Word: lebanons
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...even in Lebanon, Nasrallah isn't universally adored. Many Lebanese consider it a heroic but colossal blunder on Nasrallah's part to have provoked the Israelis by having his fighters stage a cross-border raid in July and kidnap two Israeli soldiers. War damage in Lebanon is assessed at $3.6 billion. More than 1,200 Lebanese died, and 3,700 were wounded. Another 974,184 were left homeless. Says parliamentarian Saad Hariri, son of the slain former Prime Minister: "When it starts raining and getting cold, people will realize what a huge mistake it was for Hizballah to start this...
...Cedar Revolution crashing down? Part of the answer rests outside Lebanon's borders. During the summer's war with Israel, Hizballah relied heavily on the Syrians for logistic, military and financial support. According to Israeli officials, Western diplomats in Beirut and Arab sources, Damascus acted as a conduit for Iranian weapons to reach Hizballah, allowing the group to fight the Israelis to a standstill...
...payback time. Lebanese officials, along with Israeli military sources and Western diplomats, say that while Syrian President Bashar Assad may be willing to help pull the Bush Administration out of the Iraqi quicksand, he hopes to exact concessions that would allow him to treat Lebanon, where the Syrian regime has vast financial interests, as his private turf. And according to these same sources, he is unnerved by a U.N.-sponsored inquiry that implicates top Syrian officials in the February 2005 car bombing that killed former Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri and 22 others. Assad is hoping that the international probe will...
Whether Hizballah succeeds depends on how long it can capitalize on the p.r. boost it gained from waging war with Israel. Among Lebanon's downtrodden Shi'ites, Hizballah leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah now enjoys mythical status. The many faces of Nasrallah appear everywhere. At times he is portrayed as a jolly preacher, a wise scholar or a glowering warrior with his turban like a black storm cloud overhead. When a starstruck woman requested the abaya, or robe, that he wore during the war, Nasrallah obliged, and since then TV crews have been following the woman across Lebanon as she displays...
Hizballah was badly swatted by the Israelis too. The Israeli military says it has the names of over 550 Hizballah fighters who were killed, including 400 belonging to the Iranian-trained élite special forces unit, the Nasr Brigade. In Lebanon, the thinking is that those numbers are probably inflated, that many of the dead were militants unaffiliated with Hizballah who grabbed a gun and joined the fighting. Whatever the body count, Hizballah has lost assets. As part of a cease-fire agreement, 10,000 U.N. peacekeepers and 15,000 Lebanese troops moved into southern Lebanon, long an exclusive preserve...