As leader of a militia that has been at war for every day of its existence, Hassan Nasrallah was no stranger to danger. But one summer night in 2006, he must have felt death to be particularly close. He was in southern Beirut, in a command building of Hezbollah, with two of the most important men in his life: Qasem Soleimani, then head of the Quds Force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) and Imad Mughniyeh, Hezbollah’s gifted operational chief. The former carried a message of support from another important man: Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
But even the expressed support of a major head of state didn’t seem to be enough to save Hezbollah. Beirut had turned into a living hell with Israel’s incessant bombardment, the sky lighting up with fire everywhere. They seemed to be surrounded on all sides. As they left the building, an Israeli MK drone hovered above their heads. It felt like it was a simple order away from taking their lives.
Lease of life
But the command never came, and all three men lived – at least for the time being. They must have felt a divine hand saved them, but we now know the likelier reason. Israel’s then-prime minister, Ehud Olmert, had the cooperation of US President George W Bush in targeting field operators like Mughniyeh, who was responsible for killing hundreds of Americans in Lebanon in the 1980s. But killing a leading Iranian general like Soleimani and a political leader like Nasrallah went beyond the pale. They thus received a lease on life, at least for a while.
Mughniyeh was killed a year and a half later in an Israeli-American operation in Damascus. But the other two didn’t have long either. Soleimani was assassinated by a US drone strike in Baghdad in 2020, and on 27 September 2024, Hassan Nasrallah was killed in a massive Israeli strike that levelled down several blocks in Dahiya, the Shiite-majority southern suburbs of Beirut, which has long been a base for Hezbollah. He was 64 years old.
In his 32 years as secretary general of Hezbollah, Nasrallah turned Hezbollah into a cornerstone of Lebanon’s politics and a key regional player. A graduate of Shiite seminaries of both Najaf and Qom, he was a learned cleric and an orator with a great command of classical Arabic, the Lebanese dialect and the Persian language, which he spoke fluently, even flawlessly. Having first gone to live in Iran in 1989, just when Khamenei took over the leadership of the Islamic Republic, he built close links to the Grand Ayatollah. He integrated Hezbollah into Iran’s Axis of Resistance ever more, a task in which Soleimani aided him.
Soleimani was one of the many IRGC men who fought a long war with Iraq in the 1980s and thus gained valuable battleground experience. They helped turn Hezbollah into a militarily sophisticated force that threatened and fought the military behemoth of Israel. But in the process, the Lebanese militia also had to do the bidding of Iran in civil wars of the Arab world, killing many more of their fellow Arabs than they ever got to of Israelis.
Early life
Hassan Nasrallah’s life started in August 1960, when he was born in Bourj Hammoud, an eastern suburb of Beirut, technically part of the Mount Lebanon governorate. He was the first child of Abdulkarim Nasrallah and Mahdie Safiiedine. In the next few years, Abdulkarim and Mahdie had a child every year, totalling five daughters and four sons.
Abdulkarim’s lineage went back to a village called Bazourieh, about an hour south of Beirut, near the ancient city of Tyre, which is amongst the oldest in the world. He was known to be a descendant of the Prophet Mohammad which gave him, and later Hassan, the right to use the honorific Sayid before their name and entitled Hassan to wear a black turban.
Hassan was born into a region in which Lebanon’s Shiites were amongst the most downtrodden and marginalised people. They had a very limited presence in the country’s political system, and a few large feudal-like clans dominated their social life. Nasrallah had a typical family. As he’d later tell an Iranian interviewer, “We were poor and oppressed, having moved to Beirut from southern Lebanon in an attempt to find a job and a piece of bread.” His father ran a little store.
During this period, many Shiites were attracted to the Lebanese Communist Party and other left currents. The two largest Shiite-majority societies in the region, Iran and Iraq, also had powerful communist parties, which led some of their opponents to accuse them of being Shiite-Shoyoee (Shiite-Communists). But soon, developments emanating from Iran would radically change the dynamics of Lebanese politics.
