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Hizballah, the Shi'ite Muslim Party of God, arrived publicly on the Middle East scene a decade ago in a hail of gunfire: young fighters, armed with grenades and shouting "Allahu Akbar!" captured an invading Israeli armored personnel carrier near Beirut in June 1982 and paraded it through the city. They took their name from a verse in the Koran, "Lo, the Party of God, they are victorious," and their money, weapons and inspiration from fundamentalist sponsors in Tehran...
Hizballah decided to change its image two years ago. It opened a press office and vaunted its large, modern hospitals in Baalbek and Beirut and social programs that had created widespread Shi'ite loyalty. Last year eight of its candidates won seats in Lebanon's 128-member parliament. Symbolizing the new look, groups of Hizballah supporters lined the main road between Beirut and southern Lebanon last week, holding out plastic boxes to collect relief contributions from motorists...
...northern sections of the swamp are already dry. Most of the rice farming population has left. In the central marshes, the Shi'ite stronghold, the water level has dropped as much as 18 ft. Inhabitants now have to dig wells to find drinking water; in one attempt, villagers struck oil instead...
...ite rebels in Tehran say the fish, buffalo and rice that were the staples of life are gone. They claim the Iraqi army is using poison to kill marsh wildlife, and they show videotapes of hundreds of fish floating belly up on the brackish waters. Emma Nicholson, a British M.P. who has made three trips to the marshes, says the inhabitants can no longer sustain themselves. In the past eight months, more than 350 villages have been destroyed by shell and rocket fire. "The only way to live in the marshes today is to remain alone and move every...
While rebels claim they have been successful in attacking the canal's system of levees, dikes and sluice gates, others within the Shi'ite community say the system is too vast and too easily repaired to be destroyed by the rebels' sporadic attacks. One guerrilla leader admitted that a recent raiding party had detonated more than 1,000 lbs. of TNT in one of the bigger earthworks with little effect. "It just made a small hole that released some water," he said, "but it was repaired in two days using a diesel shovel...