And Then All Hell Broke Loose: Two Decades in the Middle East

by Engel, Richard

  The military locked down the area for forty-eight hours to look for evidence. The forensic search turned up an intelligence treasure trove—memory sticks, phone numbers, Zarqawi’s personal diary. Then the military flew a handful of reporters to see Zarqawi’s last hideout. As we circled the site, it was hard to see where the farmhouse had been. Not a wall was standing. All I could see was a crater surrounded by palm groves and wildflowers. It looked like a swimming pool filled with debris. Zarqawi’s legacy, however, would continue. He would later be remembered as the founder of ISIS, who established its barbarous practices of beheadings and mass executions. Zarqawi the beheader set the bar for ISIS’s brutality and its hatred of Shiites. He understood that the United States was disenfranchising Sunnis and used it as a powerful rallying cry. ISIS wouldn’t have existed without the US invasion of Iraq. It was born out of the Sunnis’ feeling of alienation, their belief that they’d been pushed aside—which, of course, they had been. Sunnis suffered a thirteen-century-old injustice with power stripped from them by Washington and given to Iraqi Shiites and their coreligionists in Iran. This grievance is at the core of ISIS ideology. Simply put, no Iraq war, no ISIS.

  Two weeks after visiting Zarqawi’s destroyed farmhouse, I moved to Beirut with the new title of Middle East correspondent and Beirut bureau chief, although I would keep rotating through Iraq for the next several years.

  My promotion to bureau chief for NBC was beyond anything I had imagined when I went to Cairo in 1996 without a job. It finally felt like I was starting to realize my dream of making a name as a foreign correspondent. As for Zarqawi, he wanted to make a name as well as a jihadist in a league with bin Laden. It turned out his infamy was just beginning. He would redefine Islamic terrorism into something more brutal, more digitally connected, and more widespread than any of his radical predecessors.

  In Lebanon, unbeknownst to me, another war awaited. Trouble seemed to follow me around. The late Tim Russert, my friend and the esteemed moderator of NBC’s Meet the Press, once joked, “Richard, just don’t come to Washington.”

  Of course I did come to Washington from time to time, and on one visit I met with President George W. Bush for ninety minutes. Since the invasion he had earned the equivalent of two PhDs about Iraq and the Middle East. He had done the reading, met the key players, and studied the reams of information that only a president gets. But I still didn’t think he understood how to deal with the Arabs. I don’t think he fully understood the forces he had unleashed. He certainly refused to admit he’d done anything to benefit Shiite Iran, even thought that was obvious. Under Saddam, Iraq was Iran’s hostile and dangerous neighbor. Now Iraq was run by fellow Shiites, many of them directly loyal and answerable to Tehran.

  “I’m sort of jealous,” Bush said. “I’m envious of what you’ve been doing.” He was referring to the chance to travel and explore, the adventurous side of my job. “Are you some sort of thrill seeker?”

  “No, no thrill seeker,” I said. “I don’t like driving fast or bungee jumping. I just think this is important.”

  “It is. You ever been to Iran?”

  FIVE

  AFTER YEARS AS A WARTIME vagabond with no other home besides a hotel room in Iraq, I saw my move to Lebanon as a new beginning, a chance to rebuild my personal life and, with my new title of Beirut bureau chief and Middle East correspondent, to cover stories beyond Iraq. I was sick of suicide attacks, bombed-out hotel rooms, and the fear that I was going to die in that godforsaken place.

  I knew, even then, that the war in Iraq would set the tone for the region for years, if not decades, to come. Lebanon was an ideal listening post because it was so fragile, a mere sapling of a country that has survived by bending to the geopolitical winds of its neighbors and the great powers. If Iran became the region’s bully, or if Israel got twitchy, or if Sunni jihadists grew restive, or if democracy showed signs of life—I’d feel all those things first in Lebanon.

  I also needed a home. I was divorced. I had no belongings. No framed photographs. No furniture. No place to put my books. Lebanon seemed like a perfect place to settle down for a while. It had recovered from its devastating civil war, and most important, it was at peace. It was urbane and socially relaxed with a vibrant nightlife, lovely women, and a perfect climate. While looking for an apartment, I stayed in the Mövenpick Hotel on the fabled Corniche. I could feel the tension draining out of me as I stood on the balcony and looked out over the Mediterranean.

