The black turban that, for the Shiites, indicates the belonging of a cleric to the lineage of Muhammad, was wrapped around the forehead of Hasan Nasrallah, the general secretary of the Lebanese Shiite party-militia Hezbollah, whose assassination the Israeli army announced this Saturday, in a bombing on the outskirts of Beirut. Among his people, he was considered a sayyedthe treatment that comes with that honor and with which many Shiites referred to it. At the burials of the martyrs his face was as present as the yellow flags of Hezbollah and the famous chant “We will answer your call, O Hussein.” [el nieto de Mahoma venerado en el islam chií]!” became “We will respond to your call, O Nasrallah!” His face was synonymous with terrorism in the West, with infamy for the Lebanese who accused him of kidnapping the State, and with dignity for those Sunnis in the Arab world who detest Iran as much as they applaud a militia standing up to Israel while it bombs Gaza.
His early years were spent in two forgotten places. The first, the “misery belt” of eastern Beirut: the shanty town of Sharshabuk, near the suburb of Karantine, where he was born 64 years ago and “everyone” was poor, as he recalled in May. He was the oldest of nine children, his father ran a fruit shop and that “everyone” described them too. Poor and Shiites, the marginalized minority branch of Islam.
In 1975, at the outbreak of the civil war that would end up lasting 15 years, the Lebanese cleric’s family returned to their place of origin, Basuriye, in the south of the country. It is one of those towns with a Shia majority near the border with Israel considered fiefdoms of Hezbollah and from which thousands of people have escaped these days (by order or out of fear), in that war front that has been intermittent for decades on the border.
The misery, the marginalization of the Shiites and the Palestinian refugees who live in the neighborhood where he was born — all “oppressed,” a central concept in his speech and in the state ideology of his main ally, Iran — marked his biography. of Nasrallah. The devout teenager soon clung to his Shiite identity and to another idea that ended up being one of the reasons for his organization’s existence: resistance to the Israeli occupation of Lebanon. At the age of 15, he joined the Lebanese Resistance Movement (Amal), founded by the Iranian cleric Musa al Sadr and whose followers call themselves “the dispossessed.” Disappeared in 1978, Al Sadr aspired to modernize Shiism and was a key figure in its evolution towards political action.
In 1976, Nasrallah traveled to one of the spiritual centers of Shiism: the Najaf seminary in Iraq. Its director was Mohammed Baqir as Sadr, close to the future Iranian leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, whom the student met then. Two years later he was expelled from Iraq by Saddam Hussein’s regime, but, by then, he had already attracted the attention of who would be his mentor and predecessor as leader of Hezbollah, Abbas Al Musawi, assassinated by Israel in 1992.
Those encounters forged his thinking. One event sealed his devotion to Ayatollah Khomeini: the establishment of the Islamic Republic of Iran in 1979. The regime that had Khomeini as its first supreme leader enshrined the doctrine of velayat e faqihthe government of the clerics, learned from Islamic law, which places the religious establishment at the top of political and State power. Between the Shiite quietism taught in Najaf, which defended the separation of politics and religion, and the velayat e faqih of Khomeini and the Iranian seminary of Qom – where Nasrallah also studied in the 80s – the Lebanese opted for the latter.
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In 1982, he left Amal and joined Hezbollah, the Party of God, a militia created with Iranian support and training. 10 years later, when Nasrallah was appointed its general secretary, the organization registered as a political party, a decision that was attributed to its new leader, then 32 years old. He ran in 12 districts in the 1992 municipal elections. He won in all of them. Since 2005, he has participated in the country’s governments and in 2006 he imposed a veto minority for his coalition in the National Unity Government created after that summer’s war with Israel. For the first time, he obtained two ministries.
Israel
Nasrallah’s leadership in Hezbollah had been established long before. Israel’s withdrawal from southern Lebanon in 2000, which was attributed in part to the organization’s military actions, and that which followed the brief war of 2006, surrounded the leader of the party-militia with an aura of a liberator. Many of his coreligionists saw in him “the only Muslim who has defeated Israel on the battlefield,” as the Arab website described him years ago. Al Bawabaven.
His portrait reigns in homes and businesses in the Shiite neighborhoods of Beirut, the Bekaa Valley and the south of the country, where many venerate him as a hero. His first-born son, Hadi, was assassinated by Israel in 1997 at the age of 18 and Israeli media suggest that his daughter died in the bombing this Friday. The United States and Israel see him as the leader of a terrorist group, due to the suicide attacks and kidnappings he has committed. The cleric has lived in hiding for years and addressed his followers through speeches from an unidentified location, usually live.
On October 8, 2023, one day after the Hamas attack and when Israeli planes dropped the first bombs in retaliation on Gaza, he took a step that, according to Israel, ended up costing him his life. Hezbollah launched rockets against the Sheba Farms, a territory it claims and whose status the United Nations urges to negotiate in the same resolution that ended the 2006 war. The crossfire (five times more intense from Israel than from Hezbollah) It caused hundreds of deaths until the Government of Benjamin Netanyahu stepped on the accelerator, with a massive bombing (550 dead, the deadliest day in the country’s history and as many as in the previous eleven months) and took advantage of its strategic superiority to assassinate leaders. until you reach the top.
Charismatic and a good orator, Nasralá has been, above all, a pragmatist, a specialist in giving one of the two sides and another of sand and in privileging above all the interests of the group over his ideals. In Lebanon, it has not hesitated to use the illegitimate power that weapons and its status as a State within the State give it, to prevent institutions from making decisions that harm it. Be it by taking their militiamen to the streets, like in 2008; either by blocking the investigation into the Beirut port explosion, considering that the judge was politically motivated; be imposing a veto de facto about the next president.
His speech in defense of the oppressed, for example, did not prevent him from openly and militarily supporting his Syrian ally, Bashar El Assad, responsible for war crimes, launching barrel bombs on the population, torture and brutally crushing the opposition when it was demonstrated peacefully, which ended up degenerating into civil war. Hezbollah had previously praised the Arab Spring revolts against dictators in other countries in the region. Until they touched their ally Assad, the leader who boasted weeks before that they would never reach Syria. Others, such as the Palestinian Hamas movement, actually suffered the expulsion of their leadership from Damascus, precisely for not closing ranks with Assad.
This contradiction by Nasrallah tarnished his image. Eleven months of rocket fire against Israel and the refusal to stop its offensive while bombs continue to fall on Gaza (even though its commanders fell one after another and the Mossad humiliated and diminished it with the lethal remote detonation of thousands of beepers). and of walkie-talkies)They restored it. For the West, a terrorist who had been playing dice with destiny for too long has died. For many in the Middle East, Nasrallah has paid the price for standing up for the Palestinians when almost no one else does.
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