As Hezbollah Fights In Syria, Life Changes In A Lebanese Border Town -- New York Times
HERMEL, Lebanon — The procession was small as Hezbollah funerals go, just a few hundred people winding past wind-tossed olive trees through this remote Bekaa Valley village. Still, the mourners honored the fighter killed in Syria with the usual solemn choreography: the coffin draped with a flag, the uniformed Boy Scouts bearing his portrait, the women carrying babies and wreaths of roses.
But to the traditional prayers and chants — praising the leaders of Iran and Hezbollah, denouncing Israel and America — the mourners added a new barb, for the gunmen battling the Syrian government who, they said, had killed him: “Death to the Free Army.”
The funeral on Wednesday at once encapsulated Hezbollah’s cohesion and the new uncertainties and anxieties its followers face as it fights a new kind of war, more intimate and ambiguous than the group’s founding conflict with Israel.
Hezbollah’s increasingly open military intervention in Syria, against fellow Arab Muslims, is framed by its followers here in the northern Bekaa Valley less as a galvanizing mission than a regrettable necessity.
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My Comment: This fracturing of these Lebanese communities is going to take generations to overcome. And as the civil war in Syria intensifies and become more sectarian and bloody .... this fracturing may assume a permanent status .... even having the civil war engulf this part of Lebanon. You reap what you sow, and for Hezbollah the consequences will be severe if the Syrian war continues at the present rate for the next year or two.
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