A few small units of the Lebanese army and Internal Security Forces (ISF) recently entered the Dahiyeh neighborhood, Hezbollah’s stronghold in southern Beirut. Over the course of the last several years, the Lebanese security establishment had maintained a merely symbolic presence in the area, since Hezbollah had established its own security zones. The latter provided unseen protection for areas in which the group’s various facilities and leaders — particularly those involving anti-Israeli operations — operated.

This deployment comes in response to the two bombings that struck Dahiyeh in the latter half of the summer: one in Bir al-Abed and the other in the neighborhood of Ruwais. On Sept. 24, local newspapers reported that Lebanese security sources had leaked new information concerning the perpetrators of the attack in Ruwais. According to those sources, the bombings were executed by Syrian and Lebanese Salafists connected to an extremist fundamentalist group in Syria. Hezbollah remains fearful that similar bombings will be directed against its stronghold in Dahiyeh, since the party responsible for the previous bombing is seeking to pressure Hezbollah into withdrawing its military units from Syria.

This fear has required Hezbollah to draw up and implement its own security contingency plans within Dahiyeh, setting up checkpoints along the main thoroughfares and neighborhoods and ordering its units to begin exercising the functions of the state in examining passing cars and corroborating the identities of their occupants. However, sources close to the party have revealed to Al-Monitor that Hezbollah’s leadership realized several weeks into these contingency plans that their continuation will harm Hezbollah’s relationship with the inhabitants of Dahiyeh, which have so far been the most enthusiastically supportive element of the party’s social base. This conclusion rests on the growing frustration of Dahiyeh’s inhabitants with Hezbollah’s establishment of checkpoints that interrupt the flow of traffic and cause suffocating congestion at the suburb’s entrances and exits, and within its various neighborhoods.

In addition to this, despite the party’s stress on discipline within its ranks, some of those manning the checkpoints have committed certain excesses. Afraid that the friction between Dahiyeh’s residents might deepen and evolve — in time — into an open clash between the party and its social base in Beirut, Hezbollah’s leadership opted to search for an exit strategy. On the one hand, it sought to guarantee ongoing surveillance of Dahiyeh, to prevent expected bomb attacks in the future. On the other, it desired an alternative that would allow it to remove its personnel and checkpoints from Dahiyeh's streets. The ideal decision — from the party’s standpoint — was to open its stronghold to the entrance of state security forces, so that they could provide protection from future attacks threatening the area.