Less than a year before Nasrallah’s birth, Musa al-Sadr, an Iranian cleric whose ancestors came from southern Lebanon, had moved to Tyre as an emissary of the Shiite leadership of Najaf and Qom. He helped organise Lebanon’s disorganised Shiites, just at a time when the Iranian Shiite intellectuals were going through their own split from the Marxist currents, bringing about new political formations. In 1974, al-Sadr joined Mehdi Chamran, another Iranian transplant in Lebanon, to found Amal, a political party meant to represent Lebanon’s Shiite.
Like many Beirutis, Nasrallah lived cheek to jowl with people of different faiths, especially Christians, who were a majority in the eastern suburbs of Beirut. There have always been rumours that he spoke Armenian fluently due to his upbringing there.
But in 1975, Lebanon’s civil war broke out, pitting different communities of the country against each other and against the Palestinian refugees who were the backbone of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation’s Beirut headquarters. Eastern Beirut fell to Christian militias, and Nasrallah’s family fled south to Bazourieh, where he attended high school.
According to him, he was an excellent school student, especially doing well in math, chemistry and algebra. He was also intensely interested in religion and studied in a local mosque linked to al-Sadr. There, he got his start in political life by joining Amal, soon being appointed as its branch head in the village. In those days, he also met Chamran, starting a long career of being mentored by Iranian leaders. He did well enough at seminary to be dispatched to Najaf, then the Shiite world’s most important centre of learning, in 1976.
Najaf was not only an important clerical centre then but a key site of political activity with the Islamic Dawa Party, formed in 1957 under the auspices of Ayatollah Mohammad Baqir Sadr, pushing many a cleric into politics. Nasrallah’s most important friendship in Najaf was with Abbas al-Musawi, a young man from Beqaa Valley who was a section leader for Lebanese students.
In 1978, Iraq’s ruling Baath Party increased pressure on Dawa and Shiite activities. In the same year, Iran’s exiled Shiite leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, was kicked out of Iraq and ended up in France, where he helped lead the revolution against the Shah, who was overthrown in February 1979. At 18, Nasrallah also went back to Lebanon, joining a Shiite seminary in Beqaa Valley’s Baalbek and emerging as a local Amal leader.
Pivotal moment
The revolution in Iran changed the lives of all politically active Shiites, including Nasrallah. In 1981, he visited Iran and met Ayatollah Khomeini. Impressed by him as a young man with potential, Khomeini gave him a clerical permit to gather donations. The revolution had given birth to IRGC, a militia whose name didn’t include ‘Iran’ and whose explicit purpose was to spread the revolutionary message in the region and beyond. In 1982, IRGC helped engineer a split in Amal, which, since 1980, had been under the leadership of tie-and-suit-wearing Nabih Berri, who had little interest in a transnational revolutionary ethos and wanted to integrate the Shiite into Lebanon’s political system.
Al-Musawi led the split from Amal and, joined by others, they soon formed an organisation that came to be known as Hezbollah (in the earlier years, it was shadowy and used a variety of names.) As Nasrallah himself later testified, the group’s initial leadership council consisted of three Iranians (including Ali Akbar Mohtashamipour, Iran’s then ambassador to Syria) and two Lebanese men. It was always an Iranian-led organisation.
Before Hezbollah, none of the main movers and shakers of Lebanon’s civil war had been Islamist. But the Shiite militia would change that. Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982 was initially welcomed by the Shiites, who were fed up with PLO’s presence. But the brutality of the Israeli occupation would soon turn them into a base for Hezbollah. The Iranian-led militia made a name for itself by attacking American and international forces, most notably in 1983.
Nasrallah was still too marginal to have much of a role in such events. In 1989, he moved to Qom to continue his clerical studies in the Islamic Republic. This was partly due to his disagreements with Hezbollah’s founding leader, Subhi al-Tufayli, who was replaced in 1991 by Nasrallah’s old comrade, al-Musawi. In February 1992, when Israeli Apache helicopters killed al-Musawi, alongside his wife and five-year-old kid, Nasrallah emerged as the party’s new leader. Al-Tufayli left Hezbollah and remains a trenchant critique of Nasrallah and Khamenei.
