AMERICAN interests around the world may be attacked if the United States attempts to eradicate Hezbollah, according to the leader of the militant Shia Muslim group.

In his first interview with a British newspaper for five years, Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah rejected Washington’s classification of Hezbollah as a terrorist organisation, saying that the Bush Administration did not possess the moral authority to define terrorism.

“Hezbollah is a Lebanese resistance group. It has fought and is ready to fight,” Sheikh Nasrallah told The Times. “Hezbollah has offered martyrs and is ready to offer more martyrs to defend its people and country.”

The 44-year-old cleric was speaking in a nondescript building in a sealed-off compound among the tower blocks of Beirut’s teeming southern suburbs. Grim-faced Hezbollah fighters, dressed in black uniforms and berets, with AK47 rifles slung over their shoulders, guarded the steel gates at the entrance to the compound, home to Hezbollah’s leadership.

The United States ranks Hezbollah high on its list of terrorist groups, perceiving the Lebanese radicals to be a genuine threat to its interests. But from where Sheikh Nasrallah sits, it is the Bush Administration that is the real terrorist organisation.

“We believe that the American Administration has always exercised terrorist and aggressive policies and backed terrorist groups and regimes,” he said, citing the training of Osama bin Laden and his Mujahidin by the CIA against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s, and the Reagan Administration’s support for Saddam Hussein.

“The chemical weapons used by the Iraqis against Iranian forces in al-Faw peninsula and in Halabja were provided by the Americans,” he said. “The American Administration is a sponsor of terrorism, so ethically and legally it is not qualified to categorise terrorism.”

Hezbollah was described last year by a senior US official as the “A-team of terrorists” and potentially more of a threat to American interests than al-Qaeda. America accuses Hezbollah of possessing a “global reach” through a worldwide network of cells capable of mounting terrorist attacks.

Many American officials hold Hezbollah responsible for the 1983 suicide bombings of the US Embassy and US Marine barracks in Beirut, in which more than 300 people died, as well as the kidnappings of numerous Westerners in the late 1980s. Twenty years later President Bush’s War on Terror has given the Americans the opportunity to exact a blood debt that they feel is owed by the Lebanese group.

Since the Iraq war, the US Government has applied steady diplomatic pressure on Syria to dismantle Hezbollah’s military wing. Syria grants Hezbollah a certain freedom of action in southern Lebanon, where the group’s fighters are marshalled along the border with Israel.

Sheikh Nasrallah delivered a clear warning that Hezbollah would fight back if it felt that its survival was in jeopardy. “In such a case Hezbollah has a right to defend its existence, its people and its country through any means and at any time and in any place,” he said.

While denying that Hezbollah maintained an international network of cells, he hinted that retaliation could occur worldwide. “There are many people throughout the world who love Hezbollah, who like Hezbollah and who support Hezbollah,” he said. “Some may not sit idly by when seeing a brutal aggression against Lebanon.”

It is Hezbollah’s potential for disrupting the faltering Middle East peace process that analysts believe is the real reason behind Washington’s hostility. Certainly, Sheikh Nasrallah has no time for the much-vaunted “road map” charting the path to Palestinian statehood.

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