by Kim Ghattas
Black smoke billowed in the blue sky over Beirut, windows were shattered miles away, bodies were incinerated in a fireball in the ten-meter-wide crater blown into the asphalt just outside the Saint George. Four thousand pounds of explosives had targeted the man who embodied the Saudi-Syria-Iran triangle: Rafiq Hariri, whose body had been incinerated in the fire. Lebanon was changed forever. Few assassinations have provoked such a dramatic shift in the trajectory of events across an entire region. But that day, the Middle East shifted on its axis. The détente was over. Iran had declared war on Saudi Arabia. The dead man was like a son to King Fahd and Crown Prince Abdallah. His killers, an international investigation would find, were Hezbollah operatives. The assassination had been sanctioned by Damascus, and probably Iran.
A big, portly man with a full head of salt-and-pepper hair and a thick mustache, Hariri had made a fortune in the desert kingdom turning the fantasies of the royals into reality almost overnight by building lavish palaces, conference centers, and the printing presses that churned out thousands of Qurans in Mecca. His fortune provided him with a rolodex whose contacts spanned the globe. He was a personal friend of presidents and prime ministers everywhere. With Syria’s blessing, Hariri had become Lebanon’s prime minister for the first time in 1992, the same year that Hezbollah decided to go into politics, fielding candidates in the legislative elections. That same year Hassan Nasrallah, one the young Shias who had studied in Najaf in the 1970s, became Hezbollah’s secretary-general. Iranian and Saudi allies, side by side in the hallways of parliament, with Syria as the kingmaker—everything seemed possible in the 1990s. The ambitious Sunni construction magnate helped rebuild Lebanon and downtown Beirut with glitz and pizzazz—but with little consideration for those who had long felt excluded and had tried during the war to smash their way into Hamra Street and Beirut’s clubbing district.
Shias still felt left out, consistently on the outside looking in, even though the community was more powerful and wealthier than ever. Their insecurity was fed continuously by Hezbollah, which reminded them constantly that without the guns of the Party of God, the Shias of Lebanon would again be downtrodden. Hezbollah had sunk its claws into the community by providing all the services that Lebanon’s weak state did not: hospitals, schools, after-school activities, subsidies for widows of militants killed fighting Israel. But those who tried to turn their backs on the party were harassed, beaten, eliminated ruthlessly. Others, like the former Khomeini enthusiast Sayyed Hani Fahs, were branded as traitors.
The shift that brought an end to Hariri’s life was set in motion by the death of Hafez al-Assad in the summer of 2000, keeper of the modus vivendi. His son, Bashar al-Assad, inherited the presidency but none of his father’s gravitas. Tall, lanky with a receding chin, Bashar was in search of ways to assert himself, and he was in awe of Hezbollah and its leader Nasrallah, who had succeeded where even Assad’s father had failed. Hezbollah, with the generous help of Iran, had achieved a victory that every Arab army had dreamed of since Israel was established in 1948: it had liberated Arab land.
In May 2000, exhausted by the relentless guerrilla warfare of Hezbollah, the Israelis had withdrawn from southern Lebanon, putting an end to more than two decades of occupation. They took their checkpoints, prisons, and torture cells with them, along with several hundred of their allies from the local proxy militia that helped enforce the occupation. Hezbollah was celebrated in Lebanon by Christians and Muslims alike; the party was feted across the region. Just as another round of peace talks between Israelis and Palestinians faltered, Nasrallah said he offered “this lofty victory to our oppressed people in occupied Palestine … The road to Palestine is through resistance and uprising, serious resistance and real uprising … like in Lebanon. To the Arab and Islamic nation, [I say] shame, defeat, and humiliation are a thing of the past.”
Nasrallah paid tribute and thanks to Khomeini, to Khamenei, and to Syria. Not a word about any Lebanese leaders. There was one man he didn’t mention but who also saw the Israeli withdrawal as his victory: Qassem Suleimani, head of the al-Quds force, the IRGC arm in charge of exporting and upholding the revolution. He was known as the “living martyr’’ for all the frontline battles he had survived in the war with Iraq. He was working ever more closely with Hezbollah operatives and Nasrallah. They had grand plans. Looking across the border into Israel, even Jerusalem seemed within reach. Once an eighteen-year-old student in awe of Khomeini in Najaf, Nasrallah was now delivering a victory for the Supreme Leader and the wilayat. Nasrallah had also become an Arab hero, polling as the most popular leader in the Middle East, and an alternative to the Arab rulers who kowtowed to America. In 2000, a Shia leader could still be adulated by Sunni crowds, but not for much longer.
