Word: hizballah
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Recently, that wound threatened to rip open. One evening in December, thousands of protesters from the Shi'ite Muslim group Hizballah and other factions threatened to storm the gates of the Sérail, calling the Western-backed Siniora a traitor for allegedly undermining Hizballah during its war with Israel four months earlier. Only a week before, masked gunmen had assassinated one of Siniora's Cabinet colleagues, Industry Minister Pierre Gemayel. For hours, nobody knew if the mob would overwhelm the guards, enter the building, drag Siniora and his ministers from office - and perhaps ignite a new civil...
...Hizballah and its allies thought Siniora could be intimidated; instead, they got the measure of a man undaunted. Siniora phoned various Lebanese leaders and declared he was standing his ground. "They wanted us to evacuate," recalls Marwan Hamadeh, Siniora's Telecommunications Minister. "He said, 'I will only go out of here dead.'" As Siniora remembered the standoff during three hours of interviews with Time in his office and over lunch in the Sérail: "I have never had that degree of serenity in my life. Despite the risks, which I am aware of, don't think at all that...
Siniora's December defense of the Sérail may well have been a turning point in that struggle. There are signs that the crisis has cooled, at least temporarily. Hizballah chief Sheik Hassan Nasrallah has retreated from his militant rhetoric and called his people from the streets. His main political ally, ambitious former Lebanese army commander Michel Aoun, who is popular with a significant bloc of Christians, has become publicly worried about future opposition protests out of apparent concern they could trigger Christian-on-Christian fighting...
...picture. Shi'ites are now politically dominant in Iraq, and Iran is the leading Shi'ite power. So in most Arab capitals, the sectarian war in Iraq is increasingly blamed on Iran. Taken along with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's nuclear ambitions, Iran's sponsorship of the Shi'ite Hizballah militia in Lebanon and its backing of Hamas, Iran's supposed meddling in Iraq is proof to Arab leaders that their old Persian rivals are determined to reshape the Middle East to suit their own interest...
...seminaries for the escalation of Sunni-Shi'ite violence that has claimed more than 4,000 lives in the past two decades. In the latest attacks, three separate suicide bombings killed 21 during the Ashura rituals in January. In Lebanon, sectarian tensions have risen after years of relative calm. Hizballah, the Shi'ite militia, won praise from Sunnis when Israeli forces left Lebanon in 2000. But after the assassination in February 2005 of former Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri, a Sunni, intra-Muslim antagonism began to harden. Sunnis blamed Hizballah's patron, the Syrian government, for the killing. While faulting Hizballah...