Immediately after his selection as Hezbollah’s leader, Nasrallah visited Tehran and met with Iranian officials, including Ali Akbar Velayati, foreign minister, who praised his “quick election” as “a sign of Hezbollah’s coherence and defeat of the Zionist enemy’s attempts to break down this revolutionary movement.”
New political system
Lebanon’s civil war came to a close in 1990, and a new political system emerged in the country. Nasrallah oversaw Hezbollah’s contestation of the 1992 parliamentary election, signalling a shift in Hezbollah, which, in its famed 1985 open letter, had pledged attempts to install the Islamic Republic modelled on Iran in the multi-confessional Lebanon. The party got eight seats in the elections, which counted as a good result. Right after, he went to Iran and met with Khamenei, who received him alongside Mousa Abu Marzook, leader of the recently formed Hamas, which was to soon begin its campaign against PLO’s negotiations with the state of Israel. Although the phrase ‘Axis of Resistance’ had not come into use yet, Khamenei started to build a regional alliance of militias on the back of IRGC’s previous attempts.
During the 1990s, under Nasrallah’s leadership, Hezbollah would repeatedly fight Israel, most notably during the Seven Days War of 1993 and the April Aggression of 1996 (or Operation Grapes of Wrath to use the Israeli term.) The latter ended in a US-mediated ceasefire. Since this agreement recognised Hezbollah, Nasrallah took it as a sign of victory.
“We believe that we have here is a victory and intend to preserve it,” he told Beirut’s Al-Safir newspaper while praising Hafez al-Assad’s Syria and Iran and harshly attacking PLO and its leader Yasser Arafat.
It was in the same period that Hezbollah conducted one of its most criminal attacks. In July 1994, it organised a suicide attack by driving a bomb-laden van into the building of AMIA, a Jewish community centre in Buenos Aires, Argentina. It killed 85, to date, the deadliest terrorist attack in Argentine history.
According to Matthew Levitt in his book Hezbollah: The Global Footprint of Lebanon’s Party of God, Hezbollah’s leadership was fully behind the attack. A witness attested to an order from Nasrallah that asked the party’s agents in Argentina to provide “everything needed” to make the attack possible. At least one person from the Iranian embassy also helped. Hezbollah also helped the Iranians eliminate their political opponents abroad in operations in various European cities during this period.
In 1997, a political earthquake hit Iran with the election of reformist President Mohammad Khatami. As Iranians were pushing for political reform, many wanted better relations with the West, and this worried Nasrallah about being abandoned. At the same time, many of the reformists (which included Mohtashamipour) were among the old-time supporters of Hezbollah. Nasrallah was amongst the first foreign guests to visit Khatami in Tehran. He had just lost Hadi, his 18-year-old son, to an Israeli ambush attack. President Khatami sent his condolences and praised Hezbollah as a “symbol of resistance.”
Still, Nasrallah was surely anxious about the prospects of Khatami’s Iran turning closer to the West. In the same period, Israel and Syria were conducting negotiations, supported by the Clinton administration. In the 1996 elections in Lebanon, Hezbollah lost a seat while its old rival Amal gained three.
Some of the harshest language used by Nasrallah against the Jewish people dates from this period, as he attempted to entrench his base. In a Beirut rally in May 1998, broadcast live from Hezbollah’s Al Manar TV station, Nasrallah attacked “Zionist Jews” as “descendants of apes and pigs.” This contrasted his previous statements in which he had pointed to the legal existence of the Jewish community in Iran as a sign that Hezbollah was not antisemitic. “Our war is not against Judaism or Jews but against Zionism,” he had said to a Lebanese newspaper just a few months before.
Tides turn
Subsequent events were in Hezbollah’s favour. Iran’s reformist movement was defeated by domestic hardliners, the Israeli-Syrian peace process didn’t get anywhere nor did the Israeli-Palestinian one. In 2000, Israel withdrew from the last of Lebanese territory, giving Nasrallah an immense aura of victory. In the same year, he travelled to Tehran to become an honorary faculty at Tehran’s Tarbiat Modarres University, where he received an award from Khatami’s university minister, Mostafa Moeen. Moeen said it was an honour for Iran to grant him this position just after it had given its first honorary doctorate to Nelson Mandela.
