How Hezbollah turned Lebanon into a mafia state

Group does not directly hold office but its stranglehold means few dare challenge it openly

Lokman Slim – intellectual, writer and Hezbollah critic – eased his frame into the front of the black Toyota hire car and pointed it in the direction of home.
It was February 2021 and Slim had been visiting a childhood friend in his ancestral village in southern Lebanon.
He was well aware that every journey he undertook was fraught with danger. More than a dozen other prominent critics of Hezbollah or its allies in the Syrian government had met violent ends over the previous 16 years.
To make matters worse, Slim was a Shia Muslim, albeit a secular, liberal one. For a Shia movement such as Hezbollah, taking criticism from Lebanon’s Sunni Muslim, Christian or Druze communities was one thing. For a fellow Shia to oppose the group openly was naked treachery.
In the preceding months, the threats had worsened. Posters had been glued to the door of his house calling him a traitor. Hezbollah supporters would gather in his garden to issue catcalls.
US diplomats had quietly urged him to leave the country, even offering him a green card. Slim refused, instead issuing a statement saying that if he did die, Hassan Nasrallah, the Hezbollah leader who would eventually be killed in an Israeli air strike late last month, should be held responsible.
Slim only made it a few hundred yards from his friend’s house. According to a private forensic investigation paid for by his family, he sustained a gunshot wound to his back before being dragged out of the car, forced to kneel and shot five times in the head.
Hezbollah denied involvement in the murder but celebrated Slim’s death. “Losing some people is actually a win” Nasrallah’s son Jawad tweeted shortly after the murder was announced, adding the hashtag “#NoRegrets”.
As is invariably the case following an assassination in Lebanon, the police professed to be baffled, initially suggesting that Slim might have committed suicide before closing the case within three months, declaring it unsolvable.
Hezbollah, which is a political party as well as an armed group, does not directly hold office in Lebanon, but it has such a stranglehold on the state that few would ever dare challenge it openly.
Despite opinion polls suggesting that just 30 per cent of Lebanon’s population trusts the movement – a figure that falls to 9 per cent for Sunnis and 6 per cent for Christians – the price of open opposition is simply too great to pay.
There are those in Lebanon who will privately echo the assessments made by foreign think tanks and human rights groups, which have accused Hezbollah of state plunder, drug trafficking, organised crime and the killing of its critics. But, with the movement categorically denying all such allegations, they do so in a whisper.
Hezbollah did not always exert such a fearsome grip on society.
Its power can be traced back to a peace agreement that ended Lebanon’s vicious civil war in 1990 and required the militias responsible for the slaughter to disarm.
Under a dubious interpretation of the accord, Hezbollah was allowed to keep its weapons to fight the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon.
It is an exemption that has haunted Lebanon ever since.
Hezbollah’s stature was cemented after Israel withdrew from Lebanon in 2000, earning the group respect and gratitude among many.
Meanwhile, the movement had increasingly positioned itself as the champion of the Shia minority – giving it a foothold that allowed it to gain broader political influence.
“Hezbollah is strong because it was able to convince one Lebanese sect that they are their saviour and their guarantor against going back to being the marginalised community they once were,” says Ibrahim Mneimneh, a Sunni MP.
Forging alliances with other Shia movements as well as Michel Aoun, the self-proclaimed political leader of Lebanon’s Christians, Hezbollah rapidly gained the power to veto government decisions it did not like.
It has even often been able to dictate which candidates should hold the posts of prime minister and president, which, under Lebanon’s confessional system, are held by a Sunni and a Christian, respectively.
Sheltering behind parliamentary allies, Hezbollah is able to wield political power largely without accountability.
It has also created a parallel state, hollowing out Lebanon’s weak institutions, replacing senior public servants with its own loyalists and mounting a takeover of the security, customs and border apparatus, analysts say.
This has not only ensured the flow of weapons and explosives first from Syria and then from Iran, it has also allowed the group to expand its revenue-generating capabilities in the dark economy.
An investigation published last year by the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting project alleged that Hezbollah and the Syrian army had been enabling the cross-border smuggling of captagon, a powerful recreational drug that is having a devastating impact across the Middle East.
The Syrian captagon trade earns three times the combined revenue of the Mexican drugs cartels, according to the UK Government. Hezbollah has denied playing any role in narcotics production or smuggling.
Whatever the case, the group has never been short of cash it needs to fund a generous welfare programme that shores up its support among Shia Muslims – although it also gains revenues from lucrative state contracts it ensures are awarded to Hezbollah-affiliated companies.
Efforts to curtail its financial power have long come to nought. Shortly after Blom, a Lebanese bank, closed accounts linked to Hezbollah in 2016, a bomb gutted its headquarters. Again, Hezbollah denied involvement.
Acts of violence linked to the group have undoubtedly helped to alienate the movement from non-Shias, with Sunni Muslims particularly angered by the 2005 bomb that killed Rafik Hariri, the revered former Sunni prime minister – which many blamed on Hezbollah and its ally, the Assad regime in Syria.
UN prosecutors indicted Mustafa Badreddine, the head of Hezbollah’s external operations, for the assassination but charges against him at a special tribunal in the Netherlands were dropped after he was killed in a bomb attack in Damascus in 2016.
Two years later, Hezbollah further enraged Sunni opinion by naming a Beirut street after Badreddine – a decision that Saad Hariri, former prime minister of Lebanon, tellingly described merely as “regrettable”.
Allies said Mr Hariri did not wish to antagonise Hezbollah by going any further, and that he had acknowledged the need to “sacrifice justice for stability”.
With its popularity in decline, Hezbollah has continued to shore up its position through demonstrations of force, including through showdowns on the street.
In 2008 its gunmen seized control of Sunni areas in Beirut to prevent a government attempt to shut down its internal communications network, leading to clashes that killed 160 people.
Three years ago, its fighters were again involved in deadly clashes with rival militias after protesters took to the streets to accuse Hezbollah of blocking a judicial investigation into the 2020 Beirut port blast that killed 220 people and left large areas of the city in ruins.
Public regard for Hezbollah waned further when the movement began firing rockets into Israel last year in solidarity with Hamas, something that was bitterly opposed by most.
Ironically, however, several MPs have told The Telegraph that the Israeli attacks on Lebanese soil over the past three weeks risk restoring the movement’s popularity.
“We were strongly opposed to Hezbollah dragging Lebanon into this conflict,” said Jimmy Jabbour, a Christian MP.
“But now that Israel is hitting Hezbollah, hitting civilians and bombing buildings where children are living, we have to agree that Hezbollah has the right to defend itself and Lebanon against war crimes.”
Yet, when the dust eventually settles, there might just be an opportunity to defang Hezbollah and reshape the Lebanese political landscape, according Marc Daou, a progressive Druze MP.
“Hezbollah’s image of infallibility has been shattered in recent days,” he said. “The unwavering support of its regional backers in Syria and Iran is in question.
“Everyone is questioning Hezbollah’s ability to manage this war. No one believes it is capable of effectively fighting Israel any more. As a result, Hezbollah is going to have to look for a political solution with its opponents. It is going to have to learn the language of compromise.”