Meeting places hizbullah's loyalty under scrutiny
 The loyalty of Hizbullah and the Lebanese Shiite community is again under scrutiny following unconfirmed reports of the party's secretary general, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, meeting secretly with Iran's Foreign Minister in Damascus. Al-Hayat newspaper's correspondent in Damascus, Ibrahim Hammidi, told LBCI's Naharkhom Saed talk show: "The meeting came in the midst of rising tensions between Damascus and the United Nations on the one hand, and the Lebanese government and Premier Fouad Siniora on the other."
| So Hassan, naturally, wanted to know what his opinion was... |
Hammidi, though, believed it was not the first time Nasrallah had met with visiting Iranian officials. "On almost every occasion when an Iranian top official has visited Syria, Nasrallah has met with them," he told LBCI on Tuesday.
| You weren't supposed to notice. It's a secret. He usually wears a domino mask when he goes... |
However, observers are paying particular attention to the rumors of such a visit amid mounting tensions between Lebanon and Syria. And once more local critics are demanding that the Shiites decide whether they are "with Lebanon or Syria" in the ongoing row between the neighboring countries.
| They're with Iran. Iran actually owns Syria, so you can fill in the rest... |
On condition of anonymity, one Hizbullah official told The Daily Star "under the circumstances it would be a natural event in case [the meeting] had actually happened," but refused to consider the meeting as being directed "in any way" against the Lebanese government.
"Regionally, the issues are not categorized within the local disagreement between Hizbullah and the government," the official added, pointing out "the meeting [between Nasrallah and the Iranian minister] would have been necessitated by Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's meeting with U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to discuss the future of the whole region, including the future of Hizbullah, Syria and Iran."
| "So, you see, it was really the Zionists' fault." |
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