Tyr fil Say is one of the sites where Mahdi Scouts train.

By ROBERT F.WORTH


RIYAQ, Lebanon - On a Bekaa Valley playing field gilded by late-afternoon sun, hundreds of young men wearing Boy Scout-style uniforms and kerchiefs stand rigidly at attention as a military band plays, its marchers bearing aloft the distinctive yellow banner of Hezbollah, the militant Shiite movement.

They are adolescents - 17 or 18 years old - but they have the stern faces of adult men. Each wears a tiny picture of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the Shiite cleric who led the Iranian revolution, on his chest.

“You are our leader!” the boys chant , as a Hezbollah official walks to a podium.“We are your men!”

This is the vanguard of Hezbollah’s youth movement, the Mahdi Scouts. Some of the graduates gathered at this ceremony will go on to join Hezbollah’s guerrilla army, fighting Israel in southern Lebanon. Others will work in the party’s bureaucracy. The rest will probably join the fast-growing and passionately loyal base of support that has made Hezbollah the most powerful political, military and social force in Lebanon.

(While the Mahdi Scouts fall under the umbrella of the Lebanese Scouts’ Union, they have no direct affiliation with the international scouting body based in Switzerland.)

At a time of religious revival across the Islamic world, intense piety among the young is nothing unusual. But in Lebanon, Hezbollah - the name means the party of God - has marshaled this fervor for a highly political project: educating a younger generation to continue its military struggle against Israel.

There is a network of schools - some of them run by Hezbollah, others affiliated with or controlled by it. There is a nationwide network of clerics who provide weekly religious lessons to young people on a neighborhood basis. There is a group for students at unaffiliated schools and colleges that presents Hezbollah to a wider audience.

“It’s like a complete system, from primary school to university,” said Talal Atrissi, a political analyst at Lebanese University who has been studying Hezbollah for decades.“The goal is to prepare a generation that has deep religious faith and is also close to Hezbollah.”


A Camp With a Difference

From a distance, it resembles any other Boy Scout camp in the world. Two rows of canvas tents face each other on the banks of the Litani River, the powderblue stream that runs across southern Lebanon not far from the Israeli border. A hand-built wooden jungle gym stands near the camp entrance, where pine trees sway in the breeze and dry, brown hills are visible in the distance.

Then, planted on sticks in the river, two huge posters bearing the faces of Ayatollah Khomeini and Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, come into view.

“Since 1985 we have managed to raise a good generation,” said Muhammad al- Akhdar, 25, a scout leader, as he showed a visitor around the grounds.“We had 850 kids here this summer, ages 9 to 15.
”

This camp is called Tyr fil Say, one of the sites in south Lebanon where the Mahdi Scouts train. Much of what they do is similar to the activities of scouts the world over: learning to swim, to build campfires, to tie knots and to play sports. Mr.Akhdar described some of the games the young scouts play, including one where they divide into two teams - Americans and the Resistance - and try to throw one another into the river.

The Mahdi Scouts also get visits from Hezbollah fighters, wearing camouflage and toting AK-47s, who talk about fighting Israel.

The Mahdi Scouts were founded in 1985, shortly after Hezbollah itself. Officially, the group is like any of the other 29 scout groups in Lebanon, many of which belong to political parties .

But with an estimated 60,000 children and Scout leaders, they are six times the size of any other Lebanese scout group. Even their marching movements are more militaristic than the others, according to Mustafa Muhammad Abdel Rasoul, the head of the Lebanese Scouts’ Union.

Hezbollah officials often casually mention the link between the Scouts and the guerrilla force.

“After age 16 the boys mostly go to resistance or military activities,” said Bilal Naim, who served as Hezbollah’s director for the Mahdi Scouts until last year.


Secular Temptations

A quiet 24-year-old, Ali al-Sayyed grew up in south Lebanon and now works as an accountant in Beirut. But his entire life has been lived in the shadow of Hezbollah. He attended a Mustafa high school, one of a national network of schools affiliated with the party, where he spent at least five class hours every week studying religion and listening to his teachers pray for Hezbollah’s fighters and Ayatollah Khomeini. After school and during the summers, he was with the Mahdi Scouts.

He is extremely devout - he will not shake hands with women - and mentions his willingness to fight and die for Hezbollah as though it were a matter of course.

“They made us, so of course I would sacrifice my life for them,” he said as he sat gazing through the glass wall of a Beirut cafe .
“Before, the Shiites were in a wretched condition.”

Yet Mr.Sayyed’s generation is also in many ways more exposed to the temptations of Lebanon’s secular and often decadent society than its predecessors.

The cafe where Mr.Sayyed was sitting was typical. Hezbollah banners were visible on the street outside, but on the inside young people sat at aluminum tables sipping cappuccinos, eating doughnuts and listening to their iPods.

“Hezbollah tries to keep the youth living in a religious atmosphere, but they can’t force them,” he said, gazing uneasily at the street outside.

After Mr.Sayyed had been talking to a foreign journalist in the coffee shop for more than an hour, a hard-looking young man at a neighboring table began staring at him. Suddenly looking nervous, Mr.Sayyed agreed to continue the conversation on the cafe’s second floor. But later he repeatedly postponed another meeting planned for the next week.

Finally, he sent an apologetic e-mail message explaining that he would not be able to meet again.

“As you know, we live in a war with Israel and America,” he wrote in stumbling English, “and they want to war us (destroy) in all the way.”

Boys and girls in the Mahdi Scouts are groomed as foot soldiers in the militant Hezbollah movement. A riverbank at one scout camp featured a portrait of the Shiite leader of the Iranian revolution, Ayatollah Khomeini.


Hwaida Saad contributed reporting from Beirut, Lebanon.