January 27, 2021
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When Lebanon’s financial meltdown began in late 2019, Hassan Shoumar was locked out of his dollar savings like everyone else in the country as banks clamped down with capital controls.
But the young engineer had an alternative. He could still pull out the dollars in his account at the al-Qard al-Hasan Association, the financial arm of the militant Hezbollah group.
Shoumar had kept an account at the association for years, ever since he had taken a loan from it to pay university fees. Unlike Lebanon’s commercial banks, the accounts at the association didn’t earn interest. But the 28-year-old Shoumar didn’t care about that.