The names of Lebanon's Hizbullah and its secretary-general, Sayed Hassan Nasrallah, are often associated with bravery and heroism in times of defeat in the Arab world. To others in Israel, the United States, and the West in general, these names are linked to terrorism.
Today, Lebanon's Shia Hizbullah organization is engaged in a military confrontation with Israel as the latter pounds targets across the country and the guerrilla group fires Katyusha rockets at Israeli cities and towns. Fighting erupted after Hizbullah killed eight Israeli soldiers and captured two others in a cross-border operation.
Hizbullah, the Arabic for "Party of God," was established by Shia Muslim clerics soon after the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 with the help of Iranian Revolutionary guards who were dispatched to the country to support resistance against Israel.
The organization, with 12 members in Lebanon's 128-seat parliament and ministers in the cabinet, is often referred to as the "Iran-backed Hizbullah," having close ties with the Islamic Republic, which is believed to have provided financial and military assistance to the group for years via neighboring Syria.
While its inception came during the 1975-90 civil war in Lebanon, Hizbullah boasts being the only group that did not turn its weapons against other Lebanese factions when the sectarian parties fought against each other. It has always maintained that its objective was to drive the Israeli occupation out of the country and has abandoned its initial attempt to turn the country's confessional system into an Iranian-style Islamic state.
Some 18 years of skirmishes against mostly military Israeli targets with Katyusha rockets finally paid off as Hizbullah was largely credited for successfully ending the 22-year Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon in May 2000.
Across the Arab and Muslim world, Hizbullah became the hero, seen as the first Arab party to retrieve occupied Arab territories through armed resistance against Israel.
It was again hailed with high regard at home and the Arab street in January 2004 when it managed to secure the release of hundreds of Lebanese, Palestinian, and Arab prisoners and remains of fighters, in exchange for an Israeli businessman and the remains of three Israeli soldiers after three years of negotiations through German mediators.
At the outset of militant operations, Hizbullah-affiliated cells were believed to have kidnapped Westerners in Lebanon. In 1983 they were blamed for a suicide bombing against the US embassy in Beirut, which killed 63, and another suicide truck attack against the US Marines barracks in Beirut, killing 241 American marines.
Despite the Israeli withdrawal from southern Lebanon and UN Security Council Resolution 1559, adopted in September 2004 calling on disarming Lebanese militias, Hizbullah has insisted on the right to maintain its military wing, the Islamic Resistance, so long as the Shebaa Farms are occupied and Lebanese prisoners remain in Israel.
It claims the Shebaa Farms, a small strip of agricultural land bordering Lebanon, Syria, and Israel, as Lebanese property occupied by Israel, while the UN says that it was captured from Syria. Hizbullah has also been seeking the release of Lebanese prisoner, Samir Kuntar, held in Israeli jails since 1979.
The July 12 capture of two Israeli soldiers and the Israeli military offensive against Lebanon has put off a domestic political debate over the future of Hizbullah's weapons, in which the country's political forces are seeking a way to implement Resolution 1559 without angering a large Lebanese Shia minority and other supporters.
Much of Hizbullah's clout at home and in the Arab world is largely credited to what is seen as the "charm" of its secretary-general, Nasrallah, whose name translates to "victory of God." He has been labeled a "terrorist" and "religious extremist" by Israel, which recently vowed to assassinate him.
While Nasrallah only appears publicly dressed in his traditional Shia clerical robes and turban, his eloquence and making good on his promises to strike against Israel and releasing Arab prisoners has gained him popularity across the mostly-Sunni Arab and Muslim worlds.
His credibility as a "selfless" anti-Israel resistance leader was consolidated when his eldest teenage son, Hadi, was killed in an exchange of fire with Israeli troops in southern Lebanon in 1997.
Politicians who have encountered the man say that he is highly intelligent, well-read, and politically shrewd and is known to read memoirs of Israel's former political leaders in order to "know his enemies."
Nasrallah was born in southern Beirut in 1960 to impoverished parents, who fled with their nine children to their ancestral village of Bassouriyeh in southern Lebanon with the eruption of the civil war in 1975.
He studied politics and the Koran, Islam's holy book, where he spent three years at the Shia religious academy in the Iraqi city of Najaf. There, he became acquainted with Sayed Abbas Moussawi, the former Hizbullah leader, who was killed, along with his wife, son, and four others, in an Israeli helicopter attack targeting his motorcade in southern Lebanon in February 1992.
While Nasrallah joined the Shia Amal organization shortly after he was expelled from Iraq in 1978, he and some of his comrades broke away from the group shortly after the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon as Amal was being pressured to join the National Salvation Front, which had ties with Israel.
Being heavily involved in Hizbullah's establishment and activities did not stop him from continuing his religious education in the Iranian holy city of Qom in 1989, where he obtained his qualifications as a religious jurisprudent.
Nasrallah, his wife, and three children are said to live modestly in a poor neighborhood in south Beirut.
Profile: Lebanon's Hizbullah and leader Nasrallah
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