With his black turban, reserved for the descendants of the prophet, his thin glasses and his large gray beard, Hassan Nasrallah has been the face of Hezbollah for more than three decades. At the head of this militia dedicated to the armed struggle against Israel, which had become a State above the Lebanese State, the Shiite leader had the destiny of the Cedar country in his hands, both in war and in peace. The Israeli army announced that it had killed this charismatic leader, religiously revered by his supporters and feared by his enemies as a prominent political-military strategist, on September 27, in an Israeli attack on his stronghold in the southern suburbs of Beirut.
Faced with the Arab regimes criticized for having abandoned the Palestinian cause, the “sayyed”, as he was nicknamed, embodied resistance to Israel within the Arab world. He is worshiped as a new Arab Nasser or Che Guevara, ever since his forces forced Israel to withdraw from southern Lebanon in 2000, after twenty-two years of occupation. An aura of hero enhanced in the summer of 2006, when Hezbollah defeated the troops of the Hebrew State in a brief thirty-three day war.
An object of fascination, the man enjoys dictating the history of the Middle East, with incomparable enthusiasm, in long, fluid speeches, imbued with religious references, sprinkled with touches of humor and finger threats. However, he is a hunted man, said to be hiding in a bunker beneath the southern suburbs of Beirut, to escape Israeli assassination attempts.
iranian influence
His personality was revealed throughout his rise within the militia party. Born on August 31, 1960 in a working-class neighborhood in east Beirut, into a Shiite family in southern Lebanon, Hassan Nasrallah was the eldest of nine children. As a teenager, he began to frequent mosques and admired Moussa Al-Sadr (1928-1978), a religious and political leader of Iranian origin, the origin of the Shiite awakening in Lebanon, with his Movement of the Disinherited. When, at the beginning of Lebanon’s civil war in 1975, Christian militias expelled Muslim families from their neighborhood, the Nasrallahs returned to live in their original village, Al-Bazouriye, near Tyre.
Hassan Nasrallah gives religious lessons. He joined the Amal party, founded by Moussa Al-Sadr, to counter pan-Arab and left-wing nationalists. At the age of 16 he left for Najaf, Iraq, to pursue religious studies. Sayyed Abbas Moussaoui (1952-1992), Lebanese like him, became his mentor. Mohamed Baqr Al-Sadr (1935-1980) recognized him as a brilliant student. The latter is one of the architects, along with Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini (1902-1989), of the concept of “veliyat e-faqih”the concept of primacy of religion over political power that the Islamic revolution of 1979 in Iran will impose as a model of government.
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