By Dr. Makram Rabah
BEIRUT
Ever since its formation in 1985 as an advanced post for the Iranian revolution in Lebanon, Hezbollah has tried to refashion itself in line with the changing realities on local and regional levels.
In the early 1990s, a Syrian-Iranian agreement saw late Syrian president Hafez al-Assad appointing Hezbollah as the supposed sole “resister” of the Israeli occupation of the south of Lebanon, which ended in May of 2000. More recently, the Syrian revolution against Bashar al-Assad witnessed Hezbollah’s self-depiction as a “protector of the Shiites” against an ever-looming threat of Sunni Islamic fundamentalism.
Hezbollah’s Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah’s recent public speech last week was one more occasion to reiterate these talking points and to declare that Hezbollah has dismantled its military positions on the Lebanese side of the eastern border, after successfully accomplishing its mission.
Nasrallah’s victory speech and its undercurrent, however, seem to be highly unconvincing, if not delusional, as a proper examination would reveal that the Shiite community’s wellbeing is greatly exaggerated.
Hezbollah’s immersion in the Syrian crisis was initially communicated to the public as a limited act aimed at protecting the Shiite holy sanctuaries in Syria, but soon it found itself doing much of the legwork for the regime and its crumbling army who was failing to even protect the capital Damascus. The full deployment of Hezbollah and other pro-Iranian militias from Iraq and Afghanistan across Syria made an already volatile Sunni-Shiite schism even worse, provoking a reprisal against the Shiites both in Syria as well as across the borders into Lebanon.
Consequently, Hezbollah’s Syrian incursion left it faced with the threat of suicide bombers who tried to target deep into its hinterland in the southern suburbs of Beirut as well as alongside the eastern border with Syria and its overwhelmingly Shiite villages and towns. While Hezbollah likes to maintain that its ability to fend off this terrorist threat was largely its own making, it was the intervention of the Lebanese state and its army that effectively secured the Shiite areas from any future threat.
The Lebanese Army, supported through foreign military aid mainly from the United States and the United Kingdom, deployed a series of watch towers along the border as well as aerial surveillance, which restricted, and in some instances, eliminated terrorist incursions. Perhaps equally important was the conscious decision of all the Lebanese factions to support this initiative so as not to leave the Lebanese Shiites to pay for Hezbollah’s reckless involvement in Syria.
The case of the Shiites of Syria, however, is much more perilous than their Lebanese coreligionists as they are caught between the hammer of the anti-regime forces, especially the Islamic factions, and the anvil of the regime and its allies. While fairly small in number, the Shiites of Syria have always been part and parcel of the Syrian national fabric and have never been singled out by any faction up until now.
Four of the main Syria Shiite villages in Aleppo (Zahraa and Nubl) and Idlib (Fu’ah and Kefraya) have been besieged for the duration of the conflict as the Syrian opposition have tried to use these villages to negotiate the lifting of similar sieges by the regime and their allies elsewhere. Just recently, through a Qatar-Iran initiative, the last of the inhabitants of Fu’ah and Kefraya were evacuated in exchange for a similar evacuation of the Sunni inhabitants of Madaya and Zabadani in the Damascus countryside.
The Four Towns, as they are commonly referred to, debunk Hezbollah’s alleged guardianship of the Shiites since the reality of the Shiites, both in Lebanon and Syria, reveals a very sad reality as well as a bleaker prospect. At present, the 17,000 inhabitants of Fu'ah and Kefraya, displaced never to return to their lands, have been relocated to a small area outside Aleppo's airport, where they are living in subhuman conditions.
Adding insult to injury, this makeshift refugee camp has fallen victim to pro-Assad militias most of whom look upon it as an opportunity to extort money and make them pay hefty prices for basic supplies entering the area. More drastically, Iran’s and Hezbollah's callousness have left the Syrian Shiites out in the open when at least half of their fellow Syrians are opposed to the Assad regime. This stark reality also applies to the Lebanese Shiites who have been transformed from friends of the Syrian people to a virtual occupation force commanded by Iran.
Nasrallah will certainly continue to deliver his fiery speeches to justify his party’s suicidal actions both in Syria and Lebanon and to try to reassure his constituency that what awaits them is a bright and safe future. Notwithstanding, it would perhaps be wise to remember that this same rhetoric is what the people of Fu’ah and Kefraya used to hear all the time and it has certainly proved a false prophecy.
* Opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Anadolu Agency.
