Hezbollah

Hezbollah is a Lebanese Shia Islamist political party with an active paramilitary wing, the Jihad Council, alongside a political wing that sits in the Lebanese Parliament as the Loyalty to the Resistance Bloc. It was founded in 1982 by Lebanese Shiite clerics working closely with Iran, in the setting of the Lebanese civil war, the collapse of central authority and the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, and was first helped by about 1,500 Iranian Revolutionary Guard instructors. In the 1980s and 1990s it fought Israeli forces and the South Lebanon Army until Israel withdrew from the south in 2000. It played a prominent part in the 2006 Lebanon War and later fought alongside Bashar al-Assad's government in the Syrian civil war. In 2016 its armed strength was assessed as equal to a medium-sized army.