Hizbullah reelects its leader

Lebanon's Hizbullah organization has reelected its charismatic leader, Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, to a fifth consecutive three-year term as secretary-general, signaling no change in the militant Shiite group's violently anti-Israel stance.

Sheikh Nasrallah's reelection at the end of Hizbullah's internal conclave, a series of meetings held amid great secrecy every three years, comes as no surprise.

The 44-year-old black-turbaned cleric has steered Hizbullah toward mainstream political respectability in Lebanon while sharpening tactics that leave it second only to Al Qaeda on the US list of terrorist organizations. His pragmatic shift has garnered Hizbullah a strong local base and an ability to strike at Israel, and provided a model to other Islamist groups.

"For some party members, Nasrallah is Hizbullah and Hizbullah is Nasrallah," says Nizar Hamzeh, professor of politics at the American University of Beirut and author of the forthcoming book, In the Path of Hizbullah. "He has proven himself a political player, as a pragmatist, as an ideologist, and regarded by some in Hizbullah as having an aura of holiness."

In Lebanon, Sheikh Nasrallah helped soften Hizbullah's violently anti-Western image of the 1980s and burnished its local popularity by providing social services.

But he has also transformed the group's military wing into a highly adept guerrilla force and extended its reach through ties with other groups in the region.

Israel estimates that Hizbullah controls - in the form of funding and guidance - between 70 and 80 percentof all militant Palestinian cells in the West Bank. A military operation in the West Bank town of Nablus that commenced Monday was described in the Israeli Yedioth Aharanot daily as a campaign against "Hizbullah's mercenary army."

And the recently released congressional report into the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks cited instances of Hizbullah's alleged cooperation with Al Qaeda, including training militants in explosives in 1993 at the group's Bekaa Valley stronghold in eastern Lebanon.

Hizbullah dismissed the report as lacking credibility, claiming that Washington's insistence on connecting the group with the Sept. 11 attacks confirmed its "anti-Islamic policy." The Shiite Hizbullah has always denied having any contacts with the Sunni Al Qaeda movement.

While Hizbullah's hostility toward the Jewish state is rooted in ideology, its antipathy toward the US is more practical, stemming from opposition to the Middle East policies of successive administrations.

Although associated with suicide bombings and kidnappings of Westerners in Beirut in the 1980s, Hizbullah has since avoided confrontations with the US and the West, Professor Hamzeh says.

"The pattern seems to be that Hizbullah is not interested in attacking the US without provocation," he says. "But if the US provokes Hizbullah, then definitely there would be a response."

Hizbullah officials continue to vent strong anti-American rhetoric in public speeches, but the group says that its focus remains on arch-enemy Israel, not the US.

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