Death of a Cleric
Abstract
This paper explores the extensive influence Iran and Hezbollah have cultivated within Shi’a diaspora communities across the globe over the past four decades. By embedding radical clerics and operatives in these communities, Hezbollah has fostered a network of ideological supporters and resources, often using local business ventures for fundraising and terror activities. The recent death of Hezbollah cleric Sheikh Ali Hassan Abou Raya highlights the dangerous entanglement of Shi’a diasporas with Hezbollah’s militant agenda. Abou Raya’s life and death, as well as the mourning of his supporters across continents, demonstrate the far-reaching effects of Hezbollah’s radicalization efforts. These efforts pose significant risks to host countries, as diaspora members become enmeshed in Hezbollah’s terror networks. The article serves as a cautionary reflection on the potential for future terror plots, suggesting that Western nations should pay closer attention to the radicalization of Shi’a communities abroad, as their allegiance to Hezbollah may bring the war closer to home.
For four decades, Iran and Hezbollah have nurtured Shi’a diasporas across the globe, infiltrating their institutions or building new ones for them. A cohort of radical clerics and Hezbollah commissars, committed to the ideals of the 1979 Iranian Revolution, have embedded themselves in their communities, mosques, and schools. Diaspora members wedded to the revolutionary cause of Iran and Hezbollah have enthusiastically embraced their agenda, often volunteering their business ventures as a tool for Hezbollah’s fundraising, and their craft as a resource for Hezbollah’s terror plotting.
Over the past year, as Hezbollah and Israel traded fire in an escalation that has now erupted into a full-scale war, hundreds of Hezbollah senior leaders, commanders, and fighters have died. The map of militancy and grief that emerges from the lament of martyrs’ mourners abroad reveals the extent of radicalization that Iran and Hezbollah have fueled across Shi’a diaspora communities, and the inherent danger this radicalization poses to host countries.
The recent death of Hezbollah cleric Sheikh Ali Hassan Abou Raya opens a window into this world, offering a cautionary tale of what is to come. On September 23, as conflict between Israel and Hezbollah continued to escalate, his past caught up with him in the form of an Israeli missile.[1] Hezbollah supporters called him a martyr “on the path of Jerusalem” — a sure sign that Sheikh Abou Raya died a martyr in Hezbollah’s zealous struggle against the Jews.
The fourth of seven siblings from the southern Lebanese village of Toufahta, Sheikh Abou Raya spent his adult life propagating the word of Hezbollah and Iran to different corners of the world. Twenty-five years ago, he was in Ottawa,[2] Canada, where he headed a mosque[3] and established a Shi’a Islamic center and a school. He is fondly remembered there.[4] Subsequently, he spent five years in São Paulo, Brazil,[5] where he ran a school and the local mosque for the largest Shi’a community in Latin America. Later, he preached[6] at the Shi’a mosque in Brussels,[7] Belgium.
Once he returned to Lebanon, he emerged from the shadows of an itinerant cleric’s humble existence as a senior leader inside Hezbollah’s Foreign Relations Department (FRD),[8] a unit charged with keeping Shi’a diaspora communities under the tight control of the terrorist group. His senior role gave away his past — not as a traveling pastor tending to the scattered flocks of diaspora faithful, but as a fully credentialed Hezbollah ambassador, tasked with indoctrinating, radicalizing, and mobilizing a restive global diaspora of potential recruits and financial backers.
Sheikh Abou Raya was the predecessor of Sheikh Mohsen Bilal Wehbe, whom the U.S. Department of Treasury identified[9] in 2010 as Hezbollah’s senior representative for South America. Wehbe arrived in São Paulo shortly before Abu Raya left and rejoined him in Lebanon in 2019, continuing to cover the region after he departed from Brazil. The mosques, schools, and cultural centers where they both served now continue their work, standing steadfastly in their support for Hezbollah.
