Waiting for a response for any message in the family group chat right now is fucking torture, I literally can't deal with it anymore. I've sent my wife and the kid to her mom's for a few days, they can't see me and my dad like this. The two hours it took for my uncle to see the message and respond today were absolute hell, fuck this life. My aunt has little kids no older than 14, what if something happens. I've called my cousin from my mom's side who has a little farm outside of Damascus in Syria, he can take in my dad's family from Beirut, but how the fuck will they even leave with this situation, and my cousin is already dirt poor, how will he feed them. Too many thoughts spinning, nowhere to scream them out, nowhere to go and nothing to do, I almost wish I was there.
LargePenis
I don't know man, I'm not worried about the leadership or the continued existence of the Resistance, but Nasrallah is/was Nasrallah, he's the resistance, he's the voice of it, he's the man that defeated Israel twice. It's just hard emotionally, It's really hard to process.
It's very obvious from the tone of the posts on Resistance channels that he's not, I hate this so much
This feels exactly like the Soleimani strike, I don't have a good feeling at all
I have a really bad feeling about Sayyid Hassan Nasrallah and that Beirut strike...
We now move into Lebanon again, where Hezbollah have transformed from a religious militia into the most influential political party in the country. Lebanon after the end of the civil war was dominated politically by the Future Movement, which was founded by liberal Saudi-Lebanese Sunni Muslim businessman Rafic Hariri. Hariri was an interesting character, he moved to Saudi Arabia very early after finishing his university studies in Beirut, and even acquired Saudi citizenship and basically lived as a Saudi for a large part of his life, but he caught the “philanthropic” billionaire bug during the civil war as he realised how much power his money would give him in Lebanon. His companies’ re-built large sections of Beirut after the war, but he was an indecisive Prime Minister and his relationship with the Syrians deteriorated quickly in the mid-00s. Lebanon got rid of the Israeli occupation in the south after Hezbollah’s first victory in 2000, but the Syrian Army still had a presence in Lebanon until 2005. Hariri got assassinated in 2005, most likely by members of Hezbollah who were unhappy with how he’s dealing with the Syrians. What followed is the Cedar Revolution, where thousands of Lebanese civilians protested massively against the cancerous presence of the Syrian Army in Lebanon. I must add a personal anecdote here. As an eight-year-old, I was in Beirut with my family on a long summer holiday in the early 00s. We were in a Kaak (basically Lebanese bagels) shop with my uncle and my young cousins, and the streets were suddenly shut down by armoured trucks. It was the first time my diaspora eyes had seen an army on the streets, so I vividly remember literally being glued to the window of the shop watching the Syrian Army raid a nearby shop while my uncle tried to keep everyone inside until they were finished. A few years later, I learned that they were basically extorting the poor guy, and he refused to pay. Such incidents were very common, and the Syrian presence were viewed very negatively in Lebanon, so it wasn’t surprising that people took the assassination of the most popular guy in Lebanon as the last straw. The Syrians left after the Cedar Revolution, but fumbling Lebanon wasn’t the last big mishap by Assad, and more on that later when we examine Syria’s position in the pan-Shia world.
