As Hezbollah Fights in Syria, Life Changes in a Lebanese Border Town

 HERMEL, Lebanon — The procession was small as Hezbollah funerals go, just a few hundred people winding past wind-tossed olive trees through this remote Bekaa Valley village. Still, the mourners honored the fighter killed in Syria with the usual solemn choreography: the coffin draped with a flag, the uniformed Boy Scouts bearing his portrait, the women carrying babies and wreaths of roses.

But to the traditional prayers and chants — praising the leaders of Iran and Hezbollah, denouncing Israel and America — the mourners added a new barb, for the gunmen battling the Syrian government who, they said, had killed him: “Death to the Free Army.”

The funeral on Wednesday at once encapsulated Hezbollah’s cohesion and the new uncertainties and anxieties its followers face as it fights a new kind of war, more intimate and ambiguous than the group’s founding conflict with Israel.

Hezbollah’s increasingly open military intervention in Syria, against fellow Arab Muslims, is framed by its followers here in the northern Bekaa Valley less as a galvanizing mission than a regrettable necessity.

“We are fighting with them, but we dislike this fighting,” one resident, a man who accompanied journalists to the funeral and asked to be identified as a Hezbollah supporter, said at the party’s headquarters after the ceremony.

The fighting has unraveled many of the ties that once linked Hermel to its neighbors. It has left many Shiite Muslims in Hermel afraid to visit nearby Sunni villages in Lebanon and Syria, cutting them off from jobs, friends and business dealings. Soldiers now check cars entering the village, fearing bombs. A new wariness has crept up between some Syrian workers and their employers here.

“Unfortunately, we don’t know who our enemy is today,” one villager, Abu Hassan, said as the family of the fighter, a young father with a wispy beard named Ahmed Awad, crowded, some weeping, around the grave.

“It’s as if you take the fight against Israel and you bring it instead into your own house,” the Hezbollah supporter said. “But honestly,” he added, referring to Syrian rebels and the foreign radicals fighting with them, “it was them who brought it into the house.”

Nearly everyone interviewed during three recent days in Hermel said that Hezbollah, the Shiite Muslim militant group and political party that holds sway in this mostly Shiite village, had no choice but to fight alongside its Syrian ally, President Bashar al-Assad, against an uprising increasingly influenced by Sunni extremists. Some Sunni rebel groups have denounced Shiites as apostates, killed them and destroyed their shrines.

Yet the very view from the grave site in Hermel was a reminder of why Hezbollah’s followers here express a degree of pain over the Syrian fight.

Below the hillside cemetery stretched the mountains and apricot orchards along the border with Syria, lands where the Shiites of Hermel have long shared deep ties — of commerce, of kinship — with Lebanese and Syrian Sunnis. Many ties remained even as some Sunnis joined or supported the uprising. Local Hezbollah leaders and supporters met with Sunni sheiks, trying to keep the area calm.

But as Hezbollah poured fighters across the border last month to help the Syrian Army retake the nearby town of Qusayr — its white buildings, where Hermel residents used to shop, visible in the distance from the cemetery — rebels increasingly clashed directly with Hezbollah and attacked its civilian areas in Lebanon. Hermel has lost four residents to rocket attacks from Syrian rebels, and about seven Hezbollah fighters, the mayor, Mustafa Taha, said.

Residents fear worse. An obstetrician from Hermel recently got a call from her boss at a clinic in Arsal telling her it was unsafe for her to come to work anymore.

Her husband, a Shiite member of the secular Syrian Social Nationalist Party, said he was concerned about the growing religious fervor on both sides. “Marx was right,” he said. “Religion is terrible for society.” But he said he accepted the protection of Hezbollah, saying he prefers its religiosity to “fanaticism” on the other side.

The economic problems that began when rebels seized border villages and gunmen started kidnapping travelers have worsened: lucrative fuel smuggling has dropped off. The fish farms along the gushing Orontes River have lost most of their business, which was with Syria. The restaurants there stand empty, their umbrellas advertising Lebanese beer unopened. Apricots and apples go unharvested.

Watching the funeral, Abu Hassan, who gave only a nickname to protect his security, said it might have been “a mistake” to fight Syrians, but added, “If we didn’t, they will come to us.”

“I dislike the whole situation,” he said. “The Syrians don’t trust us. They consider us lambs permissible for slaughtering.”

Mistrust had invaded the village, he said, even among some Shiites, as some have supported the battle more enthusiastically than others, and especially between them and the Syrian laborers who have long worked here.

“We’re watching them,” he said.

Here, Hezbollah finds itself caught between competing pressures. Some tribal Shiites, who back Hezbollah politically but resent the way it has supplanted their traditional power, voice discomfort with the fighting that has disrupted livelihoods and community ties and want it to end as soon as possible.

On the other hand, some followers chafe when the party urges restraint and reconciliation and forbids them to attack rebels and their supporters in the Lebanese Sunni village of Arsal across the valley. In the past week, the son of a Sunni leader from Arsal was killed near Hermel, and four Shiites were killed near Arsal, including two from the powerful Jaafari tribe.

Mohammed Jaafar, a tribe member, said that the family was refraining from traditional revenge killings at Hezbollah’s request — for now.

“We won’t stay silent over our sons’ blood,” he said.

Even though Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, forbade celebratory gunfire in a recent speech, as the funeral procession passed on Wednesday, relatives of the dead fighter honored him with barrages of gunfire. Asked why, the Hezbollah supporter said it was impossible to contain people’s emotions — and, eventually their demands.

“I told Sayyed Hassan myself, there is a point at which we can’t control the people,” he said. “If we could, then people from Arsal wouldn’t have been killed, nor the Jaafari people.”

After the funeral, he awaited a meeting with a sheik from Arsal, part of a flurry of talks that aims to keep tensions low. Hezbollah, according to multiple Hermel residents and Sunnis visiting from Syria who do not support the uprising, has worked behind the scenes to keep Sunnis safe in Shiite-majority villages on both sides of the border, once even paying compensation to Shiites who wanted to take revenge on antigovernment Sunnis they said destroyed their homes.

But the Hezbollah supporter said he believed the rebels had not reciprocated. “That’s what hurts,” he said.

North of Hermel, the Syrian border was quiet, the black-clad Hezbollah fighters who had been active there during the Qusayr battle nowhere to be seen; Hezbollah supporters said they had moved on to other battles in Syria.

Hussein Jamal, a Shiite man living at the border, whose yard had been struck by a shell and whose brother was kidnapped and never returned, said he felt safer now, but was unsure if relations with neighboring Sunnis would ever be the same.

“We were told no one was allowed to be hurt,” he said. “But without the leadership I don’t think they would be staying here.”