How war in Syria changed the image of Hezbollah
News of Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah’s killing last month sent shockwaves across Lebanon and beyond, as the charismatic, seemingly untouchable Hezbollah leader was finally killed by his sworn enemy, Israel.
Supporters in Lebanon, Palestine and beyond expressed their grief over his demise, focusing especially on the struggle he led against Israel.
“He died doing what he loved to do the most, fighting alongside the Palestinians,” Kareem Shaheen, Middle East and Newsletters Editor at New Lines Magazine, told Middle East Eye.
Hezbollah has been engaging in cross-border battles against Israel since 8 October 2023, saying it is partaking in a “solidarity front” with Hamas in Gaza.
Serious escalations by Israel over the past week led to the killing of over 2,100 people in Lebanon, several senior Hezbollah officials and the displacement of hundreds of thousands.
Experts argue that Hezbollah’s battles over the past year may have restored some of the reputation the group had formed around itself prior to its highly controversial involvement in the Syrian civil war.
The latter, which saw hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths and millions of displaced, has arguably changed the Lebanese armed movement’s role in the region forever.
Hezbollah was founded in response to Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982. With the backing of Iran, it became a powerful guerrilla force which led efforts to liberate southern Lebanon from Israeli occupation in 2000.
Its month-long war against Israel in 2006, which ended with Israel failing to achieve its intended objectives, turned the group into a heroic figure in the entire Arab world.
“You could see pictures of Hassan Nasrallah throughout the region, from Aleppo in Syria to Cairo in Egypt,” said Joseph Daher, academic and author of a book on Hezbollah.
Ahibai, the famous song by Lebanese singer Julia Boutros based on a letter Nasrallah gave to his fighters, was also played in many countries of the region, Daher said.
As far as wider Arab populations were concerned, the party was seen as an anti-colonial liberator.
In Lebanon, however, Hezbollah’s actions made it both a beloved and hated group by different sectors of the population.
While widely accepted as the defining force in southern Lebanon’s liberation, Hezbollah’s alliance with Syria during its occupation of Lebanon drew heavy criticism, which culminated when Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri was assassinated in 2005.
Many blamed Hezbollah, who then accused Israel of carrying out the attack.
Following events, such as armed clashes with political opponents in 2008, only increased internal tensions.
As the years progressed and Hezbollah entrenched itself more deeply in Lebanese politics, experts such as Daher believe the party started sharing the poor reputation of other establishment parties, even sometimes helping "defend the Lebanese sectarian neoliberal system".
However, it still enjoyed popular legitimacy as a resistance force among its base of Lebanese Shia Muslims and beyond.
These controversies took an international turn during the Arab Spring in the early 2010s. Hezbollah, which initially expressed support for popular Arab protests in countries like Egypt, took the decision to join the civil war in Syria on the side of its president, Bashar al-Assad.
The Lebanese group had portrayed the Syrian uprising-turned-civil war as an Israeli-backed plot to destroy its alliance with Assad against Israel.
Sheikh Subhi al-Tufayli, who led the party between 1989 and 1991, told Reuters in 2013 that “I know that the decision is Iranian, and the alternative would have been a confrontation with the Iranians”.
Tufayli, who fell out with Hezbollah and Iran in the 1990s, also said that, “I know that the Lebanese in Hezbollah, and Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah more than anyone, are not convinced about this war”.
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To Shaheen, the conflict showed that “Iran’s interests were the prime motivating factor behind Hezbollah at that point”.
“Hezbollah was instrumental in keeping Assad in power, and they were also involved in some of the worst atrocities that happened in the conflict,” he said.
Daher agrees that the Syrian war “broke this image” of a resistance movement committed to the liberation of Palestine.
Regardless of the reason, Hezbollah’s initial hesitation regarding its involvement in the war waned after 2013, when Nasrallah declared that Syria had “true friends in the region” and that his group would not let it “fall into the hands of the Americans, Israel and the ‘takfiri’ [extremist] groups”.
'I know that the Lebanese in Hezbollah, and Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah more than anyone, are not convinced about this war'
- Sheikh Subhi al-Tufayli, former Hezbollah leader
The group scored a decisive victory in Qusayr, near Syria’s border with Lebanon in June of that year, essentially cementing its role as a leading belligerent by Assad’s side.
While Hezbollah was heavily criticised for its role in Syria, its battles against the Islamic State (IS) in Syria helped influence part of the Arab world into viewing it as a force protecting minorities in the Levant.
Experts believe that the horrifying images showing the actions of Islamic State in Iraq and Syria instilled fear among Christians in Lebanon, for example, and partly legitimised Hezbollah fight against “takfiris” even amongst some opponents.
Shaheen says the group remains hated by large swathes of the Syrian population and opposed by other Arabs as it took part in key moments of the civil war such as the siege of Madaya in 2015, which Doctors Without Borders says killed 23 people of starvation.
A decade after it formally joined the war in Syria, Hezbollah went back to engaging in near-daily battles with Israel as part of its “solidarity front” with Gaza.
Direct clashes with Israel, along with the latter’s disproportional attacks that killed not just Hezbollah fighters but many Lebanese civilians, meant that the party may have regained some of its image from the 2000s.
However, recent developments which saw Israel kill most of the group’s senior leadership and wound thousands of its members through explosive pagers and other communication devices raised many questions on how penetrated it may be.
According to the Financial Times, the Syrian war may have played a role in that by leaving the group more vulnerable to Israeli spies “placing agents or looking for would-be defectors”.
By expanding itself in Syria, the party may have been forced to reveal itself more, through things as simple as death notices and funerals for killed members.
“[The Syrian war] cost them more than their reputation,” Shaheen said. “It cost them the operational integrity of the party and its perception as a party that is supposed to fight for the weak.”
Nasrallah’s killing was met with conflicting reactions in Syria, as the group is viewed differently depending on which side a Syrian may be on.
In Idlib, the main city in the opposition-controlled pockets of north-western Syria, people flooded the streets in celebration, citing Hezbollah’s beligerrence against them as a reason.
Shaheen says the reaction from Syrians opposed to Assad is “understandable”, while Daher adds that the killing itself must not be taken out of the current context.
'His assassination took place in a week where you had over 800 civilians killed. You cannot separate his assassination from the bombing of Dahiyeh or the south'
- Joseph Daher, academic and author
“It was not done for the sake of Syrian democratic rights or to advance these rights,” Daher said. “His assassination took place in a week where you had over 800 civilians killed. You cannot separate his assassination from the bombing of Dahiyeh or the south.
“It is happening in a genocidal war against the Palestinians, and in an attempt to crush everything in Lebanon, not only Hezbollah, and seek to promote sectarian tensions in the country.”
Nasrallah’s death still came at the highest reputational point of his recent years.
“It reminded people of what they respected him for in the past,” said Shaheen.
“It reminded them of the dignity that Hezbollah had promised them for a long time by saying that they are the ones who are going to show up against Israel while the rest of the Arab world is going to be watching from the side-lines. They waged the longest war that an Arab force has waged against Israel.”