Shia leaders like Hussein al-Husseini or Sayyed Fahs were hoping that Hezbollah would now retire its fighters and loosen its grip on the Shia community—after all, its job was done. But Hezbollah did not lay down its weapons. In October, barely five months after the Israeli withdrawal, Hezbollah kidnapped three Israeli soldiers along the border and detained an Israeli businessman in a sting operation. The soldiers had died during the abduction, but their bodies and the businessman were later traded for four hundred Palestinian and thirty Lebanese prisoners who had been held in Israeli jails for years. The Arab world was jubilant: Hezbollah had done it again—Israel was being made to kneel. And yet somewhere in the back of the minds of many remained a recurrent, nagging question: Why are the Shias scoring such victories? Why aren’t the Sunnis? Hariri had just become prime minister again, after a couple of years out of power. He was frustrated by Hezbollah actions—this was not the image of Lebanon he wanted to project on the globe—but his hands were tied.
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Hezbollah was only gaining in stature, and after the Israeli withdrawal, it now controlled even more territory in southern Lebanon: miles of craggy hills overlooking northern Israel, villages and towns that its men in black could patrol on their motorbikes, more walls on which it could plaster pictures of its martyrs, rooftops on which it could fly its flags and the black banners of mourning for Imam Hussein. Beards, once regarded suspiciously under Israeli occupation, now grew long, and women in chadors arrived from Beirut to visit their long-lost relatives in liberated villages. Hezbollah were the liberators, embraced by most Shias but regarded more warily by Christians and Sunnis living along the border. Having matured since its early years, Hezbollah worked to win over its new subjects with more subtlety. There were no reprisals, no assassinations, and no smashing of liquor bottles—not yet.
The Lebanese state, unable to impose itself where Hezbollah held sway, was mostly absent from a region in dire need of help after years of occupation. Hezbollah had millions it could spend every month, courtesy of Iran and rich Shia supporters from the diaspora. Imam Khomeini schools and Mahdi scout groups sprung up; more husseiniyyas were built. Ashura commemorations became bigger, bolder, and longer. In an effort to maintain constant mobilization of its followers, Hezbollah emulated Iran’s growing number of religious commemorations. Ashura extended over more days. One bled into another and soon Ashura and the fortieth commemoration, the Arba’een, felt like one long period of wailing and chest thumping. Shias who did not adhere to Hezbollah felt even more alienated and began to describe the transformation of their community as the Iranization of Shiism. All of the south of Lebanon began to feel like Hezbollah’s fortress, with pictures of Khomeini and Khamenei hanging on walls just miles from the Israeli border. Hezbollah’s reconstruction arm, called Jihad for Construction, rebuilt hospitals and stocked dispensaries, paved roads and repaired electricity pylons. Children in particular were preyed on—through them, Hezbollah’s beliefs, slogans, and imagery could invade the homes of families, regardless of their political affiliation. Hezbollah set up summer camps and kids returned with stickers and caps bearing Hezbollah logos. The children thought it was cool. Parents who were not religious or political were wary but relieved there was something to do for their kid
s during the summer period. Over time, tensions arose within families, with teenagers who wanted to join the ranks of combatants or don the chador. The sale of liquor was banned, with some shops acquiescing in fear, as others resisted. Backgammon and card games were frowned upon. Cafés closed. There was nothing cultural on offer—except Hezbollah programming of all mediums. It created a milieu that was as all-enveloping as it was inescapable—not even Badia Fahs had managed to resist it, perhaps because when she had just returned to Lebanon from Iran in 1986, it was still unclear what Hezbollah would become, beyond a militant group fighting Israeli occupation.
