BEIRUT // In Beirut’s southern suburbs, the faces of the dead are everywhere.

Some gently cradle assault rifles in their arms. Others hold weapons in the air, loosely at their side or aim them over sandbags at unseen enemies. Stern faces, youthful grins and blank stares meet the camera. Poses of bravado are struck against the backdrop of the Syrian desert or photoshopped images of Damascus’ Shiite Sayyida Zaynab shrine and the yellow banner of Hizbollah. The face of the Shiite militia’s leader Hassan Nasrallah looks over the shoulders of the dead. The men span generations, from middle-aged veterans in one last war to kids who do not look old enough to understand what war means.

Here in the streets of Burj Al Barajneh, a crowded slum in Beirut’s southern suburbs, the Hizbollah martyr posters are affixed to nearly every wall, as well as strung across narrow alleyways, hung from balconies and posted inside shops. They show the faces of men killed in Syria, where Hizbollah has been at war on behalf of Syrian president Bashar Al Assad since 2012, as well as those killed fighting extremist groups on Lebanon’s border and civilians massacred in bomb blasts in Beirut.

The latest martyr poster to appear in Beirut's southern suburbs is that of Mustafa Badreddine, the militia's top military commander, who Hizbollah claimed on Saturday had been killed by artillery fire from hardline rebels near Damascus International Airport.

Such posters are made and used by a range of factions involved in the Middle East’s conflicts, from Kurdish rebels battling the Turkish state and Palestinian militants to national armies. Hizbollah is not the only group in Lebanon that celebrates its fallen this way, but its posters are the most ubiquitous in the country these days due to the group’s widespread involvement in Syria’s civil war.

Phillip Smyth, an American researcher who closely tracks Shiite militias in Iraq, Syria and Lebanon, estimates that up to 1,500 Hizbollah fighters have died so far in Syria. Over the past three years, a spate of bombings targeting Hizbollah-controlled areas of Beirut have killed more than 100 people. For each of the departed, there are posters.

Karrar Abbas, 33, is one of the people who creates martyr posters in Burj Al Barajneh. As with photo studios across the world, his shop takes a lot of portraits of children, families and couples. But with the war in Syria raging, martyr posters are also a major part of his business.

Before heading into battle, Hizbollah fighters frequently leave their own designs behind with friends or family, crafting the perfect image by which they wish to be remembered in death.

“They are going to fight and they know they may be martyred, so they prepare,” said Mr Abbas.

When fighters or friends do not design a poster, the task falls on Mr Abbas who draws up a few different styles for the deceased’s family to choose from.

“What inspires me is that I live in the environment of Hizbollah and the martyrs of Hizbollah,” he said. “Our religion, this atmosphere and where [the martyr] died is what inspires me in the design.”

Mr Abbas has been creating posters for about 17 years and has seen the designs evolve over the years, particularly with Hizbollah’s involvement in Syria’s war.

“Before the Syria war, the design was always about the Hizbollah flag and Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah,” he said. “But after the Syria war began, it was more about the Sayyida Zaynab shrine and the guys holding their weapons.”

The Sayyida Zaynab shrine is one of the most important sites in Shiite Islam and has been at times used as a justification for Hizbollah’s involvement in the war. For fresh martyrs of Hizbollah’s conflicts, it has replaced another gold-domed shrine – Jerusalem’s Dome of the Rock – as the group has shifted from fighting Israel to supporting Mr Al Assad.

In the culture propagated by Hizbollah, martyrdom and sacrifice are celebrated. Time is remembered by wars with Israel and now, battles against Syrian rebel factions. Everybody knows a martyr.

While Lebanon’s government pledged to remain neutral in the Syrian conflict, for young men in southern Beirut, there is constant pressure to join Hizbollah and go to fight in Syria.

Such sentiments are imposed on many from an early age: Alongside the more conventional portraits hanging on display in Mr Abbas’ modest photo studio is one of a boy aged no more than 6 years old dressed in a Hizbollah uniform, a rocket-propelled grenade leaning on his shoulder and a machine gun sitting in the background.

One of Burj Al Barajneh’s best-known martyrs these days is Adel Termus, who died in November when two ISIL suicide bombers struck the neighbourhood’s main market street, killing more than 40 people. Mr Termus is believed to have tackled one of the bombers, likely lowering the death toll in what was already the worst attack on Lebanon’s capital since the country’s civil war ended in 1990.

His widow Basma, 31, said she was initially distraught, but when she realised that her husband had become a martyr “the sadness in my heart changed to happiness”, she said.

“He always said ‘I want to be martyred protecting the people I love’. God gave it to him as a gift.”

Adel Termus’ pictures are plastered all over the neighbourhood. Most feature a photograph of him wearing a green scarf with either his Hizbollah flag-draped coffin or the Sayyida Zaynab shrine photoshopped into the background.

Despite the Hizbollah imagery in his posters, his wife says he was only a supporter of the group, not a member.

The parents of another martyr have mixed feelings about the group.

Like many young men in Lebanon’s poorest reaches, 26-year-old Hussein Shinawi dreamed of a better life abroad. With the help of his family, he was planning on heading to Turkey in November and smuggling himself to Europe. Just days before his departure, he was killed by the same suicide bombings that took the life of Termus.

While Shinawi supported Hizbollah, his parents initially opposed the group’s entry into the Syrian war as they believe the militants should not fight fellow Muslims. These days, however, they recognise the role Hizbollah has played in protecting Lebanon’s borders from extremist groups like ISIL and Al Qaeda’s Syria branch, Jabhat Al Nusra.

A martyr poster of Shinawi’s face against the background of a yellow Hizbollah flag hangs from their balcony, but inside the family’s home, the portraits on display are all just regular photographs, without any symbols of the group. They do not speak of their son as an honoured sacrifice in a war bigger than them, as a martyr to the cause. They are just sad and worried about their other children and life in a neighbourhood that has supplied so many dead in recent years.

“We were sending him to Germany so he could work, to protect him from the drugs and all the problems here,” said his mother Nadira. “We hoped we could make his life better.”

jwood@thenational.ae