Hezbollah's Global Footprint

With its enormously unpopular involvement on the side of President Bashar Assad in the Syrian civil war against the regime’s primarily Sunni opposition, the Shiite-based Lebanese Hezbollah now finds itself facing the most severe existential crisis since its creation in the early 1980s. Matthew Levitt’s “Hezbollah: The Global Footprint of Lebanon’s Party of God,” a meticulously detailed examination of Hezbollah’s origins as an Iranian proxy in Lebanon and its forays into terrorism, could not come at a better time. The book sheds new light on the targeting of Western and Israeli interests in Lebanon and abroad (where Hezbollah also runs extensive criminal enterprises), and the consolidation of its power among Lebanon’s Shiite population and the country’s political system — all of which are now being threatened by its controversial involvement in Syria’s civil war.