Right on cue, echoes of Abou Raya’s demise have since reverberated across the Atlantic, both in South and North America. In São Paulo, Brazil, the Mosque of the Messenger of God, popularly known as Mesquita do Bras for its location in that city’s Bras district, published[10] a funerary announcement on its social media page inviting community members to pay their respects to the late Hezbollah cleric’s son, Hassan,[11] who still lives in São Paulo. The following week, the mosque also organized a memorial service. In Ottawa, where the Sheikh’s children were born, the Abo Ther Al Ghafari Mosque also announced a memorial service[12] for the sheikh who once headed it.
From the Tri-Border Area of Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay, or TBA, to Canada, his disciples from across the globe publicly poured their grief on Facebook[13] and Instagram.[14] London-based Hussain Makke, who studied under Sheikh Abou Raya, announced[15] that “Our teacher Sheikh Ali Abu Raya has met his Lord as a martyr on the path to al-Quds.” São Paulo-based Sheikh Rodrigo Jalloul,[16] the director of an Iranian-backed Shi’a center,[17] a graduate of the U.S.-sanctioned[18] Al Mustafa University in Iran, and now a candidate for elected office[19] for Brazil’s workers’ party, tearfully lamented[20] his teacher’s martyrdom by Israel.[21]
Ali Charara, a leader with Al Mahdi Scouts in Ottawa, eulogized[22] the “martyr warrior, Sheikh Abou Raya.” And a Brazilian convert to Shi’a Islam, who worked as a Quranic reciter at the same mosque where Sheikh Abou Raya served in São Paulo, said[23] of the sheikh that “he helped carry the banner of Ahlul Bayt, they will embrace him, in this and the next life. The sheikh will receive his award for his martyrdom.” Ahlul Bayt refers to the House of the Prophet Mohammad, whose direct descendants the Shi’a follow.
It is not every day that Israel eliminates a high-ranking Hezbollah official. Yet the public grief — a mixture of family and acolytes paying tributes to a terrorist ideologue whom they considered a holy man — is by no means exceptional. In death, as in life, Sheikh Abou Raya’s journey across the lands of the unbelievers to spread the doctrine of Iran’s Islamic Revolution, is a path frequently tread upon. In his short life, Sheikh Abou Raya followed a trajectory like other militant clerics drafted to infiltrate diaspora communities and recruit their members to the radical, violent cause of Hezbollah and Iran.
Indeed, he is not alone. On October 8, 2023 — the day after Hamas massacred 1,200 Israelis and took hundreds more hostage — Hezbollah opened a second front against Israel on its northern border. Since then, Shi’a communities far beyond the borders of Lebanon have lost and mourned[24] numerous relatives, friends, and comrades in the fight. And as Hezbollah announces their names, social media accounts and mosque announcements echo the lament of mourners across the ocean. Their grief is not just personal but political too: Theirs are battle cries for Hezbollah and Iran and their holy war against the Jews and America. Both communal institutions and their members identify with the Islamic Republic’s worldview and goals, confirming the close ties that bind Shi’a Lebanese diaspora communities to the resistance movement that turned their country, and many of them, into vassals of Iranian expansionism.
The lament of the mourners has now increased its tempo. Israel has eliminated hundreds of Hezbollah fighters, including numerous senior commanders and a handful of key figures in the upper echelons of Hezbollah’s nomenclature, ratcheting up the pace of their casualties in the last two weeks, adding scores of new names to the grim list of Hezbollah’s fallen.
