By request of @[email protected] , posting this three-part effortpost to this comm:

The Rise of the Collective Shia Identity: Part One

The year is 1978. Ayatollah Khomeini, the main voice of Shia Islamism has just been expelled from Najaf by Saddam Hussein. Najaf, the capital of Shia Islam and where the biggest Hawzas (Shia Islamic schools) are located, is a hotspot of political repression, executions, and arrests. The main Marja (basically Shia pope), Sayyid Abu Al Qasim Al Khoei is reduced to a strictly religious role, giving rulings about useless things like marriages and inheritance. His predecessor, Sayyid Muhsin Al Hakim, pushed the political buttons too hard with a ruling that deemed communists and Baathists as disbelievers, which made the Iraqi state go crazy and start a huge campaign of repression of anything political from the Shia elite. Khomeini’s development of the concept of Wilayat Al Faqih was very worrying for Baathist Iraq, so he was expelled from Najaf.

Shias in Iraq never got a place post-Sykes-Picot, with the Kingdom of Iraq being dominated by the Sunni Baghdadi elite. The period between 1958-1968 after the revolution was too chaotic and disjointed to produce an elite, with daily conflicts and coup attempts by adventurers with different ideologies. The Baathist period produced a new elite strictly dominated by Sunnis from Salahaddin Province, so the Shias just never got a seat at the table. Two ideologies penetrated the Shia mind, Islamism and Communism. Islamists were concentrated in Karbala and Najaf, two holy cities for Shia Islam. Communists where concentrated in Nasiriyah, Amarah and Basra, cities where poverty was rampant. Islamists were finally organised in the form of the Dawa Party, led by Musa Al Sadr’s cousin Muhammed Baqir Al Sadr. Musa Al Sadr would later rise as the spiritual leader of the Lebanese Shia community. Muhammed Baqir Al Sadr’s works and political activities really annoyed the Iraqi state, so he and his sister were executed by the state in 1980. Most of their followers were executed or exiled. Many of the influential families in Najaf and Karbala had some Persian ancestry, nearly all those families suffered from mass deportations as Saddam’s anti-Persian paranoia grew. The communists suffered from the same fate, with most communists either executed or exiled by the state due to their political activities.

Now we’re done with Iraq, let’s go to Iran. Shia Islamism is dead here too, the Shah’s security services arrests anyone with any political activity. Khomeini was successfully chased out 20 years ago, and there’s no organised political force that can even talk loudly without getting executed. The Shah is at least Shia Muslim on paper, he prays in public once every 10 years, visits the shrines in Qom and Mashhad occasionally, but to everyone with a functioning brain, this man is a disbeliever. There’s something brewing, but let’s wait with that story.

Let’s go to Lebanon. Shias in Lebanon are around half of the Muslim population. It’s hard to get exact numbers, but Shias are around 25% of the total population of the country. The Shia community here also never got a real seat at the table. The president holds most of the power and is always a Maronite. The prime minister gets fired every few weeks, but he’s always a Sunni and does nothing while the Maronite elite is pretending to be French and robbing the country. The speaker of the parliament is Shia, but toilet paper is more useful than that position. Feudalism didn’t really end in the Shia parts of Lebanon, most Shias were farmers who were getting fucked so hard on a daily basis that they didn’t have time to even think about politics. Remember we’re in 1978, where are the Shias in the middle of civil war? The answer is nowhere. The main sides are Maronites vs Sunni Muslims, communists and Palestinians. Shias were not a major factor here. The only notable Shia organization is the Amal Movement, led by Musa Al Sadr. Musa was a charismatic leader who would set the foundations of the modern Shia Lebanese identity, he was respected by all sectors of the cursed Lebanese society and his connections to Iran and Iraq were slowly starting to be important in a regional context. But nothing good lasts, as he was inexplicably disappeared and presumably killed by Gaddafi during a routine visit to Libya in August 1978.