We move into the 2006 War now. I won’t go into the specifics of the war, but the whole mythology of the war is wildly exaggerated in my opinion. Hezbollah defeated Israel, that is certain, but it wasn’t an extremely bloody war for both sides. The number of dead Israeli civilians + IDF soldiers in that war was less than 500, and the number of dead Hezbollah fighters + Lebanese civilians was less than 2000. Israel’s mass bombing of Beirut generated no tangible military advantage and just made people hate them more. The current war has been bloodier on both sides already, and the number of displaced civilians in Israel + Lebanon is already way bigger and more permanent. The real victory was that Hezbollah once again confirmed that they’re the most successful anti-Israel side in history, and with that also confirmed that there is an existential conflict between the Axis of Resistance and Israel. A decisive Israeli victory like 1967 could not happen anymore. Egypt in the leadership of the anti-Israel axis had lacked the ideological discipline and were simply way too incompetent to accomplish a permanent victory over Israel. Arabism as the leading anti-Israel ideology was not radical enough to defeat the crazy settler-colonial state. But the pan-Shia Khomeinism was definitely radical enough to create groups that Israel simply can’t defeat. Hamas can still not be defeated, Hezbollah can’t be defeated, and Ansarallah couldn’t be defeated despite the combined naval power of the West. What 2006 did was confirm that the strongest and most disciplined anti-Israel ideology could be found in the pan-Shia Hezbollah. The psychological victory was enormous, and it couldn’t be achieved without the expertise and the weaponry of Iran, once more confirming the strength and unity of the Axis in the face of Israeli aggression. Hezbollah emerged out of the war as a heroic group across the Arab and Islamic worlds, and Hezbollah was probably the most popular army in the Arab World until the Syrian Civil War, but more on that later when we cover Syria.
We end with a little failure of the pan-Shia revolution. Bahrain had some of the most intense protests during the Arab Spring, with the whole island being crippled by Shia protestors demanding an end of the Bahraini Monarchy and the abdication of King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa. Bahrain is very special demographically and also occupies a special place in the pan-Shia heart. The majority of the population are Shia Muslim, and a large part of that Shia majority are people with Persian ancestry, but Shias have literally 0% real representation in Bahraini politics. If you visit an Ashura mourning ceremony in Bahrain even today, half of the service will probably be in Persian. Some of the most famous recited poems were written by Bahraini Shias and many of the highly regarded reciters are also Bahraini. Hussein Al Akraf would recite back in 2005 the famous poem of “In you Khomeini, the world taught me how to be free” on the anniversary of Khomeini’s death. A few years later he would recite another famous poem where the chorus were “You oppressed us with how oppressive you were, and you’re always against us in opposition, O government”. The government of Bahrain basically let Shia Bahraini do the religious stuff with all its political undertones freely in order to sort of ease the pressure, but that wildly backfired when the Shias were all charged up with pan-Shia ideology and poured out in the streets with Iranian flags and pictures of Khamenei and Khomeini. The pan-Shia connection into Bahrain is Sheikh Isa Qassim, who also studied under Al Sadr in Iraq and became the highest ranked Shia cleric in Bahrain after his return to Bahrain from Iran in the 90s. The revolution took the famous Pearl Roundabout as HQ, and things quickly snowballed into a situation where either the Royal Family abdicates due to the enormous pressure, or things could snowball into armed conflict very soon if Iran “accidentally” ships some weapons through the sea. The king instead begged some support from Saudi Arabia who were fighting their own Shia insurgency in Awamiya and Qatif in Saudi Arabia, and the Saudis completely crushed the uprising through excessive violence and massive arrest campaigns. Influential Khomeinist voices like the previously mentioned Al Akraf and Isa Qassim fled the country, and even mere participators in the protests like football legend Alaa Hubail were arrested and imprisoned for years. Historic Shia mosques were razed and destroyed, thousands were arrested and tortured in prison, and nearly a thousand fled through Iran and had their citizenships revoked. The iconic Pearl Roundabout itself was bulldozed by the government. My commentary on Bahrain is “don’t do protests if you don’t have guns and an implicit threat of violence”.
That's the end of part three, hope you enjoyed reading this. We have one big and two small stories saved up for part four. The big one about Syria's alliance with Iran from the Hafez Al Assad days, then the Syrian Civil War and Iran's entry there. One small story will be about pan-Shia movement's religious business in non-Shia countries such as Nigeria and Egypt. The last story will be about the failures of the movement in Syria, Iraq and Lebanon.
Part three of my effortpost, these parts keep getting longer and longer. No proof reading as usual
Part Two, it gets continued in the first comment
The Rise of the Collective Shia Identity: Part Three
We move 25 years into the future with part three, we’re now in the period after the defeat in ISIS in Iraq and Syria, the Houthi revolution in Yemen, Hezbollah’s victory against Israel in 2006, and the failure of the Bahraini Uprising in 2011.
