By the objective technical definition, the Lebanese Hezbollah is a militia, not a regular army, nor even a political party. And Hezbollah certainly has no right to say that it is the Lebanese state, or to claim to be its spokesperson, unless water vapor claims to be the sky.
However, on the ground, it acts as if it were actually the Lebanese state. Hezbollah is not the only militia in the Arab world currently. There are also militia movements in Palestine, and the political branch of them has been acting for years according to the logic of state authority that does not exist yet. He is currently allied with the Hezbollah militia, and the two are parallel and do not meet. However, they intersect at the point of war, carrying weapons, and dependence on regional agendas.
In Iraq, there is no shortage of militias, some of which follow the ISIS organization, which is a multi-headed militia… and some of which follow countries and parties abroad that have their own political and ideological agendas linked to the agendas of their financiers.
The settlers in the occupied Palestinian territories, with the weapons they carry, are actually a militia sponsored by the extreme right led by extremists governed by the “Haganah” mentality, and they clash with their “occupying” army with the logic of imposing the power of the settlement militia. There are also foreign militias, whose presence can be clearly felt in several regions of the world, especially in Africa, including the Horn of Africa, where militia wars still claim lives and threaten security, as is the case in East Africa, where wars take place between militias. Some of them give themselves official legitimacy, despite their alliance with terrorist militias that practice the worst types of killing and robbery. There are militias in African countries that participate in Africa’s wars. They are militias that can be mercenarily mobilized when the first person pays money, or to extremist ideological mobilization at the hands of ISIS movements that are spreading rapidly, and they have enough money to organize themselves again. This is a danger that international reports talk about. A lot and no one notices it.
In Libya, after the turmoil of the “Arab Spring”, a bloody and terrifying militia war broke out, terrorizing the country, dividing it and undermining its security. Each of these militias sought to impose its control, seize power and seize control of its headquarters. During this, the logic of the state was absent, as happened in northern Syria, which was destroyed by militia wars that were quickly formed and some of them dissolved quickly as well.
The Syrian state has been restricted by Western sanctions (American and European) for years, and it is trying to re-impose order and law in all areas. In the end, the Middle East is very crowded with militias and armed groups that fight, confront and compete to enter the finals that are intended to manifest in a war that will increase the region’s crisis and fragmentation, and in the end no one will win.
*Jordanian writer residing in Belgium
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