Let’s go to Yemen and the Gulf. In Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, Shias were an afterthought, they are 0% of the ruling families and have zero political representation. They’re allowed to do some rituals at home when no one sees, but if you open your mouth in public and say anything Shia Islamist, you’re getting disappeared and your whole family will probably be deported to Iran or something. Shias in Bahrain are the absolute majority and they’re significant minorities in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. In Yemen, the Shias are not the same kind of Shia as in Iraq, Iran and Lebanon. The main group of Shia Muslims are either called Jaafari after the theological works of the sixth Shia Imam Jaafar Al Sadiq, or Ithna Ashari (Twelvers) due to their belief in twelve Imams after the Prophet Muhammed, starting with Imam Ali ibn Abi Talib and ending with Imam Muhammed Al Mahdi, also known as the Hidden Imam who according to Shia beliefs will reappear one day and basically set in motion the end of the physical world. The Shia of Yemen are known as Zaydis, after Zayd ibn Jaafar Al Sadiq, who the Zaidis recognized as 7th Imam, while the Twelvers recognized Musa ibn Jaafar Al Sadiq. The Zaidi Imamate in Northern Yemen continued for nearly a thousand years, but it could not withstand the post-WW2 chaos in the region and ended in nearly comic fashion after a coup led by local rivals and involvement from an exiled Iraqi officer. The Zaydi community here in 1978 is in disarray, with many converting to Sunni Islam out of convenience in a new world. There’s no organized Zaydi force or political party, they just farm in the highlands of Northern Yemen and chill out there. It is a fading group, but wait, something just happened in Yemen. Ali Abdullah Saleh, a Zaydi military officer from Sanaa, and one of the great adventurers of the 1900s in the Middle East, just did a military coup and took power in the failing state of North Yemen in July 1978.

How did this defeated religious group go from edges of the region to the dominant group in five countries and a political force that annoys America and Israel? We’ll find out in the next episode as we cover the Islamic Revolution in Iran and the formative value of the Iraq-Iran War, the failed Shaaban Revolution in Iraq, the rise of Hezbollah in the south of Lebanon, and the rise of the Houthi (Ansarallah) movement in Yemen.

The Rise of the Collective Shia Identity: Part Two

We continue the story around 15 years later, we’re now in the early 90s. Three significant events have taken place in the modern Shia story. The first and the most significant is the Islamic Revolution in Iran, the second is the Iraq-Iran War, the third is the formation of Hezbollah in South Lebanon and the real start of the Shia Lebanese story. We have to start with the Islamic Revolution. I won’t go into the details of how the Revolution happened and why it happened, but I will talk about what it meant at the time and what the consequences were. I will sum the events of the Revolution in three sentences. Mass protests break out in Iran against the Shah’s repression and economic inequality, which slowly takes a more Islamist character in opposition to the Shah’s pro-Western secular regime. The Islamization of the protests meant that some sort of spiritual leadership had to rise, Ayatollah Khomeini who was exiled in Paris becomes the spiritual leader and he manages to unify all sectors of the protest movement under his leadership. He then returned to Iran as the unopposed leader of the movement in the ending stage of the revolution and then consolidated the revolution in his vision of the new Iran working under his system of Wilayat al Faqih.

The success of the revolution in Iran led to the formation of the first modern Islamic state which draws its legitimacy from Shia Islam. Sykes-Picot created only kingdoms as in the Gulf and Iraq, and semi-functional weak republics like Syria and Lebanon. The establishment of Islamic Republic was significant on several levels. It was the first popular revolution which established an Islamic Republic, unlike the revolutions in states such as Egypt and Iraq, where military dictatorships were founded instead of the old comprador kingdoms. It also marked the end of nearly 2500 years of hereditary rule in Iran and old Persia. The events of the Islamic Revolution were frightening for the Gulf monarchies and for Iraq, as they realised the threat of Shia Islamism within their borders. One of Khomeini’s first promises after the success of the revolution was exporting the experience to other nations where “disbelievers” were in power and where Shias were barred from participating in controlling their destiny. The first seeds of a “Shia International” were planted by Khomeini very quickly. Shias in Iraq were very emboldened by Khomeini’s success, and political activities by the banned Dawa Party accelerated in late 1979 and early 1980, which ended after the execution of Muhammed Baqir Al Sadr in Iraq in 1980. If you were a Shia Islamist in Iraq in 1975 for example, you had nowhere to go, but if you needed to flee in 1980, you suddenly have a massive Shia neighbour that not only allows you to come as a refugee, but also fully supports your political activities and gives you weapons.

