by Kim Ghattas
As though they understood that the invasion was about to birth something even more alien to them than what they had seen so far, Hawi departed for the heavens while Faiz and Alys decided to return to the hell of Zia’s dictatorship, spirited out of the besieged city that summer, leaving behind a love letter to the Beirut they had both embraced so passionately.
Beirut, jewel of the world
A virtual heaven on earth!
When the mirror of
Children’s smiling eyes
Was smashed to pieces
These little stars now
Illuminate the city’s nights,
And brighten the land of Lebanon.
Beirut, jewel of the world …
This city has been here forever,
Will exist forever
Beirut, jewel of the world
A virtual heaven on earth!
Beirut was hell on earth that summer. Faiz titled this poem “A Verse for Karbala in Beirut,” a tribute to a city martyred by injustice. Although he was deeply secular, Faiz was no atheist. He was spiritual in the practice of his religion; Islamic imagery and allegories permeated his writings. Unknowingly, his reference to Karbala in Beirut foreshadowed the arrival of the cult of martyrdom and eternal mourning for Imam Hussein. Some believed this was the answer to Hawi’s question about who would erase the shame from his forehead.
* * *
When Sheikh Sobhi Tufayli heard the news about the column of Israeli tanks crossing into Lebanon on that June morning, he felt neither fear nor foreboding—only excitement. He was sitting in the Damascus airport waiting for a flight to Tehran to attend a conference organized by the Revolutionary Guards and their Office for Liberation Movements. Tufayli was contemplating the possibilities that the invasion would provide. A heavyset man in his midthirties, serious-looking, with full lips and a white turban, Tufayli hailed from the small village of Brital near Baalbek, always lawless, tribal, and rebellious in an area famous for cannabis plantations. He had studied in Najaf for almost a decade with Mohammad Baqer al-Sadr, the founder of the Shia Da’wa Party, the Iraqi cleric who had endorsed Khomeini’s wilayat and was executed in 1980. Tufayli had been in Najaf at the same time as Khomeini, along with other Shia clerics also from the Beqaa area, Sayyed Abbas Mussawi and Sheikh Mohammad Yazbek. Another one of the students was eighteen-year-old Hassan Nasrallah, who would rise as a militant leader one day. He was in awe of the ayatollah and his “radiant presence,” a man in whose company “time and space no longer existed.” Ever since returning to Lebanon, around the time of the Iranian Revolution, the more senior clerics had been talking to the Iranians about building an Islamic resistance against Israel. There had been various attempts but nothing concrete had come of them. The war with Iraq was a drain on Iran’s resources and there was nothing left for other adventures. There had also been the internal tug of war between the nationalist modernists whose focus was Iran and the radical Khomeinists who believed in revolution across borders. But by 1982, the radicals had won: the Bazergans, Yazdis, and Chamrans were all dead or out of power. And that year, Iran was feeling victorious against Iraq. The time was ripe, thought Tufyali—and the Israelis had obliged with an invasion. At the conference, he and other like-minded clerics asked for help.
Six days later, Iranian soldiers began to land at Damascus airport, hoping to make their way to the front in Lebanon. The man to greet them was the Iranian ambassador to Syria, Ali-Akbar Mohtashamipur, a loyal Khomeini disciple who had studied with the ayatollah in Najaf and was one of the few clerics who had accompanied him to Neauphle-le-Château. In total, some five thousand Iranians flew to Syria. They did not end up fighting the Israelis in Beirut or in southern Lebanon; most of them went home or back to the front with Iraq. But fifteen hundred Revolutionary Guards from the Office for Liberation Movements stayed behind and established a base of operations in Syria on the border with Lebanon. From there, they initially went in and out of the Beqaa Valley, where they rented houses in Baalbek and the surrounding areas; later they would take over the Lebanese Army’s regional barracks and a fancy hotel as their headquarters. One of the Guards was Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the future president of Iran.