We start in Yemen, which was reunited into one state after the end of the Cold War. The first president of the new reunited Yemeni state is no one other than Ali Abdullah Saleh, former president of North Yemen and one of our favourite adventurers like we said earlier. The first real event in the history of Yemen is the start of the 1994 civil war, which ended in a decisive victory for Ali Abdullah Saleh’s Republican forces over the remnants of the South Yemen Communist Party. The republican victory could not be achieved without the strong support by Sunni Jihadist forces who received massive concessions by Saleh in order to secure their support in the war. The growing voice of the hardline Sunni Islamists in Saleh’s government angered the Houthi family, who returned to Yemen from Iran somewhere around reunification, with the aim of reviving the Zaydi traditions that were slowly fading away as Yemen took a more “Sunni” character. It is clear that the Houthis’ stay in Iran led to them being greatly influenced by Khomeini’s pan-Shia ideology, as they founded a youth group called the Believing Youth when they returned to Yemen. The Believing Youth was a loose collection of after-school workshops and summer camps for kids in the mountains of North Yemen, where they would read works by Khomeini, Nasrallah and Al Sadr. The Believing Youth would grow in size, and by the early 00s, their presence would be felt even in Friday prayers in the Grand Mosque of the capital Sanaa. Like a true paranoid Arab government, the Yemeni government would ultimately decide to arrest Hussein Al Houthi, the founder of the BY and brother of the Abdul Malik Al Houthi that we all know and love. The government failed in their attempt to arrest Hussein Al Houthi, who retreated to the mountains of Saada and started a large insurgency again the Yemeni government. He would be killed in late 2004, but a low-level insurgency continued until the Arab Spring hit in 2011.
Yemen had some of the largest protests in the whole region, which turned violent very quickly. The escalation of the protests wasn’t surprising at all, Yemen was the poorest and the least developed Arab nation out of all the relevant ones, and Saleh had been ruling the country in some form for 33 years while achieving literally nothing of note. The Houthis and their supporters would become one of the largest factions against the government in peaceful protest, and later in armed struggle against a government long past its expiry date. After around a year of clashes everywhere in Yemen, Saleh would resign and sign a power transfer agreement in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, a place where no real peace has ever been established. An election was held in 2012, Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi, Saleh’s best friend and former vice president would win the election with 100% of the votes in a real democracy moment. Saleh was there again in Yemen for Hadi’s inauguration. The Houthis, the southern secession movement and the Islamists all rightfully boycotted this sham election. Two years later, the Houthis would launch an offensive from the mountains towards the capital Sanaa and capture the capital very quickly after the collapse of the government forces. The Houthis then absorbed the bulk of the Yemeni Army and essentially became the new government itself, they’re not an armed group anymore, but the Yemeni state itself. When did the Houthis become a real “Shia” force and a part of the Axis of Resistance? Good question. The founding principles of the Believing Youth were explicitly Khomeinist, in response to the gradual Sunnification of the Zaydi Shia Yemenis after the final collapse of the Zaydi Imamate in the 1960s. There’s no proof of direct Iranian involvement in the founding of the group, nor any proof of direct support until the explosion of the conflict after the Arab Spring. Shiaism itself evolved with the absorption of the Houthis into the wider Shia umbrella, as it followed a similar previous step with the absorption of Assad’s Alawite faith into a wider Twelver-adjacent umbrella. The Houthis aren’t Hezbollah, where the founding itself was influenced directly by Iran, but they became closer and closer to Iran as their war with Saudi Arabia started in 2015. Just like the Iraq-Iran War became the origin story of all of the heroes of the new pan-Shia ideology, the Houthi victory in the war against Saudi Arabia and the Arab Alliance became the mythological origin of the first “pan-Shia” generation of Yemen. One such hero is Saleh Al Sammad, the first president of Yemen under Houthi rule, who was killed in a Saudi drone strike back in 2018. He received the Khomeinist martyr treatment, which was a first in Yemen. Shia-style mourning ceremonies have entered the Yemeni mainstream, and celebration of the Prophet’s birthday is now a big day in Yemen, in a clear departure from the hardline Sunni position that forbids that. The Houthis, or Ansarallah as they should be called, are now a fully integrated member of the pan-Shia movement despite not having a direct line back to Khomeini or the Al Sadr family.