Saddam decided to not wait for the inevitable confrontation with the Islamic Republic of Iran and started a massive war in late 1980. The Iraq-Iran war is the most important moment in the formation of the “Shia International” and the formation of the first fully ideological generation of young Shias that would later change the world. Literally every single influential Shia character of the last 30 years had some degree of interaction with Ayatollah Khomeini or Muhammed Baqir Al Sadr or fought in the Iraq-Iran War. Qassem Soleimani fought in the war. Hadi Al Ameri, leader of Badr Brigades in Iraq fought in the war. Sayyid Hassan Nasrallah was a 16-year-old student under Al Sadr. The Houthi family lived in Qom in Iran after the revolution. Ali Khamenei was President of Iran during the war. Abu Mahdi Al Muhandis fought in the war. Even current president of Iran Masoud Pezeshkian fought in the war. Abdul Aziz Al Hakim, son of former Shia Grand Marja Muhsin Al Hakim fought in the war and later become president of Iraq for one month under the American occupation. Musa Al Sadr’s niece was married to Khomeini’s son Ahmed and Musa’s son was married to Khomeini’s granddaughter. The war itself was not that eventful, with both sides mostly in deadlock for eight years. The relevant part of the whole war was basically four battles. Iraqi capture of Khorramshahr and then the Iranian liberation of the city. Then the Iranian capture of Al Faw and the Iraqi liberation of the area. The Gulf monarchies went crazy in their support of Saddam during the war and gave him lots of money, mainly because they really wanted the defeat of Iran without shooting a bullet, which reminds us of a certain Ukrainian comedian who is getting duped now in a similar way.

The culture around the war is the most important part in the formation of the modern Shia identity in my opinion. In Christianity, the defining moment for the religion is the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, which presents Jesus as the ultimate sacrifice of humanity and the image of him bleeding on the cross is etched into the mind of every Christian. For Shia Muslims, the martyrdom of the grandson of Prophet Muhammed Imam Hussain and the wholesale murder of his entire family holds even more emotional value than the crucifixion of Jesus Christ does for Christians, because there’s no happy ending here and no Ascension to the sky. Hussain was slaughtered, his father Ali ibn Abu Talib had his skull shattered while leading morning prayers, and every single Imam was murdered in Shia beliefs. What the Iraq-Iran War did was a complete revival of the tradition of martyrdom in Shia Islam and the commemoration of martyrs became not only just an accepted practice, but also encouraged by the Iranian state. Iranian fighters that were deployed to the front wore headbands with Shia slogans such as “Ya Hussain”, “Ya Zahra” and “Ya Mahdi”, clerics held Qurans over the heads of the fighters when they were boarding trains and trucks to the front, and fighters didn’t only receive combat training at camps before reaching the front, but they also received religious lessons about the sacrifices of Hussain and his family and participated in the first sessions of state-sponsored “Matams” in modern history, where poems about martyrdom were recited while the religious Shia beat their chests. The official “music” of the Iranian state was no longer Googoosh in her skirt performing Persian Pop for the son of the Shah in his birthday party, but it was militarised and Islamised and became stuff like “Karbala Ma Darim” (“Karbala we’re coming”, a reference to the holy city of Karbala) and “Mamad Naboodi Babini” (“Mohammed you didn’t see it”, a reference to an Iranian solider that played a heroic role in the battle of Khorramshahr, but was martyred a few days before the liberation of the city). The names of the streets were changed, the names of metro stations were changed, the names of the city squares were changed. Pahlavi Street became Shahid Bahonar Street, the Tehran Metro now has over 15 stations named after some martyr, mostly from the Iraq-Iran War and the revolution. This complete transformation of Iranian society led to the creation of the concept of the Resistance itself in those years. What is the Iraq-Iran War called in Persian? Difaa e-Muqaddas, Holy Resistance.

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.

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.

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.