In an interview on the “Witness to the Age” program, former Progressive Socialist Party leader Walid Jumblatt revealed a series of political positions and milestones related to the Lebanese war and regional relations, speaking about his relationship with the late Libyan president Muammar Gaddafi, the Syrian role, and the beginnings of the emergence of “Hezbollah.”

Jumblatt said that the Lebanese National Movement was receiving financial support from the late Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, before he issued “the Syrian decision in 1978 to prevent Iraqi support,” noting that the movement then headed to Libya.

He added that he met Gaddafi several times, revealing that after the war, “we were asked to send forces to support Gaddafi in his conflict with Hissene Habré in Chad, but the militia that I led did not fight, thank God.”

Jumblatt pointed out that his relationship with Gaddafi continued until the beginnings of the “war of liberation” declared by General Michel Aoun in 1989, explaining that it also continued after the same year “when he went on a private trip, but the support stopped after the Taif Agreement, which dissolved the militias.”

He pointed out that Gaddafi was supporting “the Socialist and Communist Party and the Labor Organization,” and that his envoy, Abdel Salam Jalloud, was visiting Damascus, where “we were all meeting with him there.”

Regarding the file of Imam Musa al-Sadr, Jumblatt said: “I once presented to Gaddafi the solution to the case of Imam Musa al-Sadr, and he became disgusted, and in fact at that time I felt afraid, and he knew that his story about Musa al-Sadr traveling to Italy was a false story.”

Jumblatt also spoke about the regional transformations after the Iranian revolution, considering that the success of the revolution in 1979 “gave Hafez al-Assad a great dimension,” adding: “At that time, Hezbollah began infiltrating Baalbek and they reached the south and called themselves Hezbollah.”

He pointed out that Imam Musa al-Sadr “gave the movement of the deprived a very great political impetus, and he paralleled the other parties in the southern arena and created a balance.”

In the context of his talk about the Lebanese war, Jumblatt said, “The first mass bombing that occurred in Beirut was the storming of a truck full of explosives into the Iraqi embassy building, and then the wife of the poet Nizar Qabbani was killed.”

He also confirmed that he remained “an ally of the Assad regime for 29 years,” noting that he objected to Syria’s policy of fighting the Palestinians and refused to participate in the “war of the camps,” adding: “I was not convinced to fight them, as they fought with me and the Druze in the face of isolation, and this disturbed the Assad regime.”

Jumblatt touched on the Camp David Accords, saying: “After Camp David, we condemned Anwar Sadat in our literature.” He also described Bashir Gemayel as “he was a strong Christian leader who took the Christian gun by mutual consent and by force.”