For about three and half years, since the summer of 2012, Hezbollah has been actively involved in the Syrian civil war. From protecting its weapons caches on Syrian soil and guarding assets essential to the regime of President Bashar Assad, the Lebanese organization moved on to frontline positions. In many cases, it is Shi’ite fighters who led Assad’s attacks on rebel organizations, and paid a price accordingly. At the beginning of this year it was estimated in the Israel Defense Forces that at least 1,300 Hezbollah fighters had been killed in the war in Syria and about 5,000 wounded. At any given moment Hezbollah has about 5,000 of its fighters in Syria, nearly a quarter of its standing force.

Intelligence officials in Israel pondered for quite some time how to assess the war’s effect on Hezbollah. The long fighting and heavy losses have created a problem of erosion in the organization, which has been subjected to severe criticism at home about sending Shi’ite young men to their deaths in Syria only to save the tyrant from Damascus. Hezbollah does not publish the official count of its dead and has buried some of them in nighttime funerals with the aim of avoiding media coverage.

The organization’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, has had to explain time and again that the fighting in Syria is essential in order to save the Muslim world from Al-Qaida, Islamic State and their ilk. Hezbollah found it difficult to continue to depict itself as defending Lebanon when Sunni suicide terrorists blew themselves up in the heart of Beirut in response to the organization’s involvement in the Syrian war. The flames in Syria, said former IDF chief of staff Benny Gantz in a speech in June 2013, are already licking the hem of Nasrallah’s robe.

Read the article in full at Haaretz.