Ex-Hezbollah members denounce indoctrination

Some Shi'ite youth say they are done fighting for Iran

BEIRUT (JNI) — Lebanese Hezbollah’s indoctrination and social control helped it raise a generation of radical fighters, but its Shi’ite base may be buckling under the pressure of war, former members say.

The armed group taught a generation of Shi’ite youth to sacrifice their lives for Iran, Ayman, a former member, told Jusoor News. “They would tell us that our religion requires that we grow up and become martyrs,” he said of his experience at Hezbollah’s Mahdi Scouts summer camps. “From the age of eight, they taught us in religious classes that if you disobey Imam Khamenei, you go to hell.”

Ayman recalled that beginning at age 14, in so-called “young fighter” camps, he learned to use Kalashnikov rifles and move in military formation, alongside continued religious instruction that stressed blind obedience to Iranian leaders.

Parents of children at Hezbollah schools and camps do not necessarily know the extent of the indoctrination, according to Maytham Issa, a Shi’ite cleric from the south Lebanese village Houmein al-Tahta. “At first, they just know that he’s learning to pray, fast, read the Quran … Every parent wants their child to be disciplined, not hanging out on the street.”

Issa noted that teenagers undergoing military training at Hezbollah camps are told they have a religious obligation to lie to their parents and families. “[The recruit] has to say he went on a religious pilgrimage,” Issa said. “He can’t say he spent 40 days in uniform.” Young people who breach the secrecy face expulsion from the movement or other forms of punishment, he added.

Hezbollah also uses money to acquire and lock youth into its system of indoctrination and training, Issa said, through salaries, life insurance, health care, and scholarships. “It’s as if the Iranians turn on a tap and money pours out,” he observed. The same funds also drive a wedge between recruits and their communities, he said: “If I’m a farmer and I lost my land, or if I have a bakery or butcher shop and it was destroyed … I have nothing to eat or drink. I don’t want the war to continue … But the Hezbollah man, he’s all set, his salary keeps coming.”

Zaynab, a young refugee from south Lebanon now in Beirut, told Jusoor that no amount of money can compensate for Shi’ite losses after three years of war on behalf of Gaza and Iran. “People are displaced, living on the street; it breaks your heart,” she said. “We’ve suffered so much from this war, and we haven’t gained a single thing.”

A tenth grader when she and her family fled the war in 2024, Zaynab said she still has not resumed her studies. One relative died in the war, and bomb damage made their home unlivable. “My family is sheltering in a school. I barely even get to see my mom.”

Hezbollah’s ideology turned her community into pawns in a war not their own, Zaynab said. “Now they are negotiating, and Tehran isn’t even under attack,” she told Jusoor. “Iran is safe, while our youth are dying and our homes are being destroyed.”

Ayman, the former Hezbollah youth recruit, said he had already quit the group’s Mahdi Scouts as a teenager before the war. “I never fully bought it; something felt off to me,” he said. “In Shi’ite Islam, we believe in 12 imams. But they taught us there were 14, adding Khamenei and Khomeini to the list.”

Ayman said many Lebanese Shi’ites reject Hezbollah, but intimidation prevents them from saying so publicly. “If anyone speaks out, they say, ‘He’s with the enemy, with the Israelis.’ … They demonize you. People are still afraid to talk.”