  I was watching Al Jazeera on June 25, 2006, when the story broke that the Sunni militant group Hamas had kidnapped an Israeli soldier and spirited him back to the Gaza Strip. Then the foreign desk at NBC in New York called to say the network had a correspondent working the Israeli side but needed someone in Gaza. I hopped a plane to Jordan and drove across the border to Israel, where I met with the soldier’s father.

  All countries take the kidnapping of their troops seriously. But it drives Israel absolutely crazy. It is an affront to every person. Almost everyone in Israel is or has been a soldier. There is total commitment to the principle “leave no man behind” because nearly everyone could be that man or woman. All men and women, except some Israeli Arabs and ultra-Orthodox Jews, serve in the military, and remain in the reserves. When a soldier is kidnapped, Israelis think of their own sons and daughters.

  That was especially so in this case because Corporal Gilad Shalit came across as such a kid—skinny and awkward looking, with close-cropped hair and wire-rim glasses. Friends described him as a physics whiz, a soccer goalie, a quiet, nice boy who volunteered for combat duty.

  Hamas was calling the shots in Gaza. In the 2006 parliamentary elections, it defeated Fatah, which had been founded by Yasser Arafat, and then drove out Fatah altogether. Hamas now asked for the release of Palestinian prisoners in exchange for Shalit. Israel keeps a lot of Palestinian prisoners in part for situations like this one.

  * * *

  I ALSO MET THE FAMILY of a fifteen-year-old Palestinian boy arrested for throwing stones. He was one of a thousand prisoners Hamas was demanding be released in exchange for Shalit.

  The next day I made my way to Gaza, through the Erez Crossing, which is like crossing the river Styx. On one side is Israel, modern and clean with its LA attitude and beach culture—untucked shirts, flip-flops, girls with tattoos and pierced noses. To get to the Palestinian side, you walk nearly a mile through a tunnel with a metal roof and wire fencing on both sides. When you emerge, you feel as if you’ve stepped back fifty years. Trash and graffiti are everywhere. Bombed-out buildings stand like scarecrows.

  I went to a small building where the Palestinian authorities are supposed to write down your passport information. Normally a man sits behind a desk with a log. Nothing is computerized. Not that it mattered: No one was at the desk. Hamas had just come into power, but was under attack and feared its border registration building would be bombed, so the place had been evacuated.

  I arrived at night, dragging a suitcase with a flak jacket and helmet inside. I could hear explosions in the distance. I also realized I was standing next to a Hamas building and wanted to get away from it. I called our Gaza fixer, Wajjeh, who sent a van for the dangerous pickup. We saw no other cars on the road during the fifteen-minute drive to the center of Gaza City. The Israelis were bombing. I saw Hamas fighters huddled in small groups by doorways.

  Israel had only turned over Gaza to the Palestinians the year before in keeping with the Bush administration’s determination to plant democracy in the Middle East, on the shaky premise that democracies don’t attack other democracies and that everything else would magically fall into place in the Middle East from there. So elections were held in Gaza, and the winner was Hamas, which promptly expelled its rival Fatah at gunpoint and kidnapped a soldier from democratic Israel.

  Israel felt Gaza’s thumb in its eye and decided it was time to send a strong message that would restore its aura of military invincibility and depose the Hamas-controlled government. The Israelis started b
ombing quickly and aggressively, hitting the centers of Hamas power—government buildings, police stations, and military outposts. Many Palestinians were killed. It was a big story, and I covered it extensively—until an even bigger one came along.

  On July 12, Hezbollah, a Shiite extremist group in Lebanon, kidnapped two Israeli soldiers and killed eight others. News of the kidnapping was all over Palestinian radio and TV, and people in Gaza cheered in the streets. Dan Halutz, chief of the Israel Defense Forces, threatened to turn back “Lebanon’s clock by twenty years” unless the kidnapped soldiers were returned. I knew Gaza would quickly become a sideshow to a much larger conflict.

