Perhaps a metaphor for Lebanon’s complex cultural mosaic, the fighter is married to a Christian woman, has fought in Syria for several years but says that what he and all other Shia men really want is jobs, healthcare and a decent education.
About half a kilometre from the 2,000-year-old ruins of the temple of Bacchus, the god of wine, Venus, the goddess of love, and Jupiter, the god of Roman gods, stands a larger than life cut-out of Ayatollah Khomeini, the Shia cleric who brought his idea of Islamic revolution to Iran and began to spread it in the region through its Lebanese proxy, Hezbollah.
A product of Khomeini’s ideology and a foot soldier of Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s chief, Hassan said that he chose to speak to me because he did not want the world to think that his fellow fighters or him were terrorists. The US listed Hezbollah as a terrorist organisation over two decades ago while Britain followed suit last month and banned the group in its entirety.
He said: “Take a look at these empty villages, the only work here is agriculture. It was the same when I was a child, it is the same now. But after Hezbollah came into being at least I could get some work.” Hassan was born in 1987, a time ripe with Hezbollah’s rhetoric and military success against Israel. Hassan said it was a time to believe that the Shias could rise up and not only protect Lebanon from Israel’s invasions but also fight to reclaim the Palestinian lands. Moreover, he said, Hezbollah was in a position to provide jobs to a people who did nothing else but till the farms.
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