Life Of God's Party

The syrian regime won the battle of aleppo, but the real victory belongs to hezbollah, the resurgent party of god.

- Sulome Anderson

IN A SPARSE, one-room hideout in Dahiyeh, a Shiite suburb of Beirut, Ali, a stout, friendly-looking man in his early 50s, sits on an iron-framed bed. A pistol is holstered on his hip, and an M-16 rests on a nearby table. His friend, a grizzled man of about the same age, stands watch at the door.

Ali, who asked to be known by a pseudonym because he is not authorized to speak with the press, pulls out his smartphone and plays a video he recorded in Aleppo, Syria. In it, he’s dressed in camouflage, carrying a large machine gun and crouching behind a thicket with three other fighters. The sound of gunfire and mortars echoes in the background. “That’s me,” he says proudly, pointing at the video. “Look what I do next.”

The video shows him stooping down and running into a clearing, where someone has erected a banner bearing the symbol of Jabhat al-Nusra, a rebel Islamist group fighting against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime. Ali pulls the banner down and replaces it with the flag of Hezbollah, a powerful, Iran-backed Lebanese Shiite militia and political party that has been fighting alongside Syrian government forces since 2012.

When the video is over, Ali puts his phone away. “[The battle] is not over,” he says. “We won Aleppo, but we’re not finished yet.”

On December 22, Assad’s regime, with the help of Hezbollah and Russia, declared victory after a costly battle for the long-besieged city. The United Nations evacuated 34,000 rebels and civilians from Aleppo, amid reports that Hezbollah and Assad’s army executed unarmed civilians, something the regime and the Lebanese group deny.