  Hezbollah was a far more serious adversary than Hamas. Backed by Iran, hardened by battles against the Israelis in southern Lebanon, Hezbollah was considered to be one of the most effective guerrilla armies in the world—dedicated, smart, disciplined, well trained, and creative. I suspected that Israel, even with its vaunted war machine, would have its hands full with Hezbollah in Lebanon.

  Getting from Gaza to Beirut was not easy. They are close on a map, but worlds apart. At first light on July 13, I went back through the wormhole passage out of Gaza, drove to Tel Aviv, and flew to Jordan. (There are no flights from Israel to Lebanon; the two countries are still officially at war.) From Jordan I got a car to Syria. I then drove across Syria and got to the Syrian-Lebanese border at nightfall. The border was packed and chaotic with Lebanese fleeing into Syria. I had to get out of my car and walk the last half mile because traffic was such a snarl. I eventually got to the passport building, where I stood at the counter, frantically waving my passport in hopes of getting the border agent’s attention. I knew the border would close at any minute, and I was desperate to cross before it did. I was finally stamped to exit Syria and enter Lebanon, one of the last people allowed in.

  I changed to a Lebanese car and drove through the Bekaa Valley toward Beirut. The Israelis were already bombing the roads. The Bekaa is a Hezbollah stronghold, where many of its secret training camps are located. We drove with our lights out. Israel was targeting trucks to prevent Hezbollah from moving rockets from the Bekaa to the southern front along the Israeli border. After a white-knuckle drive I made it to Beirut just in time for the Nightly News (which broadcast live at 1:30 a.m. local time). The Israelis were already bombing the Beirut airport. I reported that Israel and the United States believed “that for decades Iran has used this airport to land 747s full of weapons and money for Hezbollah. Israel does not want the organization to be resupplied at this moment.”

  I could scarcely believe that my new home was engulfed by war before I even had time to find an apartment. It seemed that war followed me everywhere I went. In Jerusalem, the Second Intifada broke out nine months after I arrived. I went to Iraq believing that the United States would invade, and sure enough “shock and awe” lit up Baghdad. Then I moved to Beirut to get away from the killing, and two weeks later the Israelis were bombing an airport only five miles from my hotel.

  Lebanese officials in the foreign media office (conspiratorial like most of their counterparts in the Middle East) thought my move to Beirut meant that I had advance warning that war was coming. They thought it was too much of a coincidence that NBC opened a bureau two weeks before the fighting started. Obviously it was happenstance, but it did change my opinion of human nature. I now saw war as a constant, akin to wildfires. They break out unless you work actively to prevent them. It’s an atavistic thing, buried deep in our DNA.

  The war in Lebanon was vastly different from the conflict in Iraq. The US approach in Iraq was to kill insurgents while also trying to win hearts and minds. The Americans conducted lots of limited raids and operations, and bomb and missile strikes were intended to be as “surgical” as possible. Iraq was a hit-and-run war. The Americans patrolled, gathered intelligence, then pounced. The insurgents blew them up whenever they could or responded by bombing soft targets like markets.

  The Israelis weren’t trying to win hearts and minds in Lebanon. Anything but. They set about flattening the south side of Beirut street by street and southern Lebanon village by village. The goal was to punish Hezbollah, and all of Lebanon, and teach them a lesson they would not soon forget. Israel had tired of the peace process. A new era in the Middle East had begun.

  The war started amid misconceptions on both sides. The exasperated Lebanese prime minister, Fouad Siniora, asked an aide to Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, “What have you done?” Hezbollah played only a small role in the Lebanese government, holding 14 of the 128 seats in parliament and 2 of the 24 cabinet posts, but it had more military muscle than Lebanon’s armed forces. Siniora was assured that everything would calm down within a day or two. Nasrallah seemed to be gambling that Israel would settle for a prisoner swap. “We do not want to escalate things in the south,” he said. “We do not want to push the region into war.”

  Israel, the warrior state, was for the first time being led by men, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Defense Minister Amir Peretz, who had no experience in military command. They relied on the advice of Dan Halutz, the first air force commander to become chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). Halutz believed the war could be won from the air, perhaps without any ground operations. Peretz thought the conflict would last ten to fourteen days. Olmert figured Hezbollah would sue for peace after a few days of aerial pounding. Most starry-eyed was Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, who reportedly convinced herself that it would be over in twenty-four hours. They were all hopelessly and tragically wrong.

