Stimson in the News

Mona Yacoubian is quoted in the Sydney Morning Herald on Hezbollah in Syria

In

Fresh
posters of young Hezbollah martyrs mark the roads through the Shiite villages
in the north of Lebanon’s Beqaa Valley – the latest casualties in a war that
knows no boundaries.

-snip-

”The decision of Hassan Nasrallah
to remove the veil of Hezbollah’s involvement in Syria, to very openly trumpet
that they are not only involved but they are all in to the end … this is a very
significant boundary he has crossed,” says Mona Yacoubian, senior Middle East
adviser at the Washington-based Stimson Centre.

”What Nasrallah has done is such a
momentous marker in Hezbollah’s evolution toward becoming essentially a Shiite
militia,” she says.

”This project of resistance that
had broad street credibility and appeal to the Arab masses has now all but
vanished, and when he puts the Takfiris [alleged Muslim apostates] equal to, or
even more of an enemy, than Israel, something very significant has happened.”

Yacoubian says Nasrallah has
”catapulted a sectarian narrative ahead of a resistance narrative” and his
attempts to describe Hezbollah’s foray in Syria as part of the resistance
against Israel are ”just so hollow”.

To read the full story, click here.

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