Lebanon: Hizbullah Awaits the Next Round | Newsweek Scope

A Measured Victory in Lebanon
Christopher Dickey 6/8/2009 12:00:00 AM
President Barack Obama can flash a smile when he thinks of Lebanon today—which is something no American president has been able to do for a long, long time. The election results being tallied and retallied in Beirut are showing not just a victory for forces the United States has supported, but a humiliating defeat for those publicly backed by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. And as that fact sinks in on the Iranian public, it might even help sink Ahmadinejad's own prospects for re-election this coming Friday.
Ballots, Bullets And Suicide Bombers
Christopher Dickey 1/6/2009 12:00:00 AM
Gaza is only the beginning of the bad news that's blowing from the Middle East toward the Obama White House. Like khamsins, those blinding sandstorms that sweep out of the desert as summer approaches, the crises to come will be huge, dangerous and grimly predictable. Indeed, many of the worst problems will be tied to electoral calendars, a sort of almanac of disasters, in a region where democratization has come to mean radicalization, isolation, conflagration and where ballots have become as important as bullets and suicide bombers to the fight against peace.
MIDDLE EAST
Barricading Beirut
5/9/2008 12:00:00 AM
By Friday morning, Ras el-Nabeh was a neighborhood transformed. Shattered glass littered the streets of the predominantly Sunni enclave of Beirut. Pools of blood stained apartment floors. Hizbullah gunmen wearing yellow headbands—the apparent victors after three days of clashes--patrolled the ruins, cradling their Kalashnikovs. When a NEWSWEEK reporter stopped by on Friday, posters of Sunni leader Saad Hariri had been ripped down and replaced with images of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. A 66-year-old woman who gave her name as Bahiya surveyed the wreckage, glancing at the husk of a nearby charred car and lifted a bullet casing in her hand. The woman muttered darkly about a "conspiracy" before explaining that her neighborhood's mostly Sunni fighters were vastly outgunned by the Hizbullah guerrillas. "Those who didn't escape were arrested and taken away," she said.
MIDDLE EAST
Death of a Hizbullah Leader
Kevin Peraino 2/13/2008 12:00:00 AM
One afternoon during Israel's summer war with Lebanon 18 months ago, I met with a couple of senior Israeli intelligence officers at an office outside Tel Aviv. As Hizbullah's rockets rained down on the north of the country, most of the world was focused on trying to deconstruct the motives of the Islamist group's most prominent leader, Hassan Nasrallah. The Israeli officers, on the other hand, had zeroed in on a figure less well known to the public but infamous in intelligence circles: Imad Mughniyeh, Hizbullah's deputy secretary-general. Mughniyeh had been linked to some of the deadliest acts of terrorism on record, including a string of suicide attacks targeting Americans in Lebanon and the kidnapping of the CIA's Beirut station chief, William Buckley, in the 1980s. By the summer of 2006 conventional wisdom held that the aging terrorist was no longer a key player in Hizbullah's day-to-day operations. Still, the Israeli intel officers told me they were increasingly concerned about an elite and quickly growing new cadre of Hizbullah operatives, known as Unit 1800; according to a flow chart that one of the men slid across the table, the unit reported up the chain of command to Mughniyeh.
Who’s the Real Appeaser?
Fareed Zakaria
President Bush chose an odd place and time to claim that talking to "terrorists and radicals" in the Middle East is like appeasing Hitler in the 1930s. As Bush was speaking in Israel, his preferred strategy against such adversaries was collapsing next door in Lebanon. Over the past two weeks the Lebanese government, which is strongly backed by Washington, decided to confront the Shiite group Hizbullah by firing a loyalist who was head of security at Beirut airport and suspending the group's dedicated phone network. The Iranian-backed Hizbullah retaliated, taking over large parts of Beirut and paralyzing the country. Last week the Lebanese cabinet humiliatingly reversed itself on both fronts. Iran 1, USA 0.
TERROR
The Fox is Hunted Down
Kevin Peraino
Even on Imad Mugniyah's home turf, in the southern suburbs of Beirut, his associates didn't dare speak his name. When they wanted to arrange a meeting, they'd call their contacts in Hizbullah and quietly ask to see "Big Brother" or "the Fox." Mugniyah, who by the mid-1980s was being hunted by the world's most powerful intelligence agencies for his role in a string of bombings, kidnappings and hijackings, would choose a different safe house—and a different persona—for each encounter. Sometimes he would show up wearing a Western-style business suit, other times a simple pair of blue jeans, but never a uniform that would betray him as one of the guerrilla force's most prominent tacticians. "It wasn't just plastic surgery," says Mohammad Yassin, a Palestinian leader in Lebanon who met frequently with Mugniyah during the 1980s and 1990s. "It was masks, it was mustaches, it was hair." Sometimes the militant would playfully pinch his own cheek, signaling that it was really him. Such meetings continued, intermittently, for nearly 20 years. Then, one day in the late 1990s, according to Yassin, "he just disappeared completely."