BEIRUT, Lebanon
Hezbollah has announced Naim
Qassem as its new head.
Qassem, whose promotion from
deputy leader was announced on Tuesday, replaces Hassan Nasrallah as
secretary-general of the Lebanon-based armed group.
Nasrallah was killed in
Beirut in late September by an Israeli strike. Many other senior Hezbollah
officials have also been targeted since Israel turned its focus on the group
that month.
In a statement, Hezbollah said
Qassem was elected to take up the position due to his “adherence to the
principles and goals of Hezbollah”.
It added that the group would
“[ask] God Almighty to guide him in this noble mission in leading Hezbollah and
its Islamic resistance”.
The killing of Nasrallah, who
embodied the Lebanese Shia movement in the eyes of its supporters and the wider
region, was seen as having left a vacuum inside a group that had already
lost much
of its leadership as a result of months of Israeli assassinations.
Nasrallah’s cousin Hashem
Safieddine was previously viewed as the favourite to
take the helm of the Iran-linked Hezbollah, but he died in
an Israeli strike on Beirut shortly after his relative.
The 71-year-old Qassem has
often been referred to as Hezbollah’s “number two”. He is one of the religious
scholars who founded the group in the early 1980s and has a long history in
Shia political activism.
He was the most senior
Hezbollah official to continue making public appearances after Nasrallah
largely went into hiding following the group’s 2006 war with Israel.
Since the former leader was
killed, Qassem has made three televised addresses, speaking in more formal
Arabic than the colloquial Lebanese favoured by Nasrallah.
On September 30, he issued
a defiant
message, saying that Hezbollah remains ready to fight Israel and to win.
Speaking in front of curtains from an undisclosed location on October 8, Qassem said ‘the conflict between Hezbollah and Israel was a “war” about who cries first, and Hezbollah would not cry first.’
No comments:
Post a Comment