Sheikh Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah at one time lived in South Beirut with his wife Fatima Yassin and five children: Muhammad Hadi, Muhammad Jawad, Zeinab, Muhammad Ali and Muhammad Mahdi. His eldest son Muhammad Hadi was killed by Israeli forces in Jabal al-Rafei in southern Lebanon in September 1997.
Nasrallah, born in 1960, grew up in a neighborhood of squatters and refugees called Sharshabouk, in the Karantina area on the eastern outskirts of Beirut. There was no running water and no electricity. Houses were often crude shacks made from tin sheets and wood. [...]Nasrallah's father ran a small grocery, and his former neighbors recall the father as a devout, trustworthy man. But Nasrallah's mother was the force in the family, according to Syrian filmmaker Nabil Mulhim, who interviewed her for a documentary about the Hizbullah leader: "The strong words and the soft face, those are hers," says Mulhim. "And the self-satisfaction. And the toughness."
The boy's parents scraped their money together to send him to private school. Khalid Mustafa, a former classmate, remembers Nasrallah at the age of 12: "He didn't talk without thinking. He was mature, like a 35-year-old." Nasrallah often wore an oversize coat and pants to school and didn't play soccer or other sports. Most kids could tell he was poor, and gangs of Sunni bullies tyrannized everyone in the neighborhood. "All the Shiites were afraid," says Mustafa.
In 1975, when Lebanon's long civil war began, one of it's first battlegrounds was the slums of Karantina. The family was forced the family to move to their ancestral home in Bassouriyeh, near Tyre, where Hassan Nasrallah terminated his secondary education at the public school of Sour. It was during this time, Nasrallah and his brother joined the Amal Movement, a political group representing Shiites in Lebanon. Later, "in the mid-1970s, he moved to a Shiite Hawza (Islamic Seminary) in the Iraqi city of Najaf to study Qura’anic divine sciences, completing the first stage of his studies in 1978 before being forced to leave by the Iraqi authorities." He returned to Lebanon, where he studied at the school of Amal’s leader Sheikh Abbas al-Musawi, later being selected as Amal's political delegate in Beqaa, and making him a member of the central political office.
After the Israeli invasion in 1982, Nasrallah joined Hezbollah which had been formed by Iranian Revolutionary Guard who came to fight the Israelis along side their Shi'a brothers. The resistance was focused on the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon and the Bekaa Valley.
In 1989 Nasrallah, resumed his efforts to become a religious jurisprudent by moving to the sacred Iranian city of Qom to further his studies. Nasrallah believes that Islam holds the solution to the problems of any society, once saying, “With respect to us, briefly, Islam is not a simple religion including only praises and prayers, rather it is a divine message that was designed for humanity, and it can answer any question man might ask concerning his general and private life. Islam is a religion designed for a society that can revolt and build a state.â€
Nasrallah never rose high in the scholarly ranks that confer authority on a cleric. "I was mesmerized," remembers a fellow mullah who knew him in Iran but didn't want to be quoted by name criticizing him. "He is more than charismatic if you listen to him—he is mythic. But as soon as you start asking him [theological] questions, you're surprised how little knowledge he has."
Nasrallah's interests were more pragmatic, more political, more rooted in worldly conflict. "He's a very good student of everything to do with Israel: the politicians, the Army," says Timur Goksel, a former senior adviser to the U.N. forces in Lebanon who has met the Hizbullah leader dozens of times. For religious guidance, Nasrallah relied increasingly on the heads of the Iranian revolution: Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, whom he idolized, and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who in 1989 would become Khomeini's successor as Iran's spiritual leader and supreme political authority.
Hizbullah became a rival with Amal, for the leadership of the Shi'a in south Lebanon. The difference between Sunni and Shi'a beliefs revolve around the role and power of the ayatollahs. So disagreements over the ayatollahs role and which to follow led, in 1988, to skirmishes among the militias broke out into open combat and Nasrallah was on Hizbullah's front lines. This conflict was intensely personal because Nasrallah's older brother, who used the nom de guerre Jihad al Husseini, was on the side of Amal.
"He was injured in the fighting with Hizbullah," says Humayed, his face flushing red from the memory. "You can imagine the suffering of the mother and the father. One son on one side and one son on the other side." The fratricidal battles among the Shiites were savage, with reports of corpses being mutilated. "All of Amal against all of Hizbullah," says Humayed.
