As the effects of Western sanctions take effect, the Iranian-backed terror group, Hezbollah, has reached out to its supporters for financial assistance, Reuters reported Friday.
“I announce today that the resistance is in need of its (popular base),” Hezbollah chief Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah said in a televised speech last week.
The terror boss also pointed out that the United Kingdom had declared the entire organization a terror group last month and said that other countries could follow suit, making it even more difficult to raise funds.
“The sanctions and the terror lists are a form of war … we should deal with them as if they are a war,” Nasrallah added.
However, despite his request for aid, Hezbollah’s leader said that the actions taken against his group would not leave them “poor, hungry or isolated.”
Reuters noted that Hezbollah “does not acknowledge having separate political and military wings.”
Earlier this week, Mark Dubowitz and Benjamin Weinthal of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies argued in the New York Post that Europe’s failure to follow the UK’s decision to ban Hezbollah in its entirety puts the continent “at odds with reality — not to mention Hezbollah leaders’ own view of their group.”
Shortly after the UK ban, The Jewish Chronicle reported that the blacklisting of the group could give British authorities the ability to block transactions, hampering Hezbollah’s ability to raise and transfer money. In addition, the Chronicle cited Israeli intelligence estimates that Iran, due to United States sanctions, had cut its roughly $1 billion annual contribution to the terror group in half.
Julie Lenarz, a senior fellow at The Israel Project, also called on the rest of Europe to follow Britain’s example and ban all of Hezbollah.
“Unless the rest of Europe comes to its senses, Hezbollah will continue to spread its financial and ideological tentacles there, with devastating implications for both Europe’s security and the stability of the Middle East,” she wrote.
Though Nasrallah is asking for money now, in June 2016, he expressed his gratitude to Iran, noting that “Hezbollah’s budget, its income, its expenses, everything it eats and drinks, its weapons and rockets, are from the Islamic Republic of Iran.” Nasrallah boasted further, “As long as Iran has money, we have money… Just as we receive the rockets that we use to threaten Israel, we are receiving our money. No law will prevent us from receiving it.”
[Photo: PressTV / YouTube ]