Nasrallah Tries Once More to Mobilize Base to Support Assad

Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah gave yet another speech on Wednesday in an effort to motivate Shi’ite supporters in Lebanon to help keep Syrian President Bashar Assad in power.

“The party that has fought and experienced wars can lead to victory,” Nasrallah said, according to the Lebanese Broadcasting Corporation International website.

In a speech honoring the memory of a Shi’ite cleric, Nasrallah said “new milestones were opened” for Muslims following the victory of the Islamic Revolution in Iran.

Nasrallah sees Shi’ite Iran and its leading cleric, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, as the spiritual authority, and perceives the struggle against Sunni powers in the sectarian regional war as a continuation and spreading of the revolutionary ideology of the Iranian regime.

The joint struggle to maintain Assad in power is Hezbollah’s primary mission at the moment and, through a string of recent speeches, the group’s leader is trying to rally his forces in the face of high casualties and the need for new recruits.

“It is true that I said the day may come when we will have to declare general mobilization.

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Tony Badran, a columnist for the Beirut- based website NOW Lebanon and a research fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told The Jerusalem Post on Wednesday that Nasrallah’s last speech was more significant in terms of his calling Shi’ites to fall into line and the broader context of the Iranian effort to mobilize Shi’ite fighters to protect Assad.

The Hezbollah leader has successfully “framed the Syrian war as existential for the Shia of Lebanon,” Badran said.

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