Daughter Says Mandela on ‘Deathbed’

South African Broadcasting Corporation interviewed Makaziwe Mandela in this footage on Dec. 3.

Nelson Mandela waged a long struggle against apartheid. And he is still fighting, this time for his life from what his oldest daughter is describing as his “deathbed.”

Mr. Mandela, the 95-year-old iconic leader and South Africa’s first black president, has been receiving medical care at his house in Johannesburg since being discharged from a hospital in September. He has been battling a lung infection since the spring.

On Dec. 3, the state-run South African Broadcasting Corporation released an interview with one of Mr. Mandela’s daughters, Makaziwe, who gave an assessment of her father’s condition, the details of which have been scant in much of the period since his health took a turn for the worse. For that reason, the brief interview with Ms. Mandela spurred stories in news media around the world.

Tata is still with us, very strong, as I said, very courageous. Even in lack of a better word on his “deathbed,” I think he is still teaching us lessons; lessons in patience, lessons in love, lessons in tolerance. Every moment, every minute with Tata amazes me. There are times when I have to pinch myself that I come from this man who is so strong, who is a fighter, even when there are moments when he, you can see he is very strongly struggling, but the fighting spirit is still there with him.

Tata is the Xhosa word for grandfather, Mr. Mandela’s clan’s tongue, and a term of endearment to South Africans. Mr. Mandela’s grandson, Ndaba, also spoke to the SABC at an event in the former president’s honor: “He is still with us, although he is not doing well at home in bed.”

Ms. Mandela was leaving an event for a book on Mr. Mandela’s life called “The Nelson Mandela Opus.” Mr. Mandela’s wife, Graça Machel, and other family members were also at the event.

In another interview with the SABC in June, when Mr. Mandela was being treated in a hospital in Pretoria, it was the same daughter, Makaziwe, who said that her father “doesn’t look good, I’m not going to lie,” but added that the family remained hopeful that the former president might recover. She also compared the behavior of the news media waiting outside of the Mediclinic Heart Hospital at the time to scavenging birds of prey.

“It’s like, truly, vultures, waiting when a lion has devoured the buffalo, waiting there to, you know, for the last carcasses. That’s the image that we have as a family. And we don’t mind the interest, but I just think it has gone overboard.”

Memorial Image of Hezbollah Official Links Him to Sectarian Battle for Syria

Mohamed Azakir/Reuters A memorial poster for the Hezbollah military leader Hassane Laqees, carried at his funeral in Baalbek, Lebanon on Wednesday, referred to him as “The Martyr, The Mujahid, The Leader.”

As our colleagues Anne Barnard and Ben Hubbard report from Beirut, after the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah announced the death of a senior military official on Wednesday, a photo montage of the dead man began circulating online that connected him to the sectarian battle for control of neighboring Syria.

The poster, which was also carried at his funeral, showed the dead man, Hassane Laqees, in uniform, with the militant group’s flag over one shoulder and the dome of a mosque in Syria revered by Shiite Muslims over the other.

One version of the image posted on Twitter showed Mr. Laqees with the dome of the Sayida Zeinab mosque outside Damascus behind him, alongside a photograph of his son Ali, who was killed during Hezbollah’s war with Israel in 2006, according to the militant group’s news channel, Al Manar.

#Photo Lakkis and his son ‘Ali’ who reportedly killed during 2006 war with #Israel #Hezbollah #Lebanon http://t.co/JfuMKfuB4k

â€" Rami (@RamiAlLolah) 4 Dec 13

Al Manar’s video report on the funeral showed that another version of the poster, also featuring both the shrine in Syria and the man’s dead son, was on display in Baalbek, where he was buried.

Fighters from Hezbollah and the Shiite power in the region, Iran, have joined the battle for Syria to keep their sectarian allies in the government of President Bashar al-Assad from being overrun by Sunni Muslim jihadist groups. In that context, a battle this year to defend the shrine to Sayida Zeinab, the granddaughter of the Prophet Muhammad revered by Shiites, has become central to propaganda justifying that intervention from both Iran and Hezbollah.

As Nicholas Blanford reported for the Christian Science Monitor in January, preserving the holy site was also the focus of a propaganda video apparently produced late last year by a Shiite militants from Iraq, which features images of the mosque and a martial song with the refrain, “Oh Zeinab.”

A propaganda video casting the war in Syria as a sectarian struggle to defend a Shiite holy site.

In another sign that the sectarian struggle in Syria has crossed the border into Lebanon, a little-known group calling itself the Free Sunnis of Baalbek, after the town in the Bekaa Valley where Hezbollah support is strong, claimed responsibility for killing Mr. Laqees in an Arabic-language post on Twitter.

لواء أحرار السنة بعلبك:يتبنى رسمياً العملية الجهادية البطولية(صدقنا الوعد) بإغتيال القيادي في حزب الشيطان حسان هولو اللقيس في عقر دارهم

â€" لواءاحرارالسنة بعلبك (@Ahrarsunab3lbek) 4 Dec 13

The message called the killing a “heroic, jihadist operation” against an official from the “Party of the Devil,” a mocking reference to the name Hezbollah, which when translated means “Party of God.”

Although there was some speculation that the Hezbollah military official might even have been killed in Syria, residents of the south Beirut neighborhood where he lived told Agence France-Presse that they heard a “light sound” of a bullet firing in the middle of the night, followed by screaming.

“I looked through the window and saw a crowd of people,” Mr. Abdullah told A.F.P. “I didn’t understand what was going on until I talked to the neighbors, and they said ‘Your neighbor has been assassinated.’” Ali Fares, another neighbor, added: “We went downstairs and found the martyr in his car with the door open. Maybe he was trying to get out of his car when they were watching him. So as soon as he opened his car door, they fired at him.”