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Hizballah's victory was hardly a surprise. Its Shi'ite militiamen, who number in the thousands and are armed by Syria and Iran, have survived battle with the mighty Israeli army, while the supporters of Prime Minister Fouad Siniora's government are poorly armed amateurs on neighborhood patrol. Neither the police nor the military--which has received hundreds of millions of dollars in arms and training from the U.S.--dared to lift a finger against Hizballah. Long after the militiamen had withdrawn from the streets, the army said it would intervene in any ongoing clashes but added that it would...
Sounds familiar? Think of Iraq, where a U.S.-backed government is bunkered down in the Green Zone, fighting fitfully against Shi'ite militias. Or of Palestine, where despite U.S. support and aid, President Mahmoud Abbas is powerless against the Iran-backed Hamas in Gaza. When dealing with internecine Arab conflict, the Bush Administration has never been able to back the winning team; it invariably attaches unrealistic expectations to moderate parties and underestimates extremist groups. The lesson, says Bilal Saab, a Lebanon expert at the Brookings Institution, is that "you can't pick sides in a civil...
...National Accordance Front has long accused Maliki, a Shi'ite, of being too much of a sectarian partisan to offer evenhanded leadership in a coalition government comprising Sunnis, Shi'ites and Kurds. That was a fair criticism until November 2006, when the Sadrists, too, began a boycott of Mailiki's government because the Prime Minister refused to press for an American withdrawal. Tensions between the two formerly allied Shi'ite factions built until open clashes erupted in Basra in March, when Iraqi forces attacked Mahdi Army havens there. The move sparked months of fighting that spread across southern Iraq...
Jaafar's coffin, covered in the yellow emblem of the militant Shi'ite Hizballah, is borne aloft on the shoulders of six comrades dressed in camouflage uniforms and green berets. Dozens of armed Hizballah militants march alongside, draped in green webbing heavy with ammunition pouches, grenades and walkie-talkies. They carry their rifles at chest height, baseball caps shading their grim faces as they scan the surrounding area for potential trouble. Jaafar was killed two days earlier - wounded by a sniper and executed with a bullet in the head, according to residents -during heavy clashes between Hizballah and the Druze...
Qmatiyeh is one of two predominantly Shi'ite villages nestled in a mainly Druze area at the northern end of the Chouf mountains. The village's isolation from the densely Shi'ite-populated areas of southern Beirut, clearly visible from here and where Hizballah holds sway, is a source of unease for the residents who look to the Shi'ite group for protection. "I don't think it's calm enough yet to feel confident," says Hussam Najjar, a criminal court magistrate. With his pressed gray suit, blue tie, sunglasses and neatly trimmed mustache, Najjar looked out of place among...