"Radicalized Fighters"

"He was a good man with a good heart, but it seems that people who have no conscience brainwashed him."
"Had I known where my son was, I would have gone and got him. We are innocent of all he did."
Hisham al-Mughayar, Bisariyeh, Lebanon

Mohammed Zaatari/The Associated Press

The conflict in Syria has engulfed neighbours in its fiery chaos of bloodshed. In particular one neighbour whose relations with Syria is freighted with the presence of a terrorist group founded by and funded by the Islamic Republic of Iran as representing for Iran yet another military that can be called upon to advance its Shia-fundamentalist Islamist plans for an alliance of power and fear within the Middle East.

Hezbollah has managed through intimidation, assassination, terror and force, to inveigle itself in the country as a player in the government, giving it a tenuous legitimacy in international fora, despite its status as a terrorist entity in some Western countries' files. The descent into hatred based on tribal, ethnic and religious factionalism that consumed Lebanon in decades past, transforming it from a peaceful, civilized oasis in the Middle East, to a fractured, broken country is exemplified by Hezbollah.

At the behest of Iran the Hezbollah leadership agreed to loyally defend and fight for the continuation of Alawite rule in Syria, to support the continued regime of President Bashar al-Assad, revealed as a consummate butcher of his own population. The never-healed wounds of Lebanon's civil war that pitted the Muslim sects against one another, Lebanese Christian militias against the presence of Palestinians, have been resuscitated.

In Bisariyeh, Lebanon, a village once at peace with itself and its mixed-religious residents, raging hatred has surfaced in the wake of young men returning home after radicalization while fighting alongside Sunni rebels in Syria. Returning home, they have staged suicide bombings at home. This is a situation that is being repeated across the Middle East, moving authorities to enact prevention strategies to halt their citizens from fighting in Syria.

Across Lebanon, the traditional social mores of tolerance have once again been challenged by conflicted loyalties reacting to a wave of bombings carried out by Sunni extremists retaliating for Hezbollah's military support of Syria's regime. In Bisariyeh alone a few months has seen a half-dozen men vanishing in the predominantly Shiite village in South Lebanon. Vanished into the chaos of fighting in Syria.

Two of those men -- Nidal Muighayer and Adan al-Mohammad -- returned to their home village from their fighting forays in Syria to blow themselves up outside Iranian targets in Beirut on February 19. In the process killing eight people and wounding over one hundred. Once news spread that Nidal was one of the bombers, furious Shiite villagers marched to his father's home, setting it and the family's grocery and four vehicles afire.

Throughout the Middle East and North Africa a shift is taking place, to criminalize fighting abroad for fear of returnees carrying home their vibrant hatred, committing to the violence of suicide-slaughter. From Egypt to Bahrain, Saudi Arabia to Tunisia, legislation is being drawn up to prevent their people from fighting in Syria.

A blight of human insanity whose viral infection has alerted Europe and North America in fear of a mirror image of Middle East concerns.