We travel to Iraq again now. In 2003, something called the Iraq War, and the American Occupation happens. The Americans basically allow anyone that hates Saddam on their team, so the team that takes over the Iraqi state post-Saddam is a very dysfunctional one where Communists, Khomeinists, Kurdish nationalists, Sunni Muslim Brotherhood members, Liberal CIA assets, and random minority representants were supposed to pretend to play politics while the Americans were robbing the country. There was one crucial group that the Americans missed while building the political playhouse. That group was the Sadrists under the leadership of Muqtada Al Sadr, son of Muhammed Sadiq Al Sadr. The Sadrists split in two sometime in the late 90s, but no one had noticed that under the media suppression in Saddam’s Iraq and the general American disinterest in Iraqi attitudes while they were planning to invade Iraq. One group of Sadrists stayed in the Dawa Party and adopted more Khomeinist and pan-Shia ideas, while poorer Sadrists under Muqtada’s leadership from the slums were more into nationalist and isolationist policies within Iraq’s border. Muqtada’s group would later be called the Sadrist Movement and its military wing, the Mahdi Army, would become the main player in the Iraqi Insurgency against the American occupation and later in the sectarian civil war phase of the occupation. Muqtada’s eccentric behaviour continues to this day and the Sadrists still get themselves into wacky situations, as the group slowly morphs into a cult that finds itself on the fringes of Shiaism itself, but that’s an effortpost for another day. The Iraqi state found itself under pan-Shia Dawa Party rule from 2005 to 2018, but nothing formative happened on a state level, mostly due to the failure of the American occupation and the grave incompetence of the new cast in Iraq. The most notable change during that period was that Iran was slowly becoming the main foreign player in Iraq, after several missteps by the US and their Arab allies. The war against ISIS is when large sections of Iraqi Shia society were absorbed into the Iranian pan-Shia network with the creation of the Hashd Al Shaabi (Popular Mobilization Units, or PMU for short). The PMU was essentially Iraq’s own Hezbollah, an explicitly pan-Shia organization that was created with a clear religious background. The creation of the PMU itself came after a ruling from Ayatollah Ali Al Sistani, who is the current Grand Marja of the faith. He issued a ruling that called for global Shia jihad against ISIS after the collapse of the Iraqi Army and the fall of large cities such as Mosul, Fallujah and Tikrit into ISIS hands. Iranian government support through the IRGC was open and direct, with PMU head Abu Mahdi Al Muhandis and IRGC commander Qassem Soleimani being on the frontlines together and forming a shared war room. The pan-Shia framework of open commemoration of martyrs with clear religious messaging was fully imported to Iraq and became the dominant ideological marker in the Shia south of Iraq. I remember visiting Baghdad with my wife sometime before Covid and literally every single street in the capital had some pictures of martyrs.
cont.
I can absolutely do that when I'm done
Hey, please read the first two parts of my effortpost on the evolution of the modern pan-shia ideology if you haven't done that already. Part three coming probably tomorrow, but I'm on 5k words in total already and I haven't even mentioned Syria and Bahrain in the last part, so this became a bit larger than expected lmao.
Part Two, it gets continued in the first comment
you're getting the third and probably final part tomorrow, be patient
cont.