The Revolutionary Guards wore military uniforms, but they weren’t doing any fighting either: they were missionaries, bringing Khomeini’s Islamic revolution to the Mediterranean. For many residents of Baalbek, those who did not see the world like Sheikh Tufayli, it felt like a foreign invasion. For others, the men were a welcome change from the unruly militias that dictated the law almost everywhere in wartime Lebanon. Most important, the Iranians provided services where the state had failed, not just since the war, but since what felt like the beginning of time. Decades later, those who had witnessed the arrival of the Guards would still have vivid memories of how their town changed almost overnight. Baalbek, a mixed city of Shias, Sunnis, and Christians, became Little Tehran, the Tehran of Khomeini. The international festival of Baalbek had paused with the outbreak of the Lebanese civil war, but now music was banned altogether, as were wedding celebrations. A new radio station, the Voice of the Iranian Revolution, began broadcasting sermons, religious songs, and interviews with supporters. The statue of President Nasser that had stood at the entrance of the town was blown up and posters of Khomeini were plastered on the wall. Iranian flags fluttered from lampposts. The walls were covered with slogans about Imam Hussein, about Jerusalem and martyrdom. The town’s archbishop was kidnapped and released after two days, but the message was clear. Christians left the area. Alcohol was banned. Women began to veil in large numbers, either coerced or by choice or out of precaution: walking outside without a veil was a recipe for trouble. The Iranian-style black chador, the large cloth wrapped over the head and body, suddenly appeared. Some reports talk of families being paid between $100 and $150 if their daughters put on the veil—a hefty sum in those days in a poor city and community. The Iranians came with a lot of money: they distributed cheap gasoline during the harsh winters, they set up a hospital (named after Khomeini), they took over schools and provided scholarships to study in Iran. They taught classes on the Quran and Khomeini’s vision of Islam. They were slow and methodical, quietly overwhelming the town and its surroundings. New ideas and new imagery enveloped people, seeping into their minds, settling into their consciousness over time.
There was also military training. Iranians never did any fighting against the Israelis, but they began to recruit and organize Shia youths in the Beqaa Valley. They attracted the radicals, still a minority: those who looked to Khomeini with awe, or felt that Amal was too moderate, and had defected to found Islamic Amal. Some had trained alongside the Palestinians but had tired of their secular ways, like Imad Mughniyeh, a slim, earnest-looking twenty-year-old, devout, with a good sense of humor, who had been part of Arafat’s elite Force-17. Many of the young Shia recruits came from the Beqaa, others including Mughniyeh came from Beirut’s southern slums, a poverty belt filled with refugees who had fled the south in waves with every Israeli attack. The ferment of poverty, frustration, and a deep sense of injustice in the face of Israeli occupation would prove propitious for Iranian plans. There had been no Islamic revolution after the assassination of Sadat in Egypt. In Iraq, the Shias had not risen to topple Saddam, and the Shia uprising in Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Province had been quelled quickly. In Syria, Khomeini had seen no point in backing an uprising against Assad. The Syrian dictator had also sided with Iran against Saddam. But in Lebanon, in the chaos of war, in a forsaken, forgotten corner of the country, the Islamic revolution was taking hold with no one to counter it.
In the training camp set up by the Revolutionary Guards near Baalbek, the young men received religious instruction from clerics like Tufayli and Mussawi, now wearing military fatigues under their clerical robes. The men learned to handle AK-47 rifles and rocket propelled grenades, they were taught hand-to-hand combat and the art of camouflage. In the same Beqaa Valley where just a few years ago Palestinian guerrillas had trained Iran
ian revolutionaries, Iranians were now training Lebanese Shias, birthing a new movement that would forever change Lebanon’s Shia community and America’s relationship with the Middle East. Soon the Lebanese would run the training camps themselves. The still amorphous movement would remain unnamed for a couple more years. But this was the founding of Hezbollah, the Party of God, molded after Iran’s own Hezbollah, and it would be the revolution’s most successful export. Still a loose movement, the group coalesced around clear tenets: Islam was a complete program for a better life. It provided the intellectual, religious, ideological, and practical foundations for their new movement. Resistance against Israel was the priority, its total obliteration the end goal. Crucially, the movement submitted to the wilayat al-faqih and the leadership of the faqih, Khomeini. In its official manifesto published in 1985 as a forty-eight-page Open Letter, Hezbollah made clear it desired an Islamic state in Lebanon, a Shia one just like in Iran, though the group was careful not to explicitly threaten to impose it. Society would embrace it, they believed, including Christians, because it was the righteous path.
The story that would be most widely told in the decades to come about the birth of Hezbollah is that it was born from the ashes of Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982. After rose petals came bullets, and then car bombs. The story is not entirely wrong. Without the Israeli invasion and occupation, Hezbollah may not have been able to take root in the country. But this is not the whole story. Sheikh Tufayli’s eureka moment at the Damascus airport preceded the rage of occupation. Even before 1979, Khomeini’s disciples had identified Lebanon as fertile terrain for their revolutionary projects.
