Inside Hezbollah: How Lebanon protests are breaking ‘fear barrier’
The veteran Hezbollah fighter can’t count how many times he has been to Syria, and vivid and gruesome battle videos on his phone testify both to his efficiency as a warrior and how effective his units could be in producing corpses of Islamic State and other jihadists.
But the fighter now refuses to return to Syria, and he curses the organization to which he has devoted his life.
The Shiite militia founded to fight Israel has, he says, diluted its brand as it has expanded to battlefields as far away as Iraq and Yemen, lowered recruiting standards, and now faces a cash crunch that has kept its bedrock supporters poor.
Indeed, by one count 1,250 Hezbollah fighters have lost their lives in Syria, with some estimates more than double that. If so, more have returned from Syria in coffins than lost their lives battling Israel since the “Party of God” was founded in 1982.
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