One such casualty resembling Sheikh Abou Raya’s story is Hafez Hussein Melhem, a Hezbollah fighter whose martyrdom announcement[25] was published[26] shortly after thousands of pagers[27] used by Hezbollah members detonated almost simultaneously across Lebanon on September 16. Hafez hailed from another large family in the southern Lebanese village of Qabrikha. One of his siblings lives in Foz do Iguaçu, on the Brazilian side of the TBA. But his mourners are not just in Lebanon or Brazil[28] — where Hafez had hundreds of personal contacts through his social media accounts.[29] They are in Detroit[30] too, and elsewhere, from Paraguay to West Africa.[31]They do not just mourn a friend or a sibling, but a comrade. In a September 18 Facebook post since deleted, Paraguay businessman Bassam Zahoui memorialized Melhem:
“Congratulations to you who have taken the school of Hussein (peace be upon him) as your role model, path, and beacon. You have given as his companions gave their souls and their ways, and so you triumphed as they triumphed, and sacrificed as they sacrificed. You truly are, like them, among the finest companions. By God, I know of no companions more loyal than my companions, and no family more righteous than my family. Peace be upon your pure blood and your immaculate souls. God is your protector, O believers, O steadfast ones, O resolute ones, O those who stand guard at the borders of our dignity, glory, and honor. You are by God the noble men of God and His chosen soldiers. Peace be upon you. You sought, and blessed is the land that embraced your bodies, and blessed is the soil that was watered by your pure blood, and blessed is the land that your feet trod upon. Indeed, you have triumphed, by God, a great victory. With much pride and honor, the Islamic Resistance, and the town of Qabrikha announce the martyrdom of the Mujahid martyr; Hafez Hussein Melhem, who was martyred on the path to ‘Al Quds’ and in defense of the south.”
And they do not just mourn him: They celebrate the cause he died for, confident in the justness of that path and reassured in the promise of future victory. They are far from the battlefield, yet their comments closely resemble Hezbollah’s resistance narrative, and are a sign of how close they are, in their hearts, to the resolute militancy of those they now mourn.
As with losses in the past, when Israel eliminated Hezbollah’s terror mastermind, Imad Moughniyeh, in Damascus in 2008, or more recently when the United States killed Iran’s terror master, General Qasem Soleimani, in 2020, Iran and Hezbollah may seek revenge by plotting terror attacks abroad. And as in the past, they will rely on their overseas supporters for assistance. They will, as they always have.
Sheikh Abu Raya and Hafez Melhem are just the latest Hezbollah casualties that, for months now, the Lebanese diaspora has been memorializing with increasingly belligerent rhetoric. Melhem, like Abou Raya, may have spent time in Latin America. His life and his connections, as well as his mourners, tell us more than the tale of a fallen fighter.
Melhem might have been one of the many Hezbollah operatives who zipped in and out of Latin America on Hezbollah’s behalf to oversee activities that the terror group, thanks to the toil of local supporters, relies on to self-finance and cement local support. Or he was simply a Hezbollah fighter, who, like many, had family and comrades in the diaspora. But there is a solid track record[32] of Hezbollah fighters, as well as party cadres, who devote part of their lives to exporting the Iranian Revolution to the diaspora. Their struggle advances thanks to the support they nurture while abroad.
Western policymakers may overlook this map of militancy and grief, as they surely overlook the close ties between Hezbollah’s foreign-bred militancy and home-born crime syndicates. They are too laser-focused on pulling the Middle East from the brink of a full-scale regional war to think strategically about how homegrown militancy could bring the war to the West too. If they are paying attention at all, it is more because they fear these militant sentiments will show up at the ballot box than because of the implications they carry for domestic security.
In fact, that is what they should worry about the most. Those who mourn today may offer their material support to Hezbollah tomorrow.
Brazil, where Abou Raya taught and preached, where Melhem had extensive family connections, was the target of a 2023 Hezbollah failed terror plot[33] that heavily relied on local members of the Shi’a diaspora to recruit, finance, arm, and direct local criminals to murder the innocent. Terror on foreign soil is one of the many sharp objects Hezbollah keeps in its toolkit. It would be foolish to think that it would not use it again, after learning that its senior leaders spent so much time abroad, as Sheikh Abou Raya did, to cultivate local communities.
What men like Sheikh Abou Raya have done with their life’s work of establishing vectors of indoctrination on Hezbollah’s behalf is what incubates religious extremism and potentially terrorism. When confronted with radical preachers infesting houses of prayer in the West with their hateful Salafist agitation, policymakers often act swiftly. Mosques are shut down. Preachers are jailed or deported. Yet Sheikh Abou Raya, a senior commander in the Hezbollah nomenclature, spent almost 20 years fomenting Shi’a radicalism, with little done by local authorities to shut him down or disrupt his fanatic proselytism. What he planted in his time abroad has now grown and taken roots.
