he is disregarding the interests of the Lebanese people and has turned Lebanon into a battleground in the Iranian and Syrian confrontations with the U.S.

``It's sad to see Lebanon as a toy in the game of nations and made to pay the price with the blood of its children,'' Lebanese Christian leader Samir Geagea told reporters in Beirut on July 25.

The war that started July 12 has inflicted $2 billion in damage to Lebanese airports, ports, roads and bridges. Lebanon's economic losses from the aborted summer tourism season and stalled industrial production amount to an additional $2 billion, Riad Salameh, the governor of the Central Bank of Lebanon, said in an interview yesterday.

`Fighting for Lebanon'

Hezbollah denies taking orders from Iran and Syria, insisting its agenda is purely Lebanese. ``We say it loudly, we are with Syria, we are with Iran, but we are not fighting for them,'' Nawwar Sahili, a Hezbollah member of parliament, said in an interview this week. ``We are fighting for Lebanon, for our people. Our agenda is Lebanese.''

The abduction of the Israeli soldiers was meant to secure the release of three Lebanese held in Israeli jails and possibly thousands of other Palestinian and Arab prisoners, Nasrallah said on the first day of the war. Hezbollah has called for an immediate cease-fire and start of talks to release those jailed.

Nasrallah, in a video message aired by Hezbollah's Al-Manar television on July 26, said Israel and the U.S. were using the soldiers' capture as a pretext to launch a pre-prepared war aimed at ``controlling Lebanon.'' He said Hezbollah will extend its rocket attacks deeper into Israel. About 50 Israelis have been killed in the fighting.

Hezbollah was formed in 1982 after Israel's invasion of Lebanon. Its creation followed the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran, which inspired many Shiites throughout the Muslim world. The poverty of Lebanon's Shiites has made the community receptive to revolutionary ideas.

`Steel-Structured Party'

Initially a loose gathering of groups sharing loyalty to the Iranian regime, Hezbollah became the ``steel-structured party that we know, with an agenda to fight Israel and support the Palestinians'' in 1988, said author Charara, the opinion editor at Lebanese newspaper Al-Akhbar. The organization gets about $100 million a year from Iran, according to the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

Hezbollah's armed wing, called the Islamic Resistance, was the only militia allowed to keep weapons under the 1989 accord that ended Lebanon's 15-year civil war because of its role in fighting Israel. It is better-equipped than Lebanon's army, which lacks air-defense and anti-ship weapons, retired Brigadier General Walid Sukkarieh said.

The army's role has been ``to preserve the peace after the civil war, while Hezbollah developed into a well-trained fighting force,'' he said.

Terrorism

Hezbollah has claimed credit for or been linked to scores of attacks on Israelis and Americans, including rocket attacks on Israeli towns, the 1983 bombings that killed 241 U.S. soldiers in Beirut, and the 1994 attack that killed 95 at a xxxish community center in Buenos Aires. The U.S. and Israel have designated Hezbollah a terrorist organization.

While Israel pulled out of Lebanon six years ago, Hezbollah resisted calls by Lebanon's Christian political parties, as well as a United Nations Security Council resolution, to disarm. The group's explanation was that it still wanted to free the Shebaa Farms, a territory captured by Israel from Syria in 1967, and claimed by Lebanon with Syrian encouragement.

In March 2005, Nasrallah organized a demonstration in Beirut to support Syria and its leader Bashar al-Assad, whose regime was accused of assassinating Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri.

Even in a Beirut school sheltering people displaced by the fighting, Hezbollah has support. ``When we need a doctor, medicine, we can count on Hezbollah's clinics,'' said Dalal Naanou, a 35-year-old widow, who fled her village in Tayr Diba, near the southern port of Tyre, with her two boys, 9 and 7.

Naanou, who shares a classroom in the Zareef secondary school with two families, gets about $75 a month from the Imam Khomeini Foundation, her only income. Her younger boy, Yasser, said he wants to join ``Hezbollah's army'' when he grows up.


this man is truly respectable.
Shame on arab nations!

[Fedayeen]

Re: War in The Middle East

yes junevar jan, he would support that too!

No doubt