Hizballah / Hezbollah - Location/Area of Operation
Operates in the Al Biqa' (Bekaa Valley), the southern suburbs of Beirut, and southern Lebanon. Has established cells in Europe, Africa, South America, North America, and elsewhere. Its training bases are mostly in the previously Syrian-controlled Biqa Valley, and its headquarters and offices are in southern Beirut and in Ba'albek.
Hizballah presence in Latin America dates back to the mid-1980s, when the group began sending operatives to the tri-border area (TBA) of Brazil, Argentina, and Paraguay. The TBA is known as a “terrorist safe haven,” given the wide range of illicit activities conducted within it, including money laundering, counterfeiting, drug trafficking, and human trafficking. Data provided by the U.S. Treasury Department indicate that since 2006 over a dozen individuals and several businesses in the TBA have been sanctioned for providing financial support to Hizballah leadership in Lebanon.
Robert Noriega identified at least two parallel yet collaborative terrorist networks that he claimed are growing at an alarming rate in Latin America: the Nassereddine Network and the Rabbani Network. These networks encompass more than eighty operatives in at least twelve countries throughout the region. Those countries with the highest presence of operatives are Brazil, Venezuela, Argentina, and Chile.
Hezbollah lent support to Assad’s regime from the start of the civil war with small numbers of fighters but committed heavily when the war dragged on to do all it could militarily to save Syria’s strongman, a member of the Alawite minority sect, an offshoot of Shia Islam.
Since the Arab Spring, Hizballanh intervened on the side of President Bashar al-Assad in Syria. Hizballah has been in the vanguard of large assaults on Syrian rebels and not just along the border in Qalamoun and Quneitra but also further afield around Aleppo in northern Syria. Anti-Assad rebel commanders estimate that 80 percent of the ground forces the Assad regime has deployed since the Russian bombing campaign was launched in September 2015 have not consisted of Syrians but are made up of Hizballah and Iranian fighters along with Shi’ite volunteers from Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Israeli defense analysts saw the foray as a blessing — better to have their Lebanese arch-enemy entangled in a war in Syria. But there is increasing concern that Hizballah is getting valuable battlefield experience in Syria, especially when it comes to large-scale, coordinated offensive operations, something the Shi’ite militia had little knowledge of before.
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