Matthew Levitt is the Fromer-Wexler Senior Fellow and director of the Reinhard Program on Counterterrorism and Intelligence at The Washington Institute.
Articles & Testimony
A primer on how the group has achieved its dominant position in Lebanese politics, engaged in terrorist activity worldwide, and played a major role in the Syrian war.
Since emerging in the early 1980s, Hizbullah has sought to present itself as a national Lebanese resistance organisation. Stepping into the vacuum left by the collapse of the Lebanese government during the civil war, it has provided services not only to the Shia community, but to those of other faiths as well.
Yet at the same time it has been active in terrorist operations ranging from bombings to hijackings, and its claim to act only in the interests of the Lebanese is wearing increasingly thin with its activity in the past decade. Between provoking an Israeli invasion in 2006, turning its guns on fellow Lebanese in a political dispute in 2008, and now fighting openly in a sectarian war in Syria (alongside Persian Iran, no less), much of Hizbullah's formerly pan-Arab support is dropping away. Hizbullah has always been committed to velayat e-faqih; it may at last be coming back to haunt them...