Despite the history of her father’s disillusionment with the Islamic Republic and Badia’s own shock at seeing women wearing the chador in her village of Jebsheet when they returned from Iran in the mid-1980s, she, too, had donned the black cloak. She had fallen in love with a Hezbollah combatant, and there were expectations of the wife of a Hezbollah fighter, so she fell in line. The marriage wouldn’t last. There are so many reasons why a marriage falls apart; with Badia there was the added complication of a father who was becoming an active critic of the party her husband belonged to. As a Hezbollah wife, she was an insider, yet she never adhered completely. She knew of their ways, and her brain rebelled against them. As a divorcée, she was victimized twice: by the community that wanted to punish her for her father’s positions and by the religious courts that ruled over personal matters in Lebanon and discriminated against women. Badia still lived in the town of Nabatiyyeh, once a cultural bastion of Jabal Amel, a center of Shia learning with a proud tradition of poetry, now a bastion for Hezbollah. She feared for her teenage son. When a neighbor alerted Badia that her son had been seen walking into a mosque known as a Hezbollah recruiting center, she called her father in Beirut. He raced to Nabatiyyeh and demanded that his grandson be handed over to him. No matter the sayyed’s politics, no one could refuse a man with a black turban. Sayyed Fahs drove the teenage boy to Beirut and kept him there, far from the claws of the party of eternal war and martyrdom. The weight of the party had already changed the Shia community, and now it was weighing down the country.
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By 2004, Rafiq Hariri was beginning to resent the arrangement that had first brought him to power in 1992. The Syrian occupation and Hezbollah’s adventures were thwarting his ambitions for Lebanon. Hariri tried to undercut Syria’s stranglehold over the country by secretly helping to draft a UN resolution calling for a Syrian troop withdrawal from Lebanon. The Syrians were furious. When Hariri tried to block plans to extend the mandate of the Lebanese president, a stalwart ally of Damascus, Bashar al-Assad warned that he would “break Lebanon over [Hariri’s] head.” Hezbollah, on the other hand, was not going anywhere; its members were Lebanese, so Hariri tried to engage its leader, Nasrallah, in a dialogue, hoping to calm the ardors of the militant group. The two men met several times and the discussions went late into the night, over tea and fresh fruit. Both men came from modest origins, both had a good sense of humor, and both had ambitions and a reach that went well beyond the borders of tiny Lebanon, but their lives and worldviews were so different that it’s hard to understand what middle ground Hariri was hoping to find. The Lebanon Hariri envisioned was not one that Nasrallah wanted to live in, and vice versa. Despite their cordial late-night conversations, there was definite condescension in Hariri’s tone when he spoke of Hezbollah, especially in the month preceding his assassination. He was gearing up for the next elections, and polls suggested his electoral machine would steamroll the Shia group. The way he saw it, he wanted to build, while they wanted to destroy; he wanted to work for peace and prosperity, they wanted eternal war. “Who wants to live like that?” he thought out loud in the company of visitors, just weeks before he died.
Nasrallah and Hariri met for the last time on February 11, 2005. They ate more fresh fruit and chatted into the early hours of the morning. It was their last supper.
On February 14, Hariri was dead. The accusing fingers immediately pointed at Syria. Hundreds of thousands of Lebanese of all faiths and sects descended onto the streets of Beirut, protesting for weeks and demanding that Syrian troops leave the country. Hezbollah organized counterdemonstrations to laud Syria and pledge eternal support. Assad would eventually bring his soldiers home, ending a thirty-year occupation of Lebanon. He knew, however, that—along with Iran—they still had control of the country, thanks to Hezbollah and other allies. A wave of assassinations followed: progressive intellectuals, longtime defenders of the Palestinian cause, communists, members of parliament, Christians, Sunnis, and Shias. This time the assassins reached beyond the Shia community, which had already been decimated by the wave of targeted killings in the 1980s. No one was caught, but everyone surmised who the killers were. The targets were those with a high profile and the intellectual heft and legitimacy to take on Hezbollah’s discourse, or offer a progressive path forward for the country. The liberal camp was in disarray, hunted, its politicians forced to hunker down. The country was split sharply into those who aligned with Iran and Syria (the axis of resistance against Israel and the West) and those who looked to the West or Saudi Arabia for support.
