Word: hizballah
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Baghdad burns, Hizballah is setting Beirut on fire. And the outcome of the struggle in Lebanon will have as much or more significance than what happens in Iraq...
...Imam Musa Sadr, a charismatic Iranian cleric, led the political mobilization of the Shi'ite community in the 1960s and 1970s, giving it a voice for the first time through his Amal (Arabic for "hope") movement. Hizballah was born with Iranian assistance in the early 1980s, to resist Israel's occupation of Lebanon. And by the 1990s, the dynamism of Hizballah and the demographic advantage of the Shi'ites had begun to eat away at the historical Sunni dominance of Lebanon's Muslim communities...
...Although that shift had generated a sense of unease among Lebanese Sunnis, the recent explosion of sectarian hostilities was triggered by a growing political confrontation during the past two years. Generally, Hizballah and its mainly pro-Syrian allies seek to wrest Lebanon away from the orbit of the United States and keep it at the forefront of the struggle against Israel. The anti-Syrian parliamentary majority, which forms the backbone of the government and includes the Sunnis, has seized upon the support of the West and its Arab allies such as Saudi Arabia to break Syria's grip on Lebanon...
...Lebanon's political fault lines today tend to follow sectarian boundaries, with the Shi'ites overwhelmingly following the Hizballah-led opposition, while the majority of Sunnis back the government and the Future Tide movement of Saad Hariri, Rafik's son and political heir. The tension between the two camps also mirrors the broader Shi'ite-Sunni political rift throughout the Arab world that has been rekindled by the Iraq conflict. The chief protagonists in this new "cold war," as some analysts describe it, are Shi'ite Iran and Saudi Arabia, the leader of the Sunni Arab world...
...Hizballah's leaders have long spoken out against a schism between Shi'ites and Sunnis, arguing that it only benefits Israel and the enemies of Islam. And one reason it called off its general strike earlier this week was that Hizballah has probably concluded that the government, buoyed by roughly equal support to that of the opposition and backed by the weight of the international community, will not buckle regardless of any new measures undertaken by the opposition. That was implicitly acknowledged to TIME by Qassem Hashem, an opposition parliamentarian and member of the Lebanese branch...