Hezbollah offers young jihadis virtual training ground
New site recreates past Hezbollah operations in flash. Organization hopes to develop more sophisticated games in future
As of publication, five games have been uploaded to the website. In addition to the game itself, the site offers an explanation of the activity or operation at hand.
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Thus, for example, you can practice firing a Katyusha rocket on Israel's northern communities like Hezbollah did in 1996, prompting Operation Grapes of Wrath .
Surfers can also try their hand at the event leading up the first Lebanon War in Beirut in 1982.
The radical Shiite group's operation against Israeli outposts and South Lebanon Army in 1986 was called by Hezbollah "The Invasion of Sujod" and also appears on the site together with a game version.
An additional game emulates the operation that killed Brigadier-General Erez Greenstein, the commander of the IDF's Lebanon Communication Unit who died when an improvised explosive device detonated in February 1999. Another flash game simulates a Hezbollah attack on IDF's Galgalit outpost in January 2000.
The Hezbollah-affiliated television station Al-Manar has begun marketing the site, broadcasting a piece which includes sections of the video game next to archive footage from the actual operations.
Muhamad Yunis, the manager of Hezbollah's "Islamic Resistance" site – part of the organization's electronic communication unit – was interviewed by Al-Manar. He expressed a wish that "the series of 'freedom' games currently working on flash be upgraded to 3D and adapted to smart phones."
According to Yunis, "This is our small contribution to the great history written by jihadi fighters of the Islamic resistance."
The message is resonated in the site itself: "Welcome to the site 'play and resist' which belong to the Islamic resistance in Lebanon site. It contains a series of games which tell the story of the resistance, its activities and its response against the criminality and the terror of the Zionist enemy in our region."
The site contains an email address to which visitors are encouraged to send comments and suggestions, as well as ideas for new games.
While Nasrallah's organization is partaking in actual war games in Syria and is taking on casualties, against Israel the games remain within the frame of psychological warfare.
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