Even as they were trying to thwart America in Iraq (allowing jihadis to cross through Syria, propping up Shia militias), or perhaps precisely because they were doing so, Damascus and Tehran had been feeling vulnerable, both wondering whether they were America’s next target. After 9/11, Iran had helped the United States by sharing intelligence about al-Qaeda and the Taliban. President Khatami was hoping for a thaw in relations. Instead, in 2002, President George W. Bush lumped Iran into the “Axis of Evil” along with North Korea and Iraq. Iran, Syria, and Hezbollah could not afford to lose ground while America was on the prowl and the region was in such flux. While Iran worked to overpower Iraq, Assad and Hezbollah needed to make sure Lebanon remained theirs, and Hariri was getting in the way. He had to go. Inside Iran, the regime also closed ranks and the next president, elected in August 2005, was a conservative true believer, one of the Revolutionary Guards who’d had a brief tour of duty in Lebanon in the 1980s to help set up Hezbollah, a man awaiting the return of the Mahdi with messianic devotion: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
With the killing of Hariri, Iran had unofficially declared war on Saudi Arabia, just as the kingdom itself was feeling fragile, grappling with the wave of al-Qaeda bombings. In August 2005, King Fahd died and Crown Prince Abdallah, de facto ruler for a decade, became king. Despite the proxy war unfolding in Iraq and the killing of his protégé in Lebanon, King Abdallah tried to uphold the détente with Iran. He even hosted Ahmadinejad in Saudi Arabia a few times. But Iran was getting increasingly bolder in Iraq: the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) was funding and arming militias, evading US sanctions by siphoning off Iraqi oil, and planting their friends in key positions in ministries. King Abdallah then felt deeply betrayed when it was revealed that Iran had a secret nuclear program, one it had developed during the period of détente with Saudi Arabia. In 2008, after a political tussle in Lebanon about Hezbollah’s growing power, there was a showdown in the heart of Beirut between Hezbollah and Sunni militiamen. Everyone still had guns in Lebanon, but no one had a trained fighting force like Hezbollah. Within hours, hundreds of its fighters took over large parts of the city and routed their opponents. The political balance of the country had been tilted in favor of Iran and Syria. King Abdallah would soon begin to rail against Iran and call on the United States “to cut off the head of the snake.”
* * *
On June 7, 2006, at 6:15 p.m., two American F-16s launched a missile strike against a house surrounded by palm trees, fifty-five miles northeast of Baghdad. The aircraft dropped two 500-pound laser-guided bombs on the house. Six people were killed; one of them was Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Iraq had had a new prime minister since May, leader of the first full-term government since the fall of Saddam Hussein. For the first time in Iraq’s history, the country’s top leader, chosen after an election, was a Shia. Nuri al-Maliki had fled
Iraq in 1979, at the age of twenty-nine. He was a Shia activist and member of the Islamist Da’wa Party. Maliki spent his years in exile between Iran and Syria until he returned to Iraq in 2003. Like almost every Iraqi Shia, several of his relatives had been killed by the regime. Maliki had the honor of making the announcement about the killing of Zarqawi at a press conference alongside the American ambassador and the American commander of US forces in Iraq.
By then, Zarqawi had not only beheaded Western hostages and blown up the UN headquarters and the Jordanian embassy in Baghdad, he had also sent suicide bombers into four-star hotels in Amman one December night in 2005, killing sixty people and injuring more than a hundred. Zarqawi was so bloodthirsty that even al-Qaeda had kept its distance from him, criticizing his gruesome videotaping of the beheadings and counseling him against the wanton killing of fellow Muslims, including Shias. Even Zarqawi’s mentor Maqdissi had never condoned the killing of Shias. But Zarqawi wanted a civil war in Iraq; he wanted to kill Shias so they would lash out at Sunnis, and so Sunnis would feel compelled to rise up, join his ranks, and reclaim their country. He was hoping to build an Islamic state in Iraq. Now he was dead. The Americans had killed him, but a Shia prime minister promised this was only the beginning. “Today Zarqawi has been terminated,” said Maliki. “Every time a Zarqawi appears we will kill him. We will continue confronting whoever follows his path. It is an open war between us.”