Remember that I said that Khomeini wanted to export to revolution to other countries. It did happen, but not fully successfully and not in a conventional manner. The first seeds were of course the Dawa Party movement in Iraq, which we previously mentioned, and it ended with mass executions including the whole leadership. The next organized group was the Supreme Council of Islamic Revolution in Iraq, led by the 2nd generation of the Al Hakim family. The top brass managed to flee to Iran in 1983 and later fought in the Iraq-Iran War on the side of Iran. The rest of the Al Hakim family were brutally executed in 1983 by the Iraqi state, with literal kids getting executed. A very important detail here needs to be mentioned. The Shia Islamist ideology was powerful enough transcend borders here, Sykes-Picot was effectively broken for the third time since the establishment of the Middle East borders. It was broken by the Arabists under Nasser with the United Arab Republic which lasted for five stupid years. And it was broken by Communists who were popping up from Algeria to Oman fighting for each other’s causes. Then it was broken by Shia Islamists under the leadership of Khomeini. It would be broken again in 2013 by Sunni Jihadists fighting for ISIS. Only one of those projects still remains, and it’s Khomeini’s project. The third attempt of Shia Islamist uprising was in 1991, and it was the most successful attempt, but it still failed. The Shaaban Uprising in Iraq lasted for around a month and large sections of the country fell under Shia rebel rule, but Saddam managed to reorganise his army after the massive defeat in Kuwait and crushed the uprising. The sources of the uprising were both expected and unexpected. The Al Hakim family and their newly formed militias breached the Iraq-Iran border and stormed into the country, which was an expected source considering the semi-collapse of the Iraqi state after the withdrawal from Kuwait. The unexpected source came from the Al Thawra (now Sadr City) ghetto in Eastern Baghdad. Another Al Sadr family member, Muhammed Sadiq Al Sadr, had secretly organised his followers and unleashed them in the uprising. His eccentric son Muqtada would later form the Mahdi Army and fight the US during the occupation of Iraq. The uprising failed, but it confirmed how deep the penetration of the pan-Shia Islamist ideology had come in Iraqi minds.
In Bahrain, a Khomeinist group tries a failed coup in 1981. These seeds that were planted would later be the ideological backbone of the Bahraini uprising in 2011, which was mercilessly crushed by Saudi Arabia, but that’s a story for a later episode of this effortpost. In Saudi Arabia, a Shia group called Hezbollah Al Hejaz fought a low-level insurgency against the government and later bombed the Khobar Towers and killed a bunch of US soldiers. Now we have to go to Lebanon, what happened there? Well Israel invaded the country in 1982 and occupied everything up to Beirut. Musa Al Sadr’s group, the Amal Movement was ideologically disoriented and very disorganised following the disappearance of Al Sadr in 1978. The Shias of Lebanon were basically left without competent leadership for four years while Israel quickly the Shia heartland in the South. Enter Khomeini again. Hezbollah was basically founded in Iran, the group doesn’t exist without the efforts of the IRGC in organizing Shia Lebanese leadership from those who had prior connections to Khomeini or Al Sadr. The first real leader of Hezbollah was Sayyid Abbas Al Musawi, who studied under Muhammed Baqir Al Sadr in Najaf, Iraq. Hezbollah’s mission in Lebanon was very simple, follow the ideology of Khomeini, kick out the Israelis, and end the collaborationist South Lebanon Army who formed a fake state that was fully propped up by Tel Aviv. Hezbollah succeeded in all three tasks. Khomeini’s pan-Shia ideology is now the de-facto ideology for Lebanese Shias, Israel would finally be kicked out from Lebanese soil in 2000 after a successful guerilla war, and the SLA was crushed in the 1980s by an alliance of Hezbollah, the Palestinian Liberation Organization and the Lebanese Communist Party. Sayyid Abbas Musawi was later martyred by an Israeli strike in 1993, and his successor was Sayyid Hassan Nasrallah. In the 1990 Taif Agreement to end the Lebanese Civil War, Hezbollah was the only armed group who did not have to disarm and were allowed to control Shia areas.
Thanks for reading! Next episode, we learn about the Houthis who I was supposed to cover here but I was too lazy. We will also learn about the 2006 Hezbollah defeat of Israel, the Mahdi Army, the Bahraini uprising, and the 2nd shia identity formation post-ISIS.
It's okay for now, thank you anyway. We're sending him some money which should be enough for now.