Destruction, Death, and Drastic Measures
By Dahr Jamail
TomDispatch.com

Tuesday 08 August 2006

Damascus, Syria - "I care about my people, my country, and defending them from the Zionist aggression," said a Hezbollah fighter after I'd asked him why he joined the group. I found myself in downtown Beirut sitting in the backseat of his car in the liquid heat of a Lebanese summer. Sweat rolled down my nose and dripped on my notepad as I jotted furiously.

"My home in Dahaya is now pulverized," he said while the concussions of Israeli bombs landing in his nearby neighborhood echoed across the buildings around us, "Everything in my life is destroyed now, so I will fight them. I am a Shaheed [martyr]."

He asked to remain anonymous, and that I refer to him only as Ahmed.

The late afternoon sun was behind him as he told me just how hard his life had been. When he was eleven years old, he and his youngest brother had been taken from their home by Israeli soldiers and put in prison for two years. I asked him what happened to him there, but that was a subject he wouldn't discuss. One of his brothers was later killed by Israeli soldiers. After his release from an Israeli prison Ahmed was spending his teenage years in southern Lebanon when he was caught in crossfire between Hezbollah fighters and Israeli soldiers near his home. He was shot three times. Many years before, his father had been killed by an Israeli air strike on a refugee camp in south Beirut.

"What are we left with?" he asked, while the angle of the sun through the windshield highlighted tears welling in his eyes, "I know I will die fighting them, then I will go to my God. But I will go to my God fighting like a lion. I will not be slaughtered like a lamb."...http://tinyurl.com/ohbgp
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