The syrian regime won the battle of aleppo, but the real victory belongs to hezbollah, the resurgent party of god.
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.
This story is from the January 20 2017 edition of Newsweek.
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This story is from the January 20 2017 edition of Newsweek.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.
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