The Phalangists quickly caught on to our strategy, and before our wall had extended five meters, the sky began raining lead. I did not hesitate, but directed traffic: “Keep moving! Keep moving! You can die advancing or die standing still!”
Bullets sizzled and snapped over my head. Our wall-building teams scurried like ants on a hill, carrying bags from the rear position to the forward tip of our barrier. Spinning on their fins, RPGs seared in, slicing through the air with a high-pitched whine. Miraculously, the Phalangists kept missing. Grenades exploded around us, but did not hit our wall. At least twice, grenades landed on the street in front of us and clinked harmlessly to a stop, their fuses defective.
Within ninety minutes we had reached the middle of the boulevard. Suddenly, I heard a booming thunder and the sound of the heavens cracking: the Phalangists had called in an artillery strike.
“Incoming!” Ali shouted.
I could hear the high scream of a 155 mm shell bearing down on our position. The PLO-trained fighters hit the pavement, then lifted ourselves on our elbows and toes to prevent being blown skyward by the force of the shell’s impact with the ground. We covered our ears with our hands and yelled as loudly as we could to stop our eardrums from breaking. When the shell hit about one hundred meters away, the sound was like the sky crashing to earth. As a hail of shrapnel and concrete peppered down, I looked up to see two of our fighters from another faction lying dead in the open street. They had not known how to brace for artillery fire, and the bucking pavement had coughed them over the sandbag wall.
Seconds later, the Phalangists began firing on the exposed corpses with a .50 caliber anti-aircraft gun. The huge rounds quickly shredded their bodies into gore. The assault on our dead infuriated Ali. Crouching low, he scuttled back toward the group carrying our weapons forward behind the sandbags and armed himself with two RPGs.
Then, abruptly, he popped above the wall holding a launch tube on each shoulder.
“Ali, no!” I yelled.
As he fired the RPG on his right shoulder, a long plume of flame scorched the ground behind him. I did not see where the grenade hit, but saw Ali’s upper body disintegrate as three .50 caliber rounds hit him in the head, chest, and shoulder. He collapsed behind the wall in a bloody heap.
“He is in jannah!” I cried instantly, not wanting the others to shrink back. “Move! Keep moving!”
Quickly, our warriors started building again, extending our protective barrier across the boulevard, moving closer to the Phalangists meter by meter. Now we had perfected our movements, and it took only an hour to extend the sandbag wall across the boulevard. Once it was complete, hundreds of fedayeen poured across in a furious stream. Now we would take down the neighborhood—one alleyway, one building, at a time.
As always, my job was demolition, blowing holes in buildings that were Phalangist strongholds, clearing them, marking them cleansed with a painted code, and pushing forward. The deeper we penetrated toward the tower, the more the retreating Christians strafed us with panic fire. Heavy fire came in from snipers embedded in the hotels, bullets chipping away the concrete on building corners.
I had ducked into an alleyway, preparing to move my team up the next block with Ahmed providing cover fire, when a rocket whistled in, smashed into the corner of the building, and sent a shard of shrapnel winging into the back of my head. I did not fall, but my hand flew to the wound, and my eyes watered as the hot metal burned in my scalp.
Ahmed stepped forward, brushed my hand aside, and plucked the metal from my head.
“It is not deep!” he yelled as the sound of more incoming echoed in the alley. “Just a cut!”
For two blocks, we pushed the Christians back, fighting our way up the street through a metal storm, returning fire with RPGs, rockets, and sniper fire. By the time we reached the tower we had lost at least twenty men. The Phalangists guarding the base of the tower had already retreated inside, but they pounded us from above with .50 caliber guns. I dashed for cover behind a building column. Above, about fifteen floors up, I could see two fighters, their heads popping into view and quickly gone again.
“Fareed! RPG,” I yelled to one of the fedayeen bearing weapons. Crouching low, he scuttled forward with grenades and a preloaded launcher. I took aim on the fifteenth floor and fired. I drew back in surprise when the entire floor erupted in a flash of fire that splashed out of both sides of the building. There must have been stored ammunition barrels there.
