Hezbollah has always portrayed itself as a vanguard force standing up for the dispossessed in the face of injustice. Thus, supporting a brutal Syrian Alawite regime against the predominantly Sunni Syrian opposition risked shattering a long-cultivated image. In the end, Hezbollah’s strategic necessity of preventing the collapse of the Assad regime — which, if replaced by a regime representing the country’s Sunni majority, would, at the least, be far less friendly to Hezbollah and possibly oppose it outright — took precedence over the need to maintain the party’s image.
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