Hezbollah has come a long way. At it’s inception the group’s combat formations were aimed at one goal: unconventional warfare against Israel. The apex of their fame and glory was undoubtedly the Second Lebanon War in 2006 when Hezbollah fighters dealt the invading Israelis serious blows which cemented their credibility in the region. Equipped by Iran with modern military equipment, they split into small teams, each armed with loads of anti-tank weaponry and dug into interlocked fighting positions connected by tunnels reminiscent of Iwo Jima. Iranian specialists provided them with electronic warfare support, allowing them to continue to maintain their lines of communication even after Israel thought they had jammed them completely. The Iranians even turned the hardened bunker underneath their embassy into a command center for use by Hassan Nasrallah and his staff.
The glory days are over, though. Presently Hezbollah finds itself being ordered by Iran to prop up the regime of Bashar Al-Assad in Syria. The former ophthalmologist turned Alawite dictator is on the verge of being ousted by Sunnis unhappy with his ruling coalition of Shiite sects and religious minorities and their decades of oppression. In the larger proxy war between Iran and Saudi Arabia, the Assad regime is a vital ally the Iran cannot afford to lose. Hezbollah’s entrance into the Syrian Civil War was a huge boon for the Syrian regime. It allowed over-stretched Syrian troops to cover more ground, hold territory, and even launch counter-offensives to retake rebel-held areas.
These conventional offensive operations have tested Hezbollah’s ability to evolve and branch out from the tactics they perfected during the 2006 war against Israel. Gone are the days when Hezbollah fighters could dig a really deep hole and lie in wait with a wire-guided missile launcher beside them. The coalition of FSA and Al-Nusra fighters are a much more nimble opponent than Israel’s lumbering conventional forces and require a much different, more aggressive approach. This has been tricky, to put it politely. The accumulated wisdom of combat commanders states that irregular forces are usually very good at defense and iffy at offense. Hezbollah, however, has plenty of ideological motivation and it’s troops generally have higher morale than the average Syrian army grunt. For the Shiites, one of the most pressing war aims is to prevent the destruction of as many Shiite shrines and places of worship as possible, which are under serious threat from Al-Nusra extremists in the west and ISIS in the east. Another stated reason for their entry into the conflict is the same “if we don’t fight them there, soon we’ll have to fight them here” that Bush II wheeled out to justify his invasion of Iraq, except that Hezbollah’s claim carries a lot more plausibility considering that Syria and Lebanon share a land border, unlike Iraq and the United States. At the beginning of the civil war, Hezbollah reported that it’s recruitment targets were met almost immediately. Training has been expanded from the days of the 2006 war. New fighters now undergo several months of training in small unit tactics and crew-served weaponry to prepare them for the fight in Syria. Hezbollah commanders have had to think larger, moving their formations strategically as well as tactically, and ensuring greater care when dealing with logistics. Many of the same weapons that served them well in Lebanon, such as the 9M113 Konkurs, TOW, 9M131 Metis, and the RPG-7V and RPG-29 launchers, have followed them across the border into Syria. The tandem warheads on these weapons deliver a one-two punch that can crack through almost any armor in the world, regardless of the presence of explosive reactive plates. This makes them excellent partners to the regular Syrian army, which is short on manpower and hesitant to use tanks in urban areas without proper support from infantry. It also means that the armored vehicles captured by Al-Nusra, ISIS, and the FSA are all going to have to be a lot more careful how they maneuver, lest they be turned into a tin can full of exploding magma.
There have been costs to this shift to a more conventional war as well. Hezbollah has lost hundreds of fighters since they entered the conflict, and the switch from Lebanon to Syria as the primary zone of operations has opened them up to attacks from Sunni extremists. These casualties might be a drop in the bucket compared to the total number of deaths in the war, but Hezbollah cannot draw on the same reserves that a conventional army could and thus each loss is more serious. For a time it seemed as though Hezbollah would be the counter-stroke that won the war for Assad, but just months after the rebels seemed to be on the run, new coalitions between extremists and moderates in the opposition forces unleashed a devastating new offensive. Now Hezbollah ironically finds itself in the same position that Israel was- out on a limb in a foreign land, it’s troops in harms way, and ultimate victory an uncertain prospect at best. Only time will tell if this conflict leaves the group stronger or weaker.
Contributed by Matthew
Hezbollah UCSC 2015 