In all, seven groups—some PLO, some Muslim factions—entered the building. The Christians who had not already retreated had no place to go but up. We pushed them higher and higher with small-arms fire and RPGs, blowing men off the floors still under construction and into the street below. We also cleared floors using “sticky sacks,” bags filled with a pasty explosive compound and shrapnel, and fitted with a short fuse: light the fuse, fling the bag up to the next floor. When the bag exploded, it cut everyone in range to ribbons.
The fight raged for two hours before we had pushed the Christians to the tower’s roof. Now they had no place left to run. But the roof provided them with a great advantage: it was split into two levels, with the still-dry swimming pool on the lower portion and the hotel’s utility sheds and giant air-conditioning units on the higher. From that metal maze of cover, the Phalangists were able to pick off three of our fighters as soon as they emerged on the roof. We knew they would be able to hold out there as long as their ammo lasted, which could be days since we had no cover on the lower level.
The only solution: blow the roof.
Working quickly with a team of two other demolitions experts, I wired massive amounts of TNT to the support columns of the floor just underneath the roof, fusing it all to Russian-made military batteries that would serve as detonators. It was the most TNT I had ever used for an operation; between the three of us, we used hundreds of kilos. We only had one chance, and we wanted to ensure complete destruction.
We ran the wire down four floors, hoping that would put enough distance between us and the explosives so that we would live and the Christians would die. Helpfully, the Phalangists had already built a kind of sandbag bunker on that floor, perfect for us to take cover behind. Even so, most of the fedayeen descended several floors lower in case the operation went wrong and the whole building collapsed. Only I and the two other triggermen stayed high.
On a three count, we pushed the buttons. For a long second, an eerie silence enveloped us as the current sped up the long lead wires to its destination.
Then hell came to earth.
The explosion that ripped down from above sounded like the collision of planets. It was the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, Everest in an avalanche, a roaring tidal wave crashing through an earthquake. A thick cocktail of black smoke, white dust, and rubble blew down through the stairwell, turning us all instantly white. The gargantuan blast distorted the air into violent, undulating waves that sucked my breath away, deflated my chest, and seemed to scramble my internal organs. Spontaneously, I vomited and dimly noticed the other fighters doing the same. A storm of devastation raged over our heads, the squeal of twisting steel, the roar of massive concrete slabs breaking loose, tumbling, thundering closer and closer as accumulating tons of wreckage broke through floor by floor.
A moment of panic gripped me: Did we take cover far enough down?
I tried to stand up and run but had to grab a support column because I had lost all equilibrium. In that moment, I heard the ceiling of the next story up smash down onto the floor over my head. Instinct sent me diving to the floor again.
Allah, save us! I prayed, then tensed my body and prepared to die.
4
The chain reaction of destruction lasted for a full minute. Gradually, the noise died away leaving above us the silence of what had to be a literal tomb. I raised my head off the floor and coughed up puffs of dust. In the smoking air, I felt I could not get a full breath. The two other fedayeen stirred, rising slowly amid the dust and gravel like ghosts.
My guts ached. But I knew I had to shake the pain off quickly—all of us did—in order to advance to whatever remained of the roof.
I heard the rest of our force rumbling up from below, ready to finish the attack. The upper stairwell was a tumble of wreckage. Armed and moving in relays to cover potential attacks from above, we climbed it like a concrete mountain. It was a short trip to daylight. I emerged into the sun to find a tangled mass of masonry, utility sheds, air-conditioning parts, and bodies.
Picking my way quickly through the rubble, I moved to the edge of the tower that faced the main road and looked down. Cars parked below looked the size of credit cards. I was about to call in a report to Abu Yousef when a slight movement caught my eye. Turning swiftly, I spotted a Phalangist lying on his back about five meters away, his fatigues burnt black and stained crimson. Had the blast carried him another meter, he would have been blown over the edge of the tower. Now he lay on his back, slowly turning his head back and forth.
