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Hezbollah Base Questions Support for Assad

With Hezbollah members increasingly dying in Syria, some of the party’s base are re-evaluating its role in the conflict, writes an Al-Monitor correspondent in Beirut.
Lebanon's Hezbollah members carry the coffin of a Hezbollah member during his funeral in Ansar village near  Baalbek city October 8, 2012. Hezbollah gave no details about their deaths but sources in Baalbek said they and another Hezbollah man were killed near a Syrian border town where rebels are fighting Assad's forces. REUTERS/Ahmed Shalha (LEBANON - Tags: CIVIL UNREST POLITICS) - RTR38X92

There is growing talk within the Shiite community in Lebanon about Hezbollah's new front aimed at defending the regime of President Bashar al-Assad in Syria. Villages in the Bekaa valley and the south, the strongholds of the party's social base, are beginning to bear the brunt of the war, as they receive the bodies of their sons who died on distant fronts in Syria.

A few days ago, the village of Mays al-Jabal, in the far south near the border with Israel, buried a young Hezbollah member who had gone to Syria just days before and returned wrapped in a party flag. Upon the arrival of his body in the village, a group of Hezbollah members wearing black uniforms received him and accompanied his coffin in a military procession to his parents' home. Among the masses of women dressed in black stood a large woman who broke into loud chants, a tradition of the region's inhabitants when they received the remains of martyrs who had fallen in the face of the Israeli army during its occupation of southern Lebanon. The relatives of Fayez, the fighter who had died in Syria, gave the chant a lukewarm response. His mother stepped aside, her forehead covered in dust, and lost consciousness for a moment as her husband glanced at her with sadness.

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