But Nasrallah’s legitimacy as an anti-Israel militant won’t be lasting either. In the new century, the region soon descended into sectarian wars, especially after the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. When Lebanon’s popular Sunni prime minister, Rafic Hariri, was assassinated in 2005, many blamed Hezbollah, especially since it also had a clear role in stone-walling the UN mechanism of investigation afterwards. Following the assassination, a mass movement in Lebanon, known as the Cedar Revolution, forced the Syrian forces to leave Lebanon following decades of occupation. Hezbollah had lost a crucial external backer.
Integrated political party
Hezbollah started the new post-Syria era by signing a memorandum of understanding with Michel Aoun, leader of a large political current amongst Lebanon’s Maronite Christians. This showed his shrewd sense of politics but also made clear that his wasn’t a party of ‘resistance’ anymore, very much part and parcel of the sectarian political system in Lebanon.
In July 2006, Hezbollah’s ambushing of an Israeli border patrol unit led to a significant war, which brought the organisation close to total destruction. Iran and Hezbollah itself used the fact that it survived as propaganda fodder, but even Nasrallah himself knew that many of his people were angry at the high cost they had paid for the group’s adventurism. In a televised interview right after the war, he said he would have never okayed the ambush operation had he known that a war would follow.
Arab states, too, were incensed at how Hezbollah had risked war on the region with its actions. “The region being dragged into adventurism does not serve Arab interests,” said Saudi’s foreign minister, Saud al-Faisal, condemning the Hezbollah attack on Israel as “inappropriate and irresponsible acts that will pull the whole region back to years ago.”
This laid the foundation of a broader Arab consensus against Hezbollah. The Arab League declared it a terrorist organisation in 2016, although, amidst bettering of ties inside the region and with Iran, it recently declared that it doesn’t hold this position anymore. Most Western countries also designate Hezbollah as terrorist, although Russia and China don’t hold such a position.
The height of Hezbollah’s sectarianism was displayed in 2013, when it openly joined the Syrian civil war in defence of the Assad regime and the IRGC, helping to slaughter hundreds of thousands of Syrians, mostly Sunnis. Many would never forgive him for this role, with people in several opposition-held areas of Syria giving sweets around to celebrate his killing on Friday.
In Lebanon itself, Nasrallah’s effigy was burnt by many a protester in 2019 when simultaneous protests in the country and Iraq attacked the sectarian power-sharing systems and Iran-backed political parties in both countries.
Nasrallah’s open defence of the regime in Iran also made him hated by many in the country. In both 2009 and 2022-23, he attacked Iranian protesters and defended the regime. Insulting the country’s heritage, he once said, “There is no such a thing as Persian civilisation left in Iran today.”
If there was ever any doubt as to Nasrallah’s allegiance to Tehran, he put it to rest in 2016 when he said: “Hezbollah’s budget and all that we eat and drink, all of our weapons and missiles comes from Iran… we have money until Iran has money.”
Iran ties in focus
As the party militia looks to its future, the relationship with Iran will continue to loom large. For many years, Hashem Safieddine had been noted as the most likely successor to Nasrallah, although the party has said that no decision has yet been made on this issue. Safieddine is Nasrallah’s first cousin once removed and also father-in-law to Soleimani’s daughter, Zeynab. But as headline-grabbing as his family is, they are not necessarily a clue as to where he will take the party.
Some analysts believe that, unlike Nasrallah, who was always an orator and a cleric first, Safieddine, while also a cleric, has operational and field experience and might bring Hezbollah back to a more militant posture. Others believe that Hezbollah will be pushed in the days ahead to abandon its status as an effective proxy for Iran’s rulers and be a more ‘Lebanised’ force, answering to its domestic constituency.
At the time of this writing, however, his fate was unknown after Israel claimed to have targeted him in air strikes on Friday, 4 October, in Dahiyeh. Hezbollah said on Saturday they had lost contact with him, yet neither Israel nor Hezbollah confirmed his death yet.
Whatever the future, Nasrallah will be remembered as a man who captured an Arab constituency, putting them at the service of a foreign state and its revolutionary ideology. With Lebanon finding itself in its worst shape in decades, few would believe that this served his country well.