Mostafa Chamran and the LMI were not the only ones who had used Lebanon as a staging ground for their anti-shah activities. Iranian leftists and Marxists were there too, training with the PLO before helping to bring down the monarchy. But the other group of Iranians who had come to know Lebanon in the decade leading up to the revolution were the hardline Khomeinists, and they had often clashed with the LMI. One of them was Mohtashamipur. He had trained with the Palestinians in Beirut and spent time in the Beqaa, so he knew the terrain. As Iran’s ambassador to Damascus, Mohtashamipur would become crucial in helping the formation of Hezbollah and establishing the conduit of arms through Syria to Lebanon.
Another Khomeinist was Mohammad Montazeri, a young, aggressive, gun-toting cleric nicknamed Ringo who had trained in the Fatah camps in Lebanon before the revolution. The son of Khomeini’s closest disciple, an ayatollah and jurist who had played a key role in drafting and implementing the new Islamic constitution, Montazeri was a typical radical-internationalist who had been making contacts with Muslim liberation movements from the Philippines to the western Sahara throughout the 1970s. In December 1979, a week after the start of the hostage crisis at the American embassy in Tehran, he had organized a group of three hundred volunteers to travel to Lebanon. Some of the volunteers were teenagers, others appeared to be in their thirties. Some wore fatigues, others were in civilian clothes. There were fifteen women among them. Bizarrely, the group had neither cash nor valid tickets. Some didn’t even have valid passports. They waited for hours to board a plane at Mehrabad airport, chanting “Glory to Khomeini, peace to Arafat.” Their cries of “Allahu Akbar” echoed through the departure area. They did not carry guns, but they were on their way to Lebanon to fight with the PLO against Israel. Or so they hoped. More chanting: “Today Iran, tomorrow Palestine.”
As news of this unsolicited help reached Lebanon, the Lebanese government closed the airspace to Iranian planes and ordered consulates abroad to refer all visa requests by Iranians to Beirut. The president obtained assurances from Syria that no Iranians would be allowed to cross overland. In Beirut, Husseini declared Montazeri mentally deranged. A Shia scholar wrote to Ayatollah Shariatmadari in Qom to tell him that the Shias of south Lebanon did not want Montazeri’s volunteers because their arrival would only provoke the Israelis further and sign the death warrant for Lebanon’s Shias. Montazeri cared little what the Lebanese or the Shias wanted. With one hundred of his followers, he staged a sit-in and a hunger strike at the Iranian foreign ministry, demanding money to fly. Somehow, he did make it to Lebanon in January 1980, entering illegally, possibly through Syria. In total, two hundred Iranians arrived. During a press conference in Beirut, Montazeri announced hundreds more Iranian volunteers were on their way. Lebanese security officials threatened to resign if Montazeri was allowed to stay. These early forays by radical Iranians, and the local connections they made, were the groundwork for what would become the founding of Hezbollah. From the Beqaa, to the southern suburbs of Beirut and to the south of Lebanon, the movement spread.
While Iran was exploring war, Saudi Arabia was exploring peace. In the fall of 1981, the Saudi Crown Prince Fahd had put forward an eight-point peace plan to settle the Arab-Palestinian conflict. While the plan offered neither concessions nor recognition to Israel, it was an admission that negotiations were an option. In Tehran, thousands marched in the streets, calling for the death of the Crown Prince. Banners declared him an enemy of Islam. Iran was now cast in the role of the ultimate defender of Palestine and the Arab homeland, and it was building an Islamic resistance movement against the enemy.
