Some figures in the Shiite political party and paramilitary group Hezbollah have close personal ties with the religious hierarchy in Najaf, and some Lebanese Shiites trace their family origins back to Iraq. Relations between Lebanon and Iraq soured in the mid-1990s after Iraqi agents killed a dissident in Beirut. But the two maintained embassies in each other's capitals even after the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.