Financial Times: Hezbollah’s Downfall Caused By Involvement In Syrian Civil War

JERUSALEM (VINnews) — The British-based Financial Times estimates that Hezbollah’s downfall was caused by its involvement in the Syrian civil war, fighting alongside Syrian president Bashar El-Assad. The newspaper claimed that the fighting abroad changed Hezbollah “from a movement focused on resisting Israel from Lebanon into an attacking overseas force and a regional arm of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards’ overseas Quds Force.”

However the war in Syria damaged Hezbollah’s image as a protector of Lebanon against the Zionist entity and pitted it against fellow Muslims,thus eroding support among Sunnis and others around the Middle East who came to see it as a sectarian force propping up a hated dictator.

“Hezbollah’s role started to change”, said Hanin Ghaddar, a senior fellow at The Washington Institute. “They were no longer a Lebanese resistance group. They became Quds force’s regional arm.”

Hezbollah proved to be crucial to Assad, who utilized their troops to help him regain control of Syria and crush small pockets of resistance such as Idlib, now packed with millions displaced from former opposition areas that Hezbollah fought to return to Assad’s control. Many in Idlib celebrated wildly after Nasrallah’s elimination on Friday, remembering well his role in their current woes.

When Assad brutally put down mass protests and civil war broke out in Syria in 2011, Nasrallah was faced with a difficult choice: potentially lose the friendly, Iran-aligned Assad regime to a likely hostile Sunni opposition government, or enter the battle and protect Hezbollah’s supply lines of weapons from Iran. He eventually decided to deploy about 10,000 men in the neighbouring country, according to multiple analysts, a significant amount of the group’s fighting force.

Supporters of Hezbollah argue that it helped push back the jihadist militant groups that had emerged from the wreckage of Syria’s opposition forces. The most powerful was IS (Isis), which ultimately over-ran entire cities in eastern Syria and Iraq before being defeated by a US-coordinated coalition. But critics saw Hezbollah’s intervention as a crude attempt to wage war on Sunnis under the guise of protecting the ruling Alawis, who are related to the Shiite stream of Islam.

“[Hizbollah] did all these ugly things,” said Bassam Barabandi, a former Syrian diplomat under the Assad regime who defected to the opposition. “They made it a sectarian war, 100 per cent.”

Backing the Syrian dictator, who had been expelled by the Arab League and at the time was reviled around the Arab world, was an enormous gamble for Nasrallah. It expended much of the goodwill he had earned from withstanding a month-long Israeli offensive in 2006, when the group was widely praised for defying Israel and seen as victorious.

It also brought them numerous enemies, and the expansion of their activities also led to infiltration of their ranks by numerous intelligence elements, who may have been responsible for Israel’s cutting edge ability to target Hezbollah’s commanders and weapon facilities.

Ghaddar says that the war in Syria exhausted Hezbollah and also caused them to neglect their main priority of opposing Israel.

It “neglected the Israeli border while Israel was focusing on them,” said Ghaddar. “Israel was looking at Hizbollah as a priority, but Hizbollah was distracted by Syria.”