I keyed my radio and gave Abu Yousef a victory report, then a footnote: “We have survivors.”
Abu Yousef did not hesitate: “Make an example of them,” he said. “Dead or alive, make an example of everyone you find.”
I knew immediately what he meant. Walking across the wreckage, I closed the distance to the Christian fighter and stood at his right side looking down. His eyes were closed and he moaned softly. His guts peeked out from a wide gash that ran down his left side from chest to hip. I bent down and grabbed his wrist and his knee.
His eyes snapped open. I lifted the Christian’s body perpendicular to the ground, swung him to my right, and launched him out into space.
Stepping toward the building’s edge, I leaned out and watched his silent fall. For a long moment, he turned in the air like a plane in a flat spin. Then the weight of his torso pulled him down head first. When he hit the street, his right arm came off.
I turned around to see several men staring at me through the smoke. “We have orders!” I shouted. “Make an example of everyone you find!”
For the next few minutes, at least seventy bodies sailed off the top of the tower as the Muslim fighters disposed of the living and the dead. Some Christians made the trip to meet their God screaming.
5
In the beginning of the civil war, the battle lines were clear: the Lebanese army and Maronite Christians, led by the Phalangist Party and militia, allied themselves against the Palestinians, who were mostly Muslims. But those alliances swiftly shifted, crumbled, and shifted again. Syria, whose army had opened the way for Fatah assaults on Israel from the border, now played both ends against the middle. They pretended to support the Palestinians but in truth hoped to arm the Shia and establish a separate Shia government in the South of Lebanon.
Meanwhile, I saw criminal gangs becoming powerful, stealing and selling relief shipments to buy drugs and weapons. As the situation deteriorated, I could soon see there would be no winner. I grew confused about a lot of things. I did not see myself as a grunt soldier; I was a jihadist. People go to university to become teachers or to a carpenter’s shop to learn woodworking. I had trained in Beirut to advance the cause of Islam with a gun. This dirty war of treacherous nations had ceased to be about Islam and had become only about survival.
I wanted to get out, to a country where my back was safe. I wanted to start fresh, to establish an Islamist movement somewhere else. Sweden seemed a prime destination. I had heard it was clean there, and ripe for a spiritual takeover. Many fedayeen talked of moving to northern Europe, quietly invading the cities in a cultural jihad. To establish a movement there would be a step toward reclaiming for Allah what the Ottomans had lost.
To save my own skin and not be labeled a traitor, I confided my feelings to Abu Yousef. He agreed that I had labored long for the Palestinian cause and would benefit from another sabbatical. I did not tell him I meant to get away forever.
In late 1976, I applied for a work visa to Sweden. While I waited for the wheels of international bureaucracy to turn, I continued to fight. But where I had fought with fierce resolve in the past, now my heart betrayed me.
By this time, a “Green Line” split the city from the seaport to the mountains. It was a line of demarcation, a burned-out no man’s land that divided hate from hate. The Christians dug in on one side, holding their end. We dug in on the other, holding ours. Pavement formed the dividing line: eight lanes and a concrete median plus sidewalks. If you crossed the line, you were crazy. Snipers on both sides would take you out.
At times during the long civil war, the warring sides would call for a temporary peace—a day to claim your wounded, resupply, and take a half-respite from the constant vigilance that wore us down like acid. The Christians called these days a cease-fire; the Muslims called it hudna. Generally, each side honored the temporary truce. I remember the day we did not.
It was a mission of opportunism. Why should we honor this code of war when our enemy had shown time after time that they had no honor? Along the Green Line, large sections of downtown Beirut were unoccupied. Our plan was to cross into Phalangist territory in an area filled with empty theaters and cheap hotels. In previous battles, we had blown holes through the buildings; now we had ready-made tunnels we could use to penetrate deep into Phalangist territory without being seen in the streets. Then, while the Christians were off-guard, we would do what we called “combing”—killing all the Christians we could find.