* * *
It began in a spectacularly violent fashion, with plumes of smoke, twisted metal, and mangled bodies. In November 1982, the Israeli command post in Tyre was blown up, killing seventy-five Israeli military personnel. In April 1983, the American embassy in Beirut was bombed: sixty-three people were killed. The following October, the Marine Corps barracks and the French paratroopers’ headquarters were blown up. The Americans and the French had come to Lebanon as part of a multinational force for peace in the wake of the Israeli withdrawal. More than three hundred were killed, including 241 Americans, in the worst disaster for the United States since the Vietnam War and the deadliest single day for the Marine Corps since the battle of Iwo Jima in World War II. Each of these attacks was conducted by a young man driving a truck laden with explosives, ramming himself into a building: the first suicide bombers ever seen in the Middle East, a novel, deadly weapon. A combination of a car bomb technique that Israel itself had first used in Lebanon in early 1979 and the Japanese kamikaze concept against American targets in World War II, these suicide bombings were carried out by devout Shias, humiliated by their own state and by Israel and driven by a newfound fervor for martyrdom. Their recruiters were more canny operators, like Mughniyeh, the former member of Arafat’s elite force. Mughniyeh had come up with the idea of a suicide bombing against the Israelis in Tyre. His fellow militants thought the idea was ludicrous: Who would be crazy enough to blow themselves up? But he had found someone—a childhood friend—and sent him to his death. Mughniyeh would become the most devilish Hezbollah military mastermind. With his brother-in-law Mustafa Badreddine, they would hijack and kidnap their way through the 1980s and develop the armed wing of Hezbollah, turning it into a highly efficient and sophisticated militia, with ample help from Iran. Hezbollah would always officially deny any responsibility for the suicide bombings against the Americans and French in Lebanon and for all the Western hostages held in Lebanon during the 1980s and into the 1990s, claiming that Hezbollah didn’t even exist in 1983. A group calling itself the Islamic Jihad claimed credit. But people like Sheikh Tufayli would later admit, proudly, that members of Hezbollah’s early nucleus were indeed responsible.
By the first half of 1983, the influence of Hezbollah was seeping from the Beqaa Valley into the slums of Beirut—waves of Shia refugees fleeing the south had settled at the bottom of the city, close to the airport, layers of families and clans, villagers converging in neighborhoods. Where you landed determined under whose influence you fell: the more moderate Amal or the Islamist Hezbollah; temperate clerics or firebrand conservative ones. Extended families would evolve in totally separate directions and years later find that one side had espoused the chador and the beard while the other drank wine and wore ties. By 1984,
the division of Beirut into east and west sectors had solidified, the Lebanese army had split up, and its Muslim brigade was in charge of keeping order on the western side of the city. But they were no match for the gunmen roaming the streets, young Shias avenging years of exclusion and discrimination by asserting their authority over the streets of West Beirut. Black banners of mourning were raised from lampposts on the streets where Faiz and Hawi had wandered, banners summoning young men to sacrifice themselves in the fight against Israel. The chador appeared on Hamra Street. When people in Ras Beirut first heard the name Hezbollah, many laughed. Hazem Saghieh, a journalist and towering intellectual of Lebanon’s left, wondered: “The party of God? And who’s the secretary-general? God himself?” A Greek-Orthodox Christian, he had been an ardent advocate of the Iranian Revolution and its promise of justice but was rapidly cured of his enthusiasm.
Very quickly, people stopped laughing. Graffiti appeared on the walls of the shell-shocked city proclaiming Kulluna Khomeini, We are all Khomeini. Every night, explosions began to hit bars and shops that sold liquor in West Beirut, around Hamra Street and on Phoenicia Street, the hub of Beirut nightlife, where clubs and bars had been swinging through the 1960s and ’70s. One evening, a band of a hundred women in chadors went on a rampage on Phoenicia Street, smashing bottles and furniture in restaurants and bars. Gunmen barged into hotels, shooting up every bottle in the bar. Men with beards harassed women near the American University, demanding that they veil. Posters appeared, plastered on walls and trees. Just a few lines, printed in black, with a call to join a holy cause and a promise of worldly rewards. “A large flat, a fast car, an obedient wife.” The puritanism of Khomeini’s Iran was flattening Beirut’s joie de vivre. Hezbollah was taking hold within the Shia community and building what it would call a “resistance society” by proselytizing, recruiting, or violently coercing Shias in ways that would change the identity of the community, a relentless, methodical campaign that would go almost unnoticed until it was too late. Hezbollah was seen as the embodiment of God’s will on earth, the party of God according to the Quran itself, standing against the party of Satan, less a political party than a movement—and anyone who believed could adhere. In Iran, leaders addressed crowds with “O Party of God!” Hezbollah would quote the Quran in their propaganda and logos: “And whoever takes Allah and His Messenger, and those who believe, for friend—surely the party of Allah, they shall triumph.” Hezbollah would adopt a variation of the Revolutionary Guards emblem as its party symbol: a raised fist holding a Kalashnikov rifle.