Barber jokes on the battlefield
By Adrian Blomfield in Srifa
If you ignored the plastic bag filled with hand grenades on the floor of the salon and just listened to the easy patter of his conversation, he could have passed for a barber anywhere in the world.
However, during five weeks of war against Israel, the barber of Srifa - a village in southern Lebanon - was anything but ordinary, serving as a fighter with Hizbollah as well as a barber.
It was an exhausting time, he said yesterday as he slapped shaving cream on to the face of a regular in Srifa, one of the areas most heavily damaged by the Israeli bombardment.
advertisementHe said that every few hours, as the fighters were taking a break, he would put down his rifle and grenade launcher to trim the beards of his fellow guerrillas.
For them, it was a way of passing the time and unwinding. At such moments he would try to forget that they were comrades with whom he had just fought on the battlefield and treat them instead as normal customers.
"To be a professional barber, you need to be good at banter and keep up the jokes," he said. "They would say, 'I want my beard to look nice before I become a martyr', and I would always reply, 'Yes, you can't go to your death with a scruffy beard.' "
Entertainment on the battlefield was in short supply and the 30-year-old barber's popularity was increased by his battery-powered cassette player and the large collection of tapes that he played as he tended his clients.
The tapes on the floor of his salon included The Best of the Pogues, but he insisted that most Hizbollah fighters preferred to listen to Koranic verses and the speeches of their leader, Hassan Nasrallah.
Shane in Morocco, Philip over on the Misc. threads propping up Hezbollah, ..... this is the smoking gun! A direct link! 
