Three Shiite clerics have held the position of Secretary-General of Hezbollah since its official founding in 1989. The first was a sheikh with a white turban named Subhi al-Tufayli, the second was a “master” with a black turban called Abbas al-Musawi, and the third was a turbaned “master” named Hassan Nasrallah.
In his book “The Shiite Genie Out of the Bottle/30 Years of Conflict between Hezbollah and Israel,” Nicholas Blanford recounts the history of the succession to this position, and the backgrounds that preceded the election of the party’s first Secretary-General in 1989.
Since the 1980s, and under the auspices of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, a gathering of Shiite clerics began to emerge, headed by two future secretaries-general of Hezbollah, which will be officially established years later: Subhi al-Tufaili and Abbas al-Musawi, in addition to Sheikh Muhammad Yazbek. Naming the emerging movement was delayed until 1984, when the leadership settled on a Qur’anic verse (Indeed, Hezbollah is the victorious) to give it a name, so the name was “Hezbollah.”
During the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, Ragheb Harb was the public face of the “resistance” in southern Lebanon and was close to Subhi al-Tufaili. But the man who was one of the prominent faces of the emerging new party was assassinated on February 16, 1984. On the first anniversary of Harb’s assassination, Blanford says, Hezbollah revealed its presence. Then, in its eighth year, this anniversary marked the history of Hezbollah and its General Secretaries.
Officially, Subhi Al-Tufaili was elected to the position of the first Secretary-General of Hezbollah after its founding in 1989. He quickly lost his position after the end of his term as Secretary-General in May 1991, and Abbas Al-Musawi took his place after disagreements between Al-Tufaili’s movement, which was considered extremist, and the movement of Abbas Al-Musawi and Hassan Nasrallah, which was considered Moderate at the time. According to Blanford, the party under Moussawi’s administration “began to show its moderate public image.”
As for Al-Moussawi’s relationship with Nasrallah, it goes back many years, as Blanford says: “Nasrallah was a young man interested in religion who was fascinated by the sermons of Sayyed Muhammad Hussein Fadlallah.
Nasrallah traveled to Najaf to study jurisprudence. There he met Abbas al-Musawi.
This was the beginning of a long and fruitful relationship between the two young men.” Al-Moussawi, who hailed from the small Bekaa village of Nabi Shit, was eight years older than Nasrallah and considered him “a father, educator and friend,” in Blanford’s words.
In 1978, the Iraqi regime applied strict measures to the seminaries in Najaf, and arrested and deported Lebanese students. “Sayyed Nasrallah slipped out of Iraq to avoid arrest, and returned to Lebanon, where he joined a new seminary founded by Al-Moussawi in Baalbek.”
On February 16, 1992, during his return from the town of Jabshit in southern Lebanon, where Hezbollah Secretary General Abbas al-Musawi was commemorating the eighth anniversary of the assassination of Ragheb Harb, two Israeli helicopters fired missiles at al-Musawi’s convoy, which was accompanied by his wife and son, and he was killed instantly.
The assassination of Musawi had a significant impact on the nature of the confrontations between the House of Israel and Hezbollah, as Blanford explains, as “the party took the decision for the first time to bomb population areas in northern Israel with Katyusha rockets,” after its operations had previously been limited exclusively to Lebanese territory.
Hezbollah’s Shura Council met the day after Musawi’s assassination, and unanimously elected 32-year-old Hassan Nasrallah as Secretary-General of Hezbollah. He remained in his position for 32 years until his assassination in an Israeli raid on Friday.