Hezbollah

Hezbollah حزب الله
Founded	1985
Headquarters	Beirut, Lebanon
Political orientation	Anti-imperialism Anti-Zionism

Hezbollah is an Islamic political party and militant group in Lebanon. It forms part of the Axis of Resistance against Zionism and U.S. imperialism.

History

Hezbollah liberated southern Lebanon from Israeli occupation in 2000 and again in 2006. In the Syrian Civil War, it helped defeat al Qaeda, ISIS, and USA-backed extremist groups. Hezbollah won the 2018 Lebanese elections, gaining a majority in a coalition with the Free Patriotic Movement and the Amal Movement.

Beginnings (1982-1985)

Hezbollah was created to resist the 1982 Zionist invasion of Lebanon. According to Robert Fisk the date of 8 June 1982, two days after the Zionist invasion of Lebanon, when 50 Shiite militants ambushed a Zionist armored convoy in Khalde south of Beirut, is considered by Hezbollah as the founding myth of the "Islamic Resistance in Lebanon", the group's military wing. It was in this battle, delaying the Zionist army's advance to Beirut for six days, that the future Hezbollah military chief Mustafa Badreddine made his name as a serious commander. The lightly armed Shia fighters managed to capture an "Israeli" armored vehicle on that day and paraded it in the Iranian Revolutionary Guards' forward operating base in Baalbek, Eastern Lebanon. Fisk writes:

Down at Khalde, a remarkable phenomenon had taken shape. The Shia militiamen were running on foot into the Israeli gunfire to launch grenades at the Israeli armour, actually moving to within 20 feet of the tanks to open fire at them. Some of the Shia fighters had torn off pieces of their shirts and wrapped them around their heads as bands of martyrdom as the Iranian revolutionary guards had begun doing a year before when they staged their first mass attacks against the Iraqis in the Gulf War a thousand miles to the east. When they set fire to one Israeli armoured vehicle, the gunmen were emboldened to advance further. None of us, I think, realised the critical importance of the events of Khalde that night. The Lebanese Shia were learning the principles of martyrdom and putting them into practice. Never before had we seen these men wear headbands like this; we thought it was another militia affectation but it was not. It was the beginning of a legend which also contained a strong element of truth. The Shia were now the Lebanese resistance, nationalist no doubt but also inspired by their religion. The party of God – in Arabic, the Hezbollah – were on the beaches of Khalde that night.

On 4 July 1982, the fascist Phalange paramilitaries, acting on orders from the Zionist entity, kidnapped four Iranian diplomats in Beirut, one of whom was Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) General Ahmad Motevaselian. In order to free them and also free Lebanese revolutionaries imprisoned by the Zionists, Hezbollah started kidnapping functionaries of American imperialism in Lebanon, such as CIA Director William F. Buckley and American University of Beirut President David S. Dodge.

Resistance operations such as the attacks on the US Embassy and Marine barracks in Beirut (1983) and the Zionist army headquarters in Tyre (1982) forced the American military to leave Lebanon and the Zionists to retreat to the country's South. A particularly successful operation was the hijacking of TWA Flight 847 in June 1985 which resulted in the release of 766 imprisoned Lebanese and Palestinians from Zionist jails.

On 8 March 1985 the CIA attempted to assassinate Hezbollah's spiritual leader, Ayattolah Sayyid Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah in Βeirut, but instead killed 80 innocent civilians and injured 300. On 16 February 1985 the party published its founding Manifesto.

National Liberation War (1985-2000)

From 1985 to 2000 the party was focused on creating a front of resistance forces to expel the Zionist occupiers from South Lebanon. This front was created on the basis of the unity between the party, the resistance (military) wing, and the people (reminiscent of the Maoist "Party-Army-People" line).

In 1992 the Zionists murdered the party's General Secretary, Abbas al-Musawi. Under his successor, Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah stepped up resistance operations. The military wing, commanded by Badreddine and Imad Mughniyeh, waged a national liberation war in South Lebanon in the late 1990s, ambushing elite Zionist formations in Ansariya (1997) and killing "Israeli" General Erez Gerstein (1999). They also captured Zionist army Colonel Elhanan Tannenbaum and exchanged him for 400 imprisoned Lebanese and Palestinian resistance fighters. These operations made the Zionists understand that South Lebanon was their "Vietnam", and forced them to leave the country, which was liberated by the Resistance Front led by Hezbollah in May 2000.

Humiliating the Zionists (2006)

Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah has said that Soleimani was instrumental in upgrading Hezbollah's military capabilities since he became head of the Quds Force in 1998 and helping transform Hezbollah into a fighting force capable of not only resisting but also deterring "Israel".

On 12 July 2006, Hezbollah, under the operational command of Imad Mughniyeh and Khalid Bazzi, launched a cross-border raid into Israel, destroying a tank, killing eight Zionist army soldiers and capturing two alive. "Israel" responded by 2006 Lebanon War|invading Lebanon. Soleimani on that day was in Damascus, but went to Beirut under intense "Israeli" bombing and throughout the course of the war stayed in Dahieh alongside Hezbollah's Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah and military chief Imad Mughniyeh, forming a three-man command to supervise all of Hezbollah's operations during the war.

Despite overwhelming manpower and technological advantages, the Zionists not only proved unable to deter Hezbollah's rocket attacks inside "Israel", but their elite army formations were humiliated by Hezbollah's fighters in the battles of Bint Jbeil, Maroun al-Ras and Ayta ash-Shab. Moreover, “the vast majority of the fighters who defended villages such as Ayta ash Shab, Bint Jbeil, and Maroun al-Ras were not, in fact, regular Hezbollah fighters and in some cases were not even members of Hezbollah,” and “many of Hezbollah’s best and most skilled fighters never saw action, lying in wait along the Litani River with the expectation that the IDF assault would be much deeper and arrive much faster than it did.” Yet another indication of "Israel’s" reversal of fortune was that, unlike any of its previous armed conflicts, in the final stages of the 2006 war it fought not in defiance of a U.N. ceasefire resolution but in the hope of a U.N. resolution to rescue it.

From the end of the 2006 war, Soleimani scrupulously worked on refurbishing Hezbollah’s missile force to make it a strike force that would deter "Israel" from attacking Iran’s nuclear facilities. Soleimani invested great resources in filling Hezbollah’s missile stocks. After 2006, Soleimani expended most of his efforts in converting a large part of the Hezbollah missiles into precision missiles. To that end, Soleimani built an operational, technological infrastructure in Syria from which he transferred missiles to Lebanon in convoys. When the missiles’ routes between Syria and Lebanon were uncovered, the Quds commander decided to build precision-targeting factories for Hezbollah in Lebanon. At first, the secret facilities were in the Beirut area, but when "Israel" discovered them, they were moved to the Baalbek region.

Fighting al-Qaeda and ISIS in Syria (2013-2017)

Hezbollah played an important role in defeating al-Qaeda and ISIS in Syria. Badreddine, the hero of 1982, 1997 and 2006, was also the commander of the Al-Otaiba ambush in February 2014 near Damascus, killing 200 al-Qaeda militants in a span of less than ten minutes. Hezbollah fighters under the command of Shahid Mustafa Badreddine mined an entire road with several IEDs, and waited for a column of hundreds of al-Qaeda terrorists to approach the road, which had been under surveillance for days. When the al-Qaeda terrorists finally marched onto the designated road, Hezbollah detonated the IEDs and opened heavy machine gun fire on the survivors. Almost 200 Western-backed al-Qaeda terrorists were killed in the ambush, making it one of the best planned and most successful ambushes by a non-state actor in military history.