The entrance to the village, verdant in the hills of south Lebanon, is lined with huge posters of smiling young men.
They are all dead, the posters dubbing them “martyrs” in Israel’s ongoing air war against Lebanon. Women pray, some weeping, over their graves at a cemetery a few paces away. Nearby, all that’s left of one house in Burj Qalawayh, located just a few miles from the Israeli border, is a plot of graying concrete rubble.
Now is a time for mourning.
Why We Wrote This
Ashoura, the period when Shia Muslims commemorate Husayn ibn Ali’s martyrdom in medieval Iraq, feels personal this year in south Lebanon, as villagers there mourn their own recent losses.
On Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas-led fighters from Gaza launched a shock attack on Israel, the Israeli government unleashed a fierce assault on the besieged Gaza Strip.
In a show of support for Hamas, Hezbollah and allied militants began firing from Lebanon into Israel. In response, Israel rained bombs on Lebanon.
More than 4,000 people have been killed in the country, mostly in the majority-Shia Muslim south and in the southern Beirut suburbs, where Hezbollah militia fighters hold sway.
Israel and Lebanon reached a shaky ceasefire last November, halting the worst of the onslaught, though Israeli bombs have beaten a steady rhythm since then, still killing people in the south and in regions of Lebanon’s eastern Bekaa Valley.
There, piles of rubble are all that remain of once-vibrant apartment buildings and shops.
The portraits of Burj Qalawayh’s martyrs dangle from the ceiling poles of a black prayer tent in one corner of the village. Fatima Tawbe, a local mother, says she helped hang them for the village branch of the Mahdi Scouts – a children’s scouting group founded by Hezbollah in the 1980s – to mark Ashoura.
Ashoura: an ancient and modern tradition
Ashoura is the annual 10-day religious ceremony, ending July 6 this year, in which Shia Muslims commemorate the pivotal Battle of Karbala, in medieval Iraq, that would determine the future of Islam.
“Everything about Ashoura relates to us,” Ms. Tawbe says, sitting outside the tent as a group of 40 or so girl scouts, clad in flowing chador robes and slogan-emblazoned headbands, join a storytelling session inside.
The story Ashoura tells is that of Husayn ibn Ali, grandson of Islam’s founder, the Prophet Muhammad. Shia Muslims, who make up around one-third of Lebanon’s population, believe that Husayn was Muhammad’s rightful descendant and should have led the faith. However, the Karbala battle in 680, between Husayn’s small army and that of the Caliph Yazid, saw Husayn and his companions besieged and killed.
For Shia faithful, the story still echoes as a potent symbol of martyrdom and the forces of good versus evil. It is always mournful.
Even more so here this year, as Burj Qalawayh reckons with the scale of its losses.
Most of the children inside the scouts’ tent lost fathers, grandfathers, brothers, or uncles in the recent war, Ms. Tawbe says. Some of the men were fighters with Hezbollah; others were first responders. Two of them were Mahdi Scout counselors, young men beaming from a giant martyr poster inside the prayer tent.
“Each day this Ashoura we are picking a [Burj Qalawayh] martyr to discuss, and [we] compare them to a martyr from the story of Karbala,” Ms. Tawbe explains.
Inside the tent, sitting behind the dozens of girls dressed in black, is Zeinab, a young mother whose husband was killed last year, just before the ceasefire. She asked to use a pseudonym to protect her safety, amid heightened security in Hezbollah-dominated areas.
Zeinab’s 4-year-old daughter is among the girls attending today’s Mahdi Scouts prayer session, as the afternoon darkens to evening.
“She is aware” of what happened to her father, Zeinab says of the young girl. “She understands.”
In Zeinab’s arms is her other daughter, 1-year-old Fatima, born only months before her father’s death.
Growing up fast
The Mahdi Scouts have faced criticism since they were founded for their ties to Hezbollah. The group is also accused of serving as a funnel, sending boys off to the battlefield.
“It’s a misconception,” contends Hussein, director of the Burj Qalawayh branch of the Mahdi Scouts, later that evening. He spoke on the condition that his real name not be published. “We do activities that any other boy scouts do,” he says, though this past year those activities have included clearing rubble left behind by the war.
The boys in his troop have grown closer amid the bombs, which killed two of their counselors.
One of those counselors was a young Ali K., killed in a bomb attack last October as he was rushing to evacuate the wounded, family members say.
His parents, who asked that their son’s full name not be published for the family’s privacy, had been building a house for Ali and his fiancée at the time. It sits now, an unfinished shell, in a corner of Burj Qalawayh. Ali’s body is interred at the cemetery just down the road. His portrait, too, dangles from the Ashoura prayer tent.
“Now they have a real experience” of war, Hussein says of his scout troop.
And as the 10 days of Ashoura roll on this year, there are signs of yet more change to come for this corner of south Lebanon.
Washington is reportedly demanding that Hezbollah, drastically weakened after nearly two years of fighting, surrender all its weapons by November, in exchange for a total halt to Israeli military operations. Lebanese officials are now drafting their response to the demand.
In a televised speech last Monday, Hezbollah leader Naim Qassem voiced distrust of the proposed plan, saying the United States and Israel “want to exploit the moment to turn the equation in the entire region in their image.”
For now, though, prayer.
It’s almost time for the girl scouts to finish their session. Soon, it will be the boys’ turn to file into the tent. The girls circle up, some of them giggling, others serious. They begin a chanted latmiya lament – the climax of each night of Ashoura – gently thumping their chests as the sad story swells.
The night wears on outside, and the low booms of Israeli airstrikes echo through the hills.