  On the second day of the conflict, I did my stand-up on a hill overlooking Beirut’s airport, which was being bombed again by Israeli warplanes. Flashes of light and thudding explosions created a dramatic backdrop. Then came a surreal scene. As a line of a dozen TV reporters trained their cameras on the airport, a crowd of cheering Lebanese came out of nowhere, including a Christian couple—she in her wedding dress, he in a dark suit with a boutonniere—who wanted to take their wedding picture with the airport going up in smoke behind them. Celebrating the destruction of their new airport by a foreign power showed how much some Lebanese hated Hezbollah, at least at the start of the hostilities.

  The Lebanese people and their government were angry that Hezbollah had picked this fight just as the country was getting back on its feet after its civil war, a fifteen-year, multi-sectarian conflict that took 150,000 lives. The economy was booming, new roads were being paved, new bridges going up, and Lebanon was probably the most popular tourist destination for wealthy Arabs, and several Arab governments actually came to Israel’s defense. Particularly gratifying, from an Israeli perspective, was Saudi Arabia’s criticism of the “uncalculated adventures” that were exposing Arab states to “grave dangers.” Fellow Sunni stalwarts Egypt and Jordan followed the Saudis’ lead, making it a rare time that an important group of Arab states sided with the “Zionist foe” against other Arabs. The G8 leaders, meeting in St. Petersburg, blamed Hamas and Hezbollah for the crisis and said Israel had a right to defend itself. The United States cheered Israel on and ran diplomatic interference, which became increasingly important when Israel’s conduct of the war came under criticism.

  Israel’s greatest military success was its first large operation, a thirty-four-minute air blitz in south Lebanon. The Israelis claimed to have knocked out fifty-nine stationary rocket launchers and two-thirds of Hezbollah’s medium-range rockets, most of them supplied by Iran and concealed in and around the homes of Hezbollah activists.

  But the second day of hostilities showed Israel’s military intentions in a more disturbing light. Several miles to the east of my hotel in south Beirut, Israel dropped twenty-three tons of high explosives in the Dahiya neighborhood, on Hezbollah’s headquarters in the capital. The stated aim was to kill Nasrallah and his high command in their underground bunker. The Israelis had dropped thousands of leaflets warning civilians to leave the area, and a good thing too: streets lined with apartment blocks were reduced to smoldering rubble. Hezbolla
h responded with an intensive rocket attack, for the first time hitting Haifa, twenty-five miles south of the border.

  That evening, Nasrallah gave a live speech from his underground bunker in south Beirut. Accusing the Israelis of “changing the rules of the game,” he said, “You wanted an open war, an open war is what you will get.” An assistant handed him a note just as he was recalling that he had promised surprises during the war. He urged his listeners in Beirut to look out at the Mediterranean. “This is the first surprise. Right now, the Israeli warship at sea—look at it now, it’s burning.” An Israeli missile boat had been hit by an Iranian-made, radar-guided missile, disabling the vessel and killing four crew members.

  Nasrallah was a savvy war leader, charismatic and smart. People in the Middle East sometimes made fun of him because he was pudgy and had a lisp, but he was well-spoken, even eloquent. When he made a threat, people believed it. Like Muqtada al-Sadr in Iraq, Nasrallah was a sayyid, a descendant of Mohammed. But Nasrallah had far greater gifts than Sadr. I always imagined that Nasrallah was the leader that Sadr dreamed of becoming.

  In the first two days of the fighting, 73 Lebanese were killed and 200 wounded; 12 Israelis died and 150 were wounded. The Israelis imposed a total land, sea, and air blockade on Lebanon. To tighten its pinch, they attacked fuel depots, radar stations, ports and jetties, and even the new lighthouse near the Corniche. They blew up roads and bridges, as well as a power plant that supplied the electricity to most of south Lebanon. Hezbollah’s rocket attacks only killed two Israelis, but they forced 220,000 people to seek refuge in shelters that were hot, unhygienic, and cramped after years of government neglect—the kind of indignity that proud Israelis thought was only suffered by the Arab side.