Hezbollah

Hezbollah is a multifaceted organization: it is a powerful political party in Lebanon, a Shia Islam religious and social movement, Lebanon’s largest militia, a close ally of Iran, and according to major and mainstream Western literature, a “terrorist organization.” Drawing on a wide range of sources, including recently declassified government documents, court records, and personal interviews with intelligence and law enforcement officials around the world, Matthew Levitt examines Hezbollah’s beginnings, its first violent forays in Lebanon, and its enterprises and activities throughout Europe, the Middle East, South America, Southeast Asia, Africa, and North America. Levitt describes Hezbollah’s unit dedicated to supporting Palestinian resistance groups as well as its involvement in training and supporting insurgents who fought US troops in post-Saddam Iraq. The book concludes with a look at Hezbollah’s integral, ongoing role in Iran’s shadow war with Israel and the West including many targets around the world. Levitt shows that Hezbollah’s tactics at home and abroad, its global reach, and its proxy-patron relationship with Iran should be of serious concern for the West. The book is structured along geographic and loosely chronological tracks. It opens with Hezbollah’s birth and its first forays into violence targeting Western interests, first at home in Lebanon and then abroad. It then follows the trajectory of Hezbollah’s operation abroad, first in Europe and the Middle East, then South America and Southeast Asia.