Hassan Nasrallah is dead . The 64-year-old leader of Hezbollah , the Iranian-backed, Lebanese-based terrorist group, was ki lled in an Israeli airstrike in Beirut on Sept. 27. To a large extent, Nasrallah helped build the modern Middle East , with all its wars and accompanying horrors. Few men have spread more death and destruction.
The late British historian Paul Johnson famously said that Josef Stalin “was a monster, one of the outstanding monsters that civilization has yet produced.” The same might be said for Nasrallah, who, with help from the Islamic Republic of Iran , constructed one of the greatest monsters that the Middle East has ever seen, responsible for mass murder and a lengthy list of war crimes. Hezbollah is a monster, and it can be said that Nasrallah was its Dr. Frankenstein.
Nasrallah led Hezbollah for more than three decades, shaping it into what U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage once called the “A team of terrorists.” His leadership was essential to the group’s rise.
Nasrallah was born in Beirut in 1960, into a very different Middle East, one in which Arab nationalism, not Islamism, was the dominant force. Beirut, a port city renowned for its architecture and culture, enjoyed a deserved, if sometimes inflated, reputation as the “Paris of the Middle East.” At the time, Lebanon was still governed by a multiconfessional structure, in which power was shared between Christians and Sunni and Shiite Muslims. This political arrangement was already teetering at the time of Nasrallah’s birth. He would play a key role in forever shattering it.
The so-called Cairo Agreement of 1969, brokered by Egyptian dictator Gamal Abdel Nasser, gave the Palestine Liberation Organization a safe haven in Lebanon after it was expelled from Jordan. The arrival of the terrorist group upset the tenuous balance of power in the country, eventually leading to a bloody civil war, which lasted from 1975 until 1990. Lebanon’s collapse would provide a new power, the Islamic Republic of Iran, with a terrible opportunity.
In 1979, Iran’s Islamic Revolution took place. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini seized power, installing a brutal and messianic regime in place of the pro-Western government of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. As the historian Ray Takeyh has noted , Khomeini and his minions believed that they were launching a new “Islamic epoch” with themselves at the epicenter. Like other totalitarian revolutionary movements, such as communism, the Islamic Republic was both utopian and imperialist, with Khomeini calling for a “revolution without borders.” Upon its founding, the Shiite cleric declared: “We don’t recognize Iran as ours, as all Muslim countries are part of us.” Nasrallah would soon become one of the foremost foot soldiers in Khomeini’s war against both the West and the established order in the Middle East.
The son of a grocer who had fled Beirut during the civil war, Nasrallah spent the late 1970s studying in a seminary in Najaf, Iraq , which was then home to radical Iranian clerics forced out by the shah. He returned to Lebanon in 1978 alongside his mentor Abbas al Musawi, who founded a religious school where Nasrallah would teach. Both men were part of the Shiite Amal Movement during Lebanon’s civil war.
In 1982, Israel launched Operation Peace for Galilee, designed to root out PLO terrorists perpetrating attacks from southern Lebanon. Khomeini’s forces had been training in Lebanon for years, even before they had seized power in Iran. Indeed, the PLO even helped train the precursor to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the praetorian force of Khomeini’s revolution. Musawi and Nasrallah were star students, forming a group that in its early years went by a variety of names but is known today as Hezbollah.
Hezbollah’s arrival on the scene was bloody, perpetrating attacks against U.S. and Israeli forces in the region and kidnapping, and often torturing and murdering, both critics and foreigners, including U.S. officials and journalists. Like Iran, Hezbollah’s lodestar, its animating ideology , was the destruction of the Jewish state.
Israel was slow to wake up to the threat, but eventually, the country killed Musawi in 1992. His onetime pupil Nasrallah took the helm , becoming the organization’s secretary general. Nasrallah took Hezbollah global. The terrorist group had perpetrated skyjackings in the 1980s and had slowly constructed global operations, but under Nasrallah, it grew into something more, effectively taking over Lebanon and carrying out attacks from the shores of South America to Europe and beyond.
Nasrallah turned Hezbollah into the tip of Iran’s spear, Tehran’s crown jewel. Under his leadership, Hezbollah amassed more men, materiel, weapons, and wealth than any other terrorist group and wielded them for a longer period of time.
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Hezbollah’s capabilities, reach, and longevity surpassed other Islamist groups, including al Qaeda, the Islamic State, Hamas, Boko Haram, and others. Osama bin Laden led al Qaeda for roughly two decades, until his death in 2011. By contrast, Nasrallah led Hezbollah with an iron fist for more than three decades. Under Nasrallah, Hezbollah blew up Jewish community centers and embassies in Argentina, waged a decadeslong war of attrition against Israel, and murdered Middle Easterners en masse to ensure Syrian dictator Bashar Assad’s grip on power. The blood of thousands is on his hands.
Nasrallah was a seminal figure in the history of global terrorism, his influence surpassed only by Khomeini himself. His life spanned the rise of Islamism and the destruction of the modern Middle East. Hopefully his end will be the beginning of its end.
Sean Durns is a senior research analyst for CAMERA, the 65,000-member, Boston-based Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis.
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