Three leaders took a group of eighty to ninety fighters from three factions. We rallied near the theaters where we would begin our attack. I led the largest group, a PLO unit of about forty men. The rest of the force was split between two men, Hamza, who led about twenty fedayeen from al-Morabitun, and a Syrian named Abu Zayed.
The Syrian and I disliked each other instantly. Over the years, to blend in with the PLO, I had taken to speaking in a Palestinian dialect, Arabic with a different slang, a different accent that was closer to Egyptian. When my face was covered with camouflage paint, people could not tell I was Lebanese. Abu Zayed seemed to think I was Palestinian and because of this, suspicion dripped off him like sweat. As it had been on my first mission into Israel, the Syrians still thought of Arafat’s fighters as trash. Now, for me, the feeling was mutual: a Syrian, I felt, would sell his mother in the streets at a discount. Abu Zayed matched the stereotype. Looking into his eyes, I could see a hunger for blood.
Now, our force climbed fire escape ladders to the top of the theater and scrambled across the theater roof, our boots crunching sun-warmed gravel. Reaching the opposite edge, we dropped into an alley on the Christian side of the Green Line. Now we were able to run through the connected buildings undetected. We often had to step across the corpses of soldiers killed in past battles, some so old their flesh had worn away.
For about an hour, we advanced through the building interiors until we came to a building I knew to have a balcony that looked over a large public courtyard.
I turned to Hamza. “Keep watch here. We will go up and have a look.” I motioned to Abu Zayed to follow me, and together we climbed six flights of stairs, emerging in a large empty room. I did not want to go with him, but I also did not want to let him out of my sight.
When we reached the highest floor, Abu Zayed and I got down on our bellies below window level. Slowly, carefully, we crawled to the balcony door and pushed it open. Below, I could see thirty or forty young men wearing the uniform of the Phalangists. But their small unit was completely off-guard, snacking, talking, and laughing, their weapons laid aside, enjoying the peace.
I knew it would be the perfect invasion. I knew we could kill them all.
I carried a Seminov rifle that day. I raised it and peered through the scope. A quick count revealed that I had brought two men for every one of theirs.
Abu Zayed spoke quietly. “It’s perfect. An easy kill. I will get the others.”
But then, in my heart, a quiet voice rose: Don’t touch them. These are mine.
I did
not hear a voice. I felt a voice. Was it Allah speaking? I did not know. What else could it be? Who else?
Whatever it was, my resolve to attack dissolved. I was not afraid, but I knew instantly and without question that we should abort. I had a problem, though: Abu Zayed lay beside me transmitting tension, ready for battle. My brain sorted through excuses to give him, a reason to abort.
An ambush.
“This is an ambush,” I whispered, my mouth forming the words as soon as they popped into my mind.
Zayed whipped his head toward me with a hard stare.
“They saw us coming,” I said carefully. “Their commanders sent those boys out there as bait.”
Zayed peered back out at the scene. He raised his rifle and scanned the area with his scope.
“Where is the ambush?” he said skeptically. He motioned for my binoculars and swept them across the buildings and streets. “I see nothing.”
I raised my arm and pointed to a random apartment building. “There, in the higher floors. If we move forward, they will see us immediately.” I spoke evenly, firmly, full of false facts. “If they have Katyushas, we’ll be murdered right here, and those who crossed with us will be dead.”
“You’re dreaming!” Zayed pointed to the young Christians with his rifle. “They are right there for our taking. We can do this. Besides, if we die, we will be al-shaheed.”
“True. But I am not ready to die today.”
With that, I moved off the balcony, sliding backward in a combat crawl, then stood and headed down the stairs. Abu Zayed was on my heels all the way down, spitting whispers in my ear. “You are a liar and a coward. There is no ambush!”
Emerging onto the lower floor, I called retreat. Immediately, my men and Hamza’s formed a loose group and began moving out, back in the direction of our tunnel system. But Abu Zayed’s men stood still.
The Blood of Lambs: A Former Terrorist's Memoir of Death and Redemption Page 18