A month after the assassination of Hassan Nasrallah, Naim Qassem has been named as the new Chief of the Lebanese terrorist organisation Hezbollah. Notably, Naim Qassem has been the deputy head of the terrorist organisation ever since Nasrallah was eliminated by the Israeli Defence Forces.
Lebanon’s Hezbollah militant group says it has chosen Naim Kassem to replace its slain leader Hassan Nasrallah, who was killed in an Israeli airstrike last month. Kassem, a deputy to Nasrallah, has served as the militant group’s acting leader since Nasrallah’s death. His appointment to replace Nasrallah has been announced on Tuesday.
Naim Qassem was born in the town of Kfar Fila in southern Lebanon and studied chemistry at the Lebanese University before working for many years as a chemistry teacher. At the same time, he pursued religious studies and participated in founding the Lebanese Union for Muslim Students, an organization that aimed to promote religious adherence among students.
In the 1970s, Kassem joined the Movement of the Dispossessed, a political organization founded by Imam Moussa Sadr that pushed for greater representation for Lebanon’s historically overlooked Shiite community. The group morphed into the Amal movement, one of the main armed groups in Lebanon’s civil war, and now a powerful political party.
The newly-appointed Hezbollah Chief joined the nascent Hezbollah, formed with support from Iran after Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982 and occupied the country’s southern region. From 1991, he served as Deputy Secretary-General of the group, initially under Nasrallah’s predecessor, Abbas Mousawi, who was killed by an Israeli helicopter attack in 1992.
In a precision strike in the end of September, the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) eliminated Hassan Nasrallah, the then-Chief of Hezbollah. The Israeli military had said that it carried out a precise airstrike while Hezbollah leaders were meeting at their headquarters in Dahiyeh, south of Beirut.
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