Hezbollah Emerges in Forefront of Power in Lebanon

Posters of slain former prime minister Rafiq Hariri with son Saad hang over a street in Beirut's Tariq Jdeideh district. (By Nasser Nasser -- Associated Press)

"Hezbollah made clear that it will be here, it will be independent, it will be an army and it will not tolerate any Lebanese government doing anything about it," said Paul Salem, the director of the Carnegie Middle East Center. "That's a no-go zone."

But a different dynamic emerged in the Chouf, whose picturesque terrain was some of the most blood-soaked in the 15-year civil war. There, Hezbollah's fighters met far fiercer resistance from the Druze who populate those mountains. While Hezbollah has long guarded a vaunted reputation won by success in ending Israel's occupation in 2000 and fighting it to a draw in 2006, this time Shiite fighters shed their old image of guerrillas for a new one of invaders.

"I know my land better than they do," Thibyan said simply.

Residents there said two convoys of Hezbollah fighters passed the village of Niha along a road that Israeli forces had built during their invasion of Lebanon in 1982. The first had 13 vehicles -- motorcycles and pickups with guns mounted in back. A half-hour later, 22 more vehicles followed, heading on a 25-mile trek to Maasar Chouf, a village on the road to Mukhtara, the feudal residence of Walid Jumblatt, the Druze leader.

At 9:30 p.m., residents said, Hezbollah's fighters were ambushed by Druze villagers in their heartland, some of whom, until that moment, had stood on opposite sides of the 18-month-long crisis, divided by politics and leadership. For perhaps the first time in Hezbollah's history, it had deployed as an army of conquest rather than an insurgent band, fighting Israel, that could exploit its own terrain and the support of its people.

Two hours later, residents said, its fighters were trapped on the Israeli-built road. Furious mediation secured their release, and, by 4 a.m., they began withdrawing.

"We're going to die in our village. We're never going to leave it," said Nadia Assaf, a 22-year-old resident of Niha, surveying the scene of the battle from a Druze shrine for the prophet Job. "It learned the lesson that it'll be defeated on our land."

The words were the same as those uttered by countless Shiite villagers in the 2006 war with Israel, when it invaded Hezbollah's stronghold in southern Lebanon.

Few missed that irony: "Hezbollah may gain a lot in terms of power. It certainly has the upper hand," said Salem, the analyst. "But it has lost a lot in terms of image."

Increased Sectarian Strife

In a land of contested martyrs, Mohammed Shamaa is one of the newest.

On Thursday, the 22-year-old resident of a Beirut Sunni neighborhood known as Tariq Jdeideh left his wife, five months pregnant with his son, at his in-laws'. He visited his mother, asking her to bless him. She did, then took two pictures with her cellphone that she downloaded to her computer.

A half-hour later, at midnight, he was dead. A bullet had pierced his left eye. His friends say he was unarmed, caught in crossfire between Sunnis and Shiites that raged from evening into the early morning. A poster of Shamaa now hangs on walls, and a banner across the street of Beirut's most ardent Sunni neighborhood commemorates his death.