Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah Hassan Nasrallah was born in 1960 in a poor suburb of Beirut. In 1975, his family moved back to its ancestral home in the southern Lebanese village of Bassouriyeh. As a young man, Sheikh Nasrallah studied in religious schools and joined the Amal Movement, a Shiite resistance …

On the leeward side of Ait al-Shaab, a village in south Lebanon, the war between Hizbullah and Israel caused many sacrifices. Months later, both tears and triumph are plentiful.

There was never any doubt that the young Iraqi Shiite with green eyes and close-cropped beard would pick up arms when called to fight by Moqtada al-Sadr.