Towards understanding the functional grammar in the media statements of militant organisations in the Middle East : a case of Hezbollah’s military arm

Militant organisations need media to transmit their messages. However,the developments of communication technologies allow militant organisations, particularly the jihadist guerrillas in the Middle East, to use online medium to convey their statements to wider audiences. Generally, the statements are embedded with representation whether to ‘the self’ or to ‘the other.’In the context of Arab-Israeli conflict, Hezbollah’s military arm, the Islamic Resistance, acknowledged since the mid-1980s the significance of media in the war by establishing what so called the Military Media Unit. This mouthpiece of Hezbollah’s military arm produces various outputs, including media statements about the Islamic Resistance’s activities and announcements.This paper is concerned with analysing the issued statements by this unit. It aims to explore their grammatical structures based on Halliday’s functional grammar under the umbrella of critical discourse analysis discipline.The paucity of this paper has been derived from the fact that it seems there is dearth of studies in this field. To bridge the gap, the paper spots the grammatical structures in a sample of archival media statements to unveil how the military arm of Hezbollah represents itself and its enemy.Although the obtained results in this paper may not be generalised to the issued statements by other jihadist organisations, the theoretical framework may provide the concerned researchers in this field an insight about the significance of understanding the notion of representation in the media statements of guerrilla movements in the Middle East.