Militias Destroy Arab Homelands!

In August 2006, following the war between Hezbollah and Israel triggered by the group’s abduction of three Israeli soldiers—which resulted in the complete devastation of Lebanon—Hezbollah’s then-secretary-general admitted that, had he foreseen the scale of the impending destruction, his organization would not have carried out the operation. (A Hamas official made a similar statement after the 2023 operation; both assertions refute the subsequent claims of victory, which are promoted as a media-driven myth by supporters.) In both cases, and in subsequent ones, even children are aware of the expected scale of Israel’s response and its devastating impact, which simply stems from the vast disparity in capabilities between a rifle and an aircraft.

At that time, I was a guest on one of the most famous and heated talk shows in the Arab world, watched by millions. My interlocutor was Dr. Anis Nqash, a Lebanese figure from Tehran, who had previously been involved in the kidnapping of OPEC oil ministers and an attempted assassination of Shapour Bakhtiar, Iran’s former prime minister. He was advocating the idea that Hezbollah’s “victory” over Israel in that war necessitated replacing Arab national armies with armed militias to achieve victory and liberate occupied territories. My response was that this is precisely the recipe for the destruction of Arab homelands (and this was said in 2006). Militias do not enter a country without destroying it and igniting endless civil wars among its sectarian and ethnic components. I asked Dr. Anis Nqash, according to your logic, should our Arab countries fund the Muslim Brotherhood militias in Syria, given that the Syrian army has not liberated the Golan since 1967, unlike the situation in southern Lebanon where the Lebanese army operates? Strangely, this episode was not rebroadcast, unlike other episodes, and was completely removed from the archive, despite the dialogue being highly respectful and entirely within normal bounds. Perhaps there was a technical reason for not airing the episode; I still possess a copy, as it was recorded on VHS tape at my home.

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Final point:

1. I stated publicly what I had previously expressed during an interview with the Kuwaiti and Arab media by the late martyr Sayyid Muhammad Baqir al-Hakim at the Kuwait Journalists’ Association in September 2002, as clouds of war between the United States and Saddam Hussein began to gather on the horizon. I was the first caller in that program, and I publicly advised retaining and reforming the Iraqi army, removing its Ba’athist leadership, because the Badr Organization and the Peshmerga could contribute to stabilizing security in their respective regions, though not necessarily across all of Iraq. I reiterated the historical truth that militias divide rather than unite, and their actions are difficult to control. The Iraqi army was subsequently disbanded, leading to widespread chaos that persists today due to militias under various names.

2. After the experiences of armed militias and the destructive wars, demolition, and displacement they have caused over decades in Lebanon, Somalia, Yemen, Syria, Gaza, Libya, Sudan, and Iraq, do we still need further evidence and indicators to demonstrate the undeniable truth that armed militias and happy homelands with bright futures never coexist?