Even as most of the Middle East is overtaken by outrage at weeks of destructive Israeli strikes against Hezbollah and its leaders, some communities are celebrating the disarray of the powerful militia that persecuted them.
Nowhere is that sentiment as strong as in parts of Syria, where Hezbollah has played a key role in helping President Bashar al-Assad wage a brutal crackdown on opponents of his family’s decades-long rule, and where news of Israeli strikes on Hezbollah neighborhoods prompted singing in the streets of rebel strongholds.
Hezbollah’s origin story is in fighting Israel’s occupation of southern Lebanon, which ended in 2000, and fighting Israel is the mission central to its followers’ identity. But one of its biggest military roles over the past decade had actually been in Syria, helping its patron, Iran, keep Mr. Assad in power.
Hezbollah forces played a part in some of the most brutal chapters of the Syrian civil war, including sieges that starved encircled communities for months, as well as operations that expelled many Sunni Muslims, who were the backbone of the anti-Assad revolt, from neighborhoods and towns.
As Israel launched strike after successful strike against Hezbollah in the past two weeks — starting with exploding pagers and walkie-talkies, and culminating in the airstrikes on Friday that killed Hezbollah’s longtime leader, Hassan Nasrallah — many Syrians from the opposition have posted celebratory messages on social media. Some used the hashtag “ana shamtan,” which translates roughly into, “I have schadenfreude.”
Unlike Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, which most of the Arab world strongly condemns and often describes as genocidal, its strikes on Hezbollah have exposed the fractures within the region’s political landscape.
Many Arab communities, including some Christian groups and many from the Sunni Muslim world, are wary of if not hostile to the network of Shiite Muslim militias backed and fostered by their regional patron, Iran, which they believe aim to uphold sectarian dominance.
Similar sentiments have been expressed by some from Iraq’s Sunni community, a population embittered not only by what they see as retributive and repressive treatment by the country’s Iran-backed Shiite majority government, but also the growing power of their country’s powerful Shiite militias.
One Sunni figure in Iraq posted a video of black smoke rising from the Dahiya district, the Hezbollah-controlled neighborhood just south of Beirut where Israel said its strikes had killed Mr. Nasrallah. “Their smoke covers the sun,” he wrote, tagging the clip with a smiley emoji.
Some who greeted the news of the debilitating attacks on Hezbollah cautioned that the schadenfreude many were feeling should not be mistaken as approval of Israel, or support of its bombardment of Gaza, which has killed more than 40,000 people.
“There is no problem with some people rejoicing over the death of Hassan Nasrallah. This does not mean that they are with the other party,” Youssif Tamimi, an Iraqi journalist, wrote on the social media platform X. “Many Shiites were happy with Saddam’s execution after American forces captured him, at a time when some of them were against the American presence in Iraq. Did their happiness mean that they were with America? Slow down, please.”
As a reminder of the reason for their celebration, Syrian opponents of Mr. Assad’s rule have been reposting decade-old videos of Hezbollah militants beating and humiliating people as they handed out bread in a district of the capital that they and Assad forces had besieged. Others reposted past videos of a well-known pro-Hezbollah media personality, who sometimes filmed himself mocking the Syrian opposition — including a video of himself eating as he reported on a besieged area, and another of him smiling and walking through streets reduced to rubble.
In Syria’s northern rebel stronghold of Idlib, devastated by years of bombardment that continues even now by Assad-backed forces, communities that only weeks and months earlier had gathered to protest the bombings in Gaza are now posting videos of people beating drums and singing in the streets, some of them distributing sweets.
One chant amid the celebrations made their underlying wish clear: “We wish the same for you, Bashar.”
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