Hezbollah European Union. After the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 in support of the Free Lebanon State, Israel occupied a strip of south Lebanon, which was controlled by the South Lebanon Army (SLA), a Lebanese Christian militia supported by Israel. Hezbollah was founded in the early 1980s as part of an Iranian effort to aggregate a variety of militant Lebanese Shi'a groups into a unified organization. Hezbollah acts as a proxy for Iran in the ongoing Iran–Israel proxy conflict. Hezbollah was conceived by Muslim clerics and funded by Iran primarily to harass the Israeli occupation. Its leaders were followers of
Turkish Hezbollah referred to information that Hezbollah had a camp in the Batman region where they received political and military training and assistance from the security forces. Former Minister Fikri Sağlar said in an interview with the paper "Siyah-Beyaz" (Black-White) that the army not only used Hezbollah, but actually founded and sponsored the organization. He maintained that such a decision had been taken in 1985 at the highest levels – the National Security Council. On 17 January 2011 Arif Doğan, a retired colonel in the Turkish army who also claims to be a founder of JİTEM, while testifying in court in the