Beirut: Embarrassed by excruciating details in the mouths of two prisoners captured by Al Nusra Front near Aleppo, Hezbollah pressured the MTV television station last Wednesday to nix the programme, which further highlighted the power of the militia in Lebanon.
A few days after a major public relations campaign to muzzle both the journalist who secured the exclusive access as well as the programme that pretended impartiality, the topic disturbed the Lebanese, though few assessed what the consequences of this additional loss of liberty meant for the country.
According to Carole Maalouf, one of the most capable journalists working in Lebanon, the opportunity to conduct a rare interview with two Hezbollah prisoners presented itself while she was in northern Syria.
By her own admission, the hour-long conversation with Hassan Nazih Taha and Mohammad Mehdi Shuaib, was not impartial—since it was filmed while her interviewees were in captivity and, therefore, could be considered to have spoken under duress—although she insisted that rare details on what Hezbollah fighters were doing in Syria were presented with impartiality, perhaps for the first time ever.
Taha and Shuaib disclosed that they were technicians, not actual fighters, and were captured in November 2015.
They described their scant military training and explained that while they received a basic course, theirs was limited since they were assigned specific technical duties.
In the event, they went to the Jabal Al Ays area, southwest of Aleppo, to install antennas for radio communication.
Amazingly, no fighters escorted them on their mission in unfamiliar territory, as it was the first time they had ever been in the area.
At the completion of their mission, and as they were returning to their temporary base, they got lost, and were fired upon before being captured.
It was unclear whether the lack of escorts was due to hubris or the lack of manpower.
While they blamed themselves for their fate, they also criticised security procedures in place since the area was not secure.
The more interesting parts of the interview concerned the motivation that young Lebanese Shiites felt to join the party because of growing sectarian views, financial incentives and, not a negligible point, the belief they were defending Lebanon in Syria.
In fact, the Hezbollah brass that learned of the interview before it was scheduled to air, were probably livid to hear two of their men avow that the chief motivation to join the party was for sectarian reasons.
Amazingly, the two prisoners recognised the value of careful indoctrination that started years ago.
Apparently, and like most children in their community, both were in the Imam Al Mahdi Scouts programme, that welcomes children as young as 6-years old for a series of cultural and para-military activities.
“As we grew up,” the two men said, “we were constantly told that foreigners were coming to demolish our shrines, [that] they are going to take our women prisoner, and that Sunni Islamist rebels planned to kill us”.
Sunni fighters, they were told and they believed, wished to destroy the Sayyeda Zeinab shrine near Damascus, an important pilgrimage site for Shiite Muslims, “which we swore to defend.”
Taha added to this claim that Hezbollah fighters “heard” that Sunnis are a “community that hates the imams and the line of Imam Ali,” in reference to figureheads of Twelver Shiite Islam.
“They hate Shiites and they hate such-and-such… They have an obsession with this subject,” he added giving examples of commonly repeated phrases during the many years of indoctrination.
Equally interesting, Taha (a former teacher) acknowledged that he was partly motivated to join the party for economic reasons, because “with Hezbollah you get slightly over the minimum wage.”
“So the matter becomes one of converging interests, between creed and living,” he asserted, which further explained one of the party’s principle recruiting tools.
Taha’s avowal was confirmed by Shuaib, who said he felt he could not leave the party in 2013 and that he was obliged to deploy to Syria since failing to do so would have had serious financial consequences.
Losing his job as a computer technician would have led to a dismissal. In one of the most critical parts of the interview, the two men said they received a meager financial compensation for deploying to Syria, which amounted to approximately $4 a day for fulfilling their 15-day mandatory ‘murabata’ service. It was unclear whether this pay was a bonus.
Of course, both claimed that an important motivation to fight was to defend Lebanon, although they wondered what the deployments in Syria had anything to do with their native country.
As valuable as the interview was, what happened to it was more revelatory, since airing it in its entirety would have upset the existing local balance of power, or so Hezbollah believed. Officials contacted MTV’s presentator Abboud, as well as the station owner Gabriel Al Murr to persuade them not to air the programme although party bosses eventually accepted a compromise to use clips from the lengthy interview—for a total of 7 minutes—on the highly-rated “Bi-Mawdu‘iyyah” [Objectively] programme, provided one of its start performers, Ali Hijazi, was invited to participate in a roundtable discussion on the impact that physical and psychological health have on prisoners. In addition to Maalouf and Hijazy, MTV included Hares Suleiman, an anti-Syrian activist, for what turned out to be an ugly show that highlighted genuine intolerance to discuss a super-sensitive topic.
It was important to record that, as a matter of principle, Hezbollah objected when Lebanese authorities negotiated with Jabhat Al Nusra to seek the liberation of 16 Lebanese security officers in exchange for 13 Islamist prisoners, including five women, even if it negotiated the release of Imad Ayyad, one of its men, in November 2014 in exchange for two Syrian revolutionaries. Fresh negotiations were under way in late January 2016 for three Hezbollah members taken captive in Syria’s Aleppo region though details were murky.
Beyond these political concerns, what bothered Hezbollah with the Maalouf interview was the highly articulate discourse viewers heard. Towards the end of her lengthy interview, Maalouf asked the two prisoners whether Hezbollah ought to apologize to Syrians for what the party is doing to and in their country, which provided an opportunity for the men to look deep in their hearts. One of them answered that they ought to apologize to themselves for being manipulated.
