Welcome to our new series Hezbollah’s Hostages, a Center For Peace Communications production presented by The Free Press.

Hezbollah maintains control by wielding lethal force to silence dissenting voices, especially among the Lebanese Shi’ites it claims to represent. Yet these voices want to be heard—and the world needs to hear them, for the sake of a new conversation about how to end the harm Hezbollah does to Arabs and Israelis alike.

Over the past year, the Center for Peace Communications, a New York nonprofit, interviewed Shi’ite opponents of Hezbollah in Lebanon, and Sunni victims of Hezbollah in Syria, each of whom in their own way has fought back against the group’s depredations. At great personal risk, they let us record and film them bearing witness to the reality Hezbollah hides. To obscure the identity of these brave people, we have illustrated their stories with striking animation. The voices you hear, however, are theirs.

The result is Hezbollah’s Hostages, a Center for Peace Communications production which The Free Press is presenting exclusively to English-language audiences on successive Mondays beginning today.

The first episode of our series is “The Combatant.” It tells the story of a Lebanese Shi’ite boy transfixed by American action movies who is lured into combat by Hezbollah during its entry into the Syrian civil war.

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