Lebanon Hezbollah rises from shadows into regional force

Hezbollah has risen from a shadowy group established during Lebanon’s 1975-90 civil war to a heavily armed force with big sway over the Lebanese State. Governments, including the United States, deem it a terrorist organisation. Iran’s Revolutionary Guards founded Hezbollah in 1982 to export its Islamic Revolution and fight Israeli forces that had invaded Lebanon. Sharing Tehran’s Shia Islamist ideology, Hezbollah recruited among Lebanese Shia Muslims. Groups that Lebanese security officials and Western intelligence have said were linked to Hezbollah launched suicide attacks on Western embassies and targets and kidnapped Westerners in the 1980s. One group, Islamic Jihad, was thought to be led by Imad Moughniyah, a top Hezbollah commander who was killed in a car bomb in Syria in […]

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