Historical Dictionary of Terrorism Third Edition

HEZBOLLAH • 243“allies” from Lebanon, to bringing leaders of the Phalangists to justicefor alleged crimes against fellow Lebanese, and to “inviting” thepeople of Lebanon to adopt an Islamic government but through theirfree consent rather than by any coercion. The Hezbollah militia hasalso sought continually to expel Israeli forces from Lebanon. DespiteIsrael’s withdrawal from southern Lebanon in 2000, Hezbollah maintainsthat the Shebaa Farms, a 10-square-mile (25 square kilometer)margin of land abutting the 1967 Lebanese-Syria border within theIsraeli-occupied Golan Heights, is part of Lebanese territory, due to abilateral Lebanese-Syrian accord in 2000, and therefore continues tofight Israeli troops along the borders between the territories occupiedby Lebanon and Israel. Until the 1989 Taif Agreement, Hezbollah alsoopposed the older Amal militia. The name Hezbollah, meaning Partyof God, is taken from the Koran (Surat al Mujadilah, verse 22) as aterm describing the true Muslim believers. It was first used to identifythe mass followers of the Imam Ruhallah Khomeini in Iran, where thename was applied to organized mobs deployed by the Islamic RevolutionaryGuards Corps (IRGC) and the Islamic Republic Party againstopponents of the Islamic Republic in Iran. Once the IRGC units arrivedin Lebanon, they gave the same name to the militias they organizedthere, as was confirmed by the confession of a Lebanese Hezbollahmember arrested in Turkey on 10 April 1987.Hezbollah was established by an IRGC contingent of 2,000 trainersand soldiers dispatched to Lebanon in the summer of 1982, ostensiblyto fight Israeli troops there. In fact, the IRGC unit remained in theBaalbak region and began organizing malcontents defecting fromthe Amal Shi’ite militia. Iran consistently disavowed direct controlover Hezbollah, and formal leadership lay in the hands of a Lebanese“Consultative Assembly” consisting of ranking Lebanese clergymen,such as Muhammad Hussein Fadlullah, and key laymen, such as HusseinMusawi. This Consultative Assembly met only infrequently from1983 until 1987, usually in the presence of either the military attachéof the Iranian embassy in Damascus or the Iranian chargé d’affaires inBeirut. Following the Israeli assassination of Musawi in 1992 and tensionsbetween Iran and Fadlullah, who refused to endorse Khomeini’sidea of Islamic government, the charismatic cleric Hassan Nasrallahwas promoted by Iran to become the most prominent public figure inHezbollah. Since 1985 Hezbollah has been reorganized as a politicalparty in addition to being a militia group and maintains an extensive