Hezbollah selects Naim Qasem as leader of Iran-backed militant group in Lebanon: NPR

BEIRUT – Hezbollah on Tuesday named cleric Naim the leader of the Lebanese militant group after its longtime leader Hassan Nasrallah was killed in an Israeli airstrike outside Beirut in late September. It was announced that Mr. Kasem had been selected.

The group said in a statement that Hezbollah’s decision-making body, the Shura Council, had elected Qassem, 71, as its new secretary-general and vowed to continue Nasrallah’s policies “until victory is achieved.”

Since Nasrallah’s death as part of an Israeli offensive that killed many of Hezbollah’s top officials, the gray-bearded, white-turbaned cleric has often been the public face of the Lebanese militant group. Although he was one of its founding members, he is widely seen by supporters as lacking the oratory skills of his predecessor.

In a televised speech earlier this month, Qasem, who holds the cleric title of Sheikh, insisted that Hezbollah’s military capabilities remained intact after Nasrallah’s assassination and told Israelis that continued fighting would only cause further suffering for Israelis. I warned you.

Qasem is under sanctions from the United States, which considers Hezbollah a terrorist organization. His appointment was not surprising, as he served as Nasrallah’s deputy for 32 years and was the public face of Hezbollah, giving interviews to local and international media.

“This is a message inside and outside Lebanon that Hezbollah has reorganized itself,” said Qassim Kassir, a Lebanese analyst close to Hezbollah.

Qassem’s appointment shows that Hezbollah is running its own affairs, with an adviser to Iran’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guards currently heading the group, as some reports have said. This shows that this is not the case, Kashir added.

In an interview with The Associated Press in July, Qasem said he did not believe Israel had the ability to start a full-scale war with Hezbollah, or that he had not yet made a decision. But he cautioned that even if Israel intended to carry out limited operations in Lebanon that would fall short of all-out war, it should not be expected that fighting would remain limited.

A day after Hamas-led militants stormed Israel on October 7, 2023, killing about 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and abducting about 250 hostages, Hezbollah said it was starting backup efforts. and began attacking Israeli military camps along the border with Lebanon. It will become a front line for Hamas allies.

The attack triggered a year-long Israeli-Hamas war, with more than 43,000 Palestinians killed in Israeli retaliatory attacks in the Gaza Strip, according to local health officials.

“No one knows what the regional and international consequences will be if a war breaks out in Lebanon,” Qassem said at the group’s political headquarters in the southern suburbs of Beirut at the time.

He said he was proud of Hezbollah’s achievements in the “support front” to Hamas, saying it “required sacrifices on our side.”

Less than three months later, Israel escalated its war in Lebanon, leaving hundreds dead and more than 1.2 million displaced. The invasion caused widespread destruction in southern and eastern Lebanon, as well as on the southern outskirts of Beirut, where Hezbollah’s headquarters are located. Israeli forces engage in violent daily clashes with Hezbollah along the border as they try to push deeper into southern Lebanon.

Hezbollah continues to fire dozens of rockets and missiles into northern Israel, and in recent days claimed to have attacked an Israeli military base south of Tel Aviv. It also claimed responsibility for a drone attack on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s home earlier this month. No one was injured in the attack.

Born in 1953 in the town of Kfar Fira in southern Lebanon, Qassem studied chemistry at the University of Lebanon and worked as a chemistry teacher for several years. He simultaneously pursued religious studies and participated in the founding of the Lebanese Islamic Student Union, an organization aimed at promoting the religion.

In the 1970s, he joined the Disenfranchised Movement, a political organization that promoted greater representation of Lebanon’s historically overlooked and impoverished Shiite community.

The group morphed into the Amal Movement, one of the main armed groups in Lebanon’s civil war, and is now a powerful political party led by National Assembly Speaker Navi Berri. Qasem later joined the nascent Hezbollah, formed with Iranian support after Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982 and occupied the country’s southern regions.

From 1991, Qassem initially served as the organization’s deputy under Nasrallah’s predecessor, Abbas Moussawi, who was killed in an Israeli helicopter attack in 1992.

Qasem’s election as Hezbollah’s leader comes after top figure Hashem Saffieddin, who was widely expected to succeed Nasrallah, was killed in an Israeli airstrike south of Beirut earlier this month. It was one week after that.

Mr. Saffieddin is Mr. Nasrallah’s cousin and has close ties to Iran, where he spent many years of his life. Saffieddin’s son Rida is married to Zeinab Soleimani, the daughter of General Qasem Soleimani, commander of Iran’s elite Quds Force, who was killed in a 2020 airstrike in Iraq.

Hezbollah said in a statement about Qasem: “We ask God for help in our great mission to lead Hezbollah and the Islamic Resistance Movement.”

In a further blow to Hezbollah, thousands of communications devices used by its members (both fighters and employees of the group’s civilian agency) exploded almost simultaneously in mid-September, killing 39 people and killing 3,000. Nearby people were injured. Israel was blamed for the attack, which left scores of others permanently disabled.

Qassem’s selection “is proof that Hezbollah is not afraid of developments,” Kassir said.