To this day, the relationship between Nasrallah and his brother is strained and brother now keeps a low profile.
Nasrallah's conduct in the fight against Amal added to his standing within Hizbullah. When, in February 1992, an Israeli "targeted assassination" killed Hizbullah leader Sheik Abbas al-Musawi, and Nasrallah took over as the group's leader at 32 years old.
Within days of Musawi's death and Nasrallah's ascendancy, Hizbullah launched its first Katyusha rocket attacks on Israel. Within weeks, Israel's embassy in Buenos Aires was blown up by a suicide bomber. Although Nasrallah has always denied responsibility not only for that attack but also for a subsequent hit on a Jewish center in Argentina in 1994, those operations are often cited by Israel and the United States as examples of Hizbullah's long reach as a terrorist organization—and of the group's penchant for revenge.
Under Nasrallah's leadership, Hezbollah became a serious opponent of the Israel Defense Forces in Southern Lebanon, managing to improve the organization's military capabilities and increasing the killing rate to approximately two dozen Israeli soldiers per year. Hezbollah's military campaigns of the late 1990s were believed to be one of the main factors that led to the Israeli decision to withdraw from Southern Lebanon in 2000, thus ending 18 years of occupation. Consequently, Nasrallah is widely credited in Lebanon and the Arab world for ending the Israeli occupation in Southern Lebanon, something which has greatly bolstered the party's political standing within Lebanon..
Nasrallah also played a major role in a complex prisoner exchange deal between Israel and Hezbollah in 2004, resulting in hundreds of Palestinian and Hezbollah prisoners being freed and bodies returned to Lebanon. The agreement was described across the Arab world as a great victory for Hezbollah with Nasrallah being personally praised for achieving these gains
Nasrallah, in part, built his leadership by leading Hizbullah into social and educational programs, softening the enforcement of strict dress codes for women and bans against drinking and playing cards.
By 1993, Nasrallah was meeting with the Maronite Christian patriarch and trying to shore up relations with all the communities in a country barely beginning its recovery from 15 years of sectarian war. Nasrallah, even then, was staking out his position as a national leader.
But the cornerstone of his politics and his power remained resistance to the Israeli occupation of Lebanese land—a struggle that had gained little ground in the years before he took charge. The military strategy developed under his leadership was one of guerrilla warfare, decentralized and working closely with the local population. Very closely. In September 1997, Nasrallah's own son, 18-year-old Hadi, was killed in a clash against the Israelis, who took his body away with them. The next night Nasrallah spoke at a Hizbullah anniversary rally. "We, in the leadership of Hizbullah, do not spare our children and save them for the future," he told the crowd. "We pride ourselves when our sons reach the front line. And stand, heads high, when they fall [as] martyrs."
It took Nasrallah almost a year to win the return of his son's corpse. The Israelis also freed 60 Lebanese prisoners and handed over the remains of 39 other fighters. In exchange, Nasrallah delivered the body of an Israeli naval commando who had been killed in a 1997 Hizbullah ambush. In 2000, to gain the freedom of still more prisoners, Hizbullah ambushed and captured three Israeli soldiers and abducted a retired Israeli colonel who had been lured to Beirut. The negotiations, through a German intermediary, lasted more than three years, eventually winning the release of 400 prisoners—not only Lebanese but Palestinians and other Arabs as well.
When Nasrallah captured two Israeli soldiers this July, he may have thought new negotiations would begin. But he also knew that his war with Israel is what gave him his power and prestige.
When Israel withdrew from South Lebanon in May 2000, Nasrallah found himself for the first time a hero of the Arab world, the first to "defeat" the Israelis. He was recognized as the equal of any of Lebanon's constitutional leaders. Goksel even arranged a meeting for him with U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan. Nasrallah also developed a close relationship with the late Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, sometimes meeting him two or three times a week. "You can make business with this guy," the billionaire Hariri would say.
So for Israel to commit itself to containing Hizbullah, they are taking on the leading political organization serving the south Lebanese, an overwhelminingly Shi'a population and 40% of the Lebanese population. Hizbullah functions as the de facto government of south Lebanon and has been adding to it's stature by distributing Iranian money and volunteer labor to the residents of south Lebanon now that the Israelis are withdrawing.
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