And now that war beckons, the blood of the martyrs is sure to stir their faraway mourners. It happened before — as evidenced by Hezbollah’s bloody trail of terror attacks abroad. It may happen again. Not paying attention will bear a cost that the innocent will pay.
[1] https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/4-shiite-clerics-presumed-to-be-hezbollah-commanders-killed-in-yesterday-s-idf-strikes-report/ar-AA1r782E
[2] https://www.facebook.com/photo?fbid=1579477262380606&set=a.1579477985713867
[3] https://www.instagram.com/p/DARm0PLRblz/
[4] https://www.instagram.com/p/DARm0PLRblz/
[5] https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100009146758925&sk=about_work_and_education
[6] https://www.shiachat.com/forum/topic/234998136-one-time-course-of-sheikh-ali-abourayah/
[7] https://moderndiplomacy.eu/2016/04/18/belgium-marking-syria-s-70-years-of-independence/
[8] https://stop910.com/en/content/foreign-relations.html
[9] https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/tg997
[10] https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=941193021379342&set=pb.100064659583570.-2207520000
[11] https://www.facebook.com/sabouraya
[12] https://www.instagram.com/reel/DARm0PLRblz/
[13]https://www.facebook.com/jafar.hammoud/posts/pfbid034jLZsuxq6iEhC66DdWURoUdezT1FpA24Fd2JyvjRhGCuy6DaZo1AT4eBCCyWzBXsl
[14] https://www.instagram.com/hussainmakke_/p/DAQfQaZiXs0/
[15]https://www.facebook.com/HussainMakke91/posts/pfbid035ZVzZm5eBqdUDLjV7oZTBLzctHqGKPeCKgRQLH8utm6eVeQkJK5C2dCERkCTeM79l
[16] https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=pfbid0WziGzcCXdWUJnR3qYb9efFwq9WnU7xUfdK8GmsGd5CAhmqrzd3MnvgLQdFzPnt2Ql&id=100078654077330
[17] https://www.instagram.com/centroislamicodapenha/
[18] https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/sm1205
[19] https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=122139982838291872&set=a.122110995950291872
[20] https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=pfbid0WziGzcCXdWUJnR3qYb9efFwq9WnU7xUfdK8GmsGd5CAhmqrzd3MnvgLQdFzPnt2Ql&id=100078654077330
[21] https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=pfbid02divGHWy7G8kUp8aDUk1jDJDqorYr6J7f1HEtfhowoL8ySigjUYV3V43tD2ut67wUl&id=100078654077330
[22]https://www.facebook.com/ali.charara.12/posts/pfbid02ihZX3AjSwYBmuxPcFWmFWeZGSW7Tc3bxbTEEkrwZAZ8jDZx4H3iDFZUVJFVCfUPyl
[23] https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=pfbid0aQvpnT3Ud1rapE5GDRtuHHmpUYjixn5EZTnXrhcidTtndfqThDnFUStxivSKmb4Zl&id=100008753017983
[24] https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-811585
[25] https://x.com/AlakhbarNews/status/1836505692557001167
[26] https://www.almanar.com.lb/12490931
[27] https://apnews.com/article/lebanon-hezbollah-israel-exploding-pagers-8893a09816410959b6fe94aec124461b
[28]https://www.facebook.com/ali.hamie.921/posts/pfbid028NsvQU9LwkSJMj44ytLy2vm46h9yyjJqSGWGATT6i553FhsmPH8UwWM4aMfSrcTLl
[29] https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100041608814651&sk=friends
[30] https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=8462212730503555&set=pb.100001447366302.-2207520000&type=3
[31] https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=pfbid0HU9UveBcDn39tB9Upmyp2rWfuzFReuzGsbvAnmHKjz77xoLLYaci3ZtTn9mFyLyql&id=100031873940480
[32] https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/magazine/698414/the-mystery-martyr/
[33] https://ict.org.il/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/Ottolenghi_Hezbollah-Terror-in-Brazil_2024_02_20-1.pdf
