The Road to Fatima Gate: The Beirut Spring, the Rise of Hezbollah, and the Iranian War Against Israel

by Michael Totten

  “No one is helping us,” Alan said. “We are paying for all the reconstruction with our own money.”

  “You aren’t getting any of the reconstruction money from Iran?” I said.

  “Of course not,” Alan said. “Of course Iran is not helping us rebuild our houses.”

  The Iranian government sent money, via Hezbollah, to at least some Lebanese people whose homes were damaged or destroyed during the war. If Alan was telling the truth, though, that money was not exactly evenly spread.

  Reconstruction had progressed more in Ain Ebel than elsewhere, even so. Rubble clearance was the only noticeable improvement in Bint Jbail. Ain Ebel was less damaged, so there was less work to be done.

  “Were people still living in Ain Ebel during the war?” I said.

  “Yes, of course,” Alan said. “Most of us stayed in the village for the first eighteen days.”

  “Were people still living in the houses that Hezbollah seized?” I said.

  “No,” Alan said. “Hezbollah only took over houses that had no one in them.”

  We came across a crater in the middle of a residential street on the edge of town left by an Israeli artillery shell.

  “Did anyone here try to stop Hezbollah?” I said.

  “How?” Alan said. “We have no weapons. Some people told Hezbollah to leave, but they pointed guns in our faces. ‘Shut up, go back in your house,’ we were told.”

  At the southern edge of town was an open field with a direct view to the south. Alan, Noah, and I stood there and looked toward Israel. The border was right there beyond some low rolling hills covered with grass and rock. The scene looked a little like Ireland.

  “Hezbollah could have set up their rocket launchers here instead of in town,” Noah said. “It’s a straight shot into Israel.”

  “The houses and trees gave them better cover,” Alan said. “The valley below, though, gave them even better cover than the village. If that’s all they cared about, they would have stayed there.”

  We walked back downtown. I wanted to find more witnesses who stayed in Ain Ebel during the war.

  Noah and I went toward the grocery store owned by Alan’s uncle. A poster on the wall outside showed an open hand, palm up in the “stop” position, in front of four strands of barbed wire. Text in Arabic warned children to beware of land mines left behind by Israelis in the 1980s and 1990s.

  A convoy of French soldiers from UNIFIL rolled down the street in armored personnel carriers and stopped in front of the store. A handful got out. They wore Smurf-blue berets and carried automatic weapons slung behind their backs. Noah badly wanted to ask them what, exactly, they were doing down there in South Lebanon, but they weren’t allowed to speak to us because we didn’t have a permit from the United Nations authorizing an interview.

  Noah and I followed them into the store. A grim-faced soldier placed five bottles of Lebanon’s Château Kefraya on the counter.

  “Are those for Hezbollah?” Noah said jokingly. I chuckled.

  “No,” said the soldier without showing even a trace of a sense of humor.

  “The French like to spend time in Ain Ebel,” Alan said. “They are welcome here. They feel comfortable. They help our economy. In Bint Jbail, some of the residents make slashing motions across their throats with their fingers when they see U.N. soldiers.”

  I felt bad for laughing when I heard that. South Lebanon was a hard place. UNIFIL’s soldiers weren’t allowed to disarm Hezbollah and prevent the next round of war. That would have required their authorization as a combat force. But they did what they could within sharply proscribed limits, and they spent most of their time in a shattered and hostile environment.

  Alan’s uncle behind the cash register defended the French.

  “I feel safer now with them here than I’ve felt for more than thirty years,” he said.

  It was easy to find another civilian who stayed in the village during the war. He said he would be happy to talk to me as long as I promised not to publish his name. He didn’t even tell me his name, so he had nothing to worry about. I’ll just call him Jad.

  I turned on my voice recorder.

  “So you stayed in Ain Ebel through the whole war?” I said.

  “Yes,” Jad said.

  “At what point did Hezbollah come to the village and fire their missiles?” I said.

  “During the war they took some uninhabited houses at the edge of our village and stayed there.”

  “Uninhabited?” I said.

  “Yes, uninhabited,” he said. “Nobody was there, so they took them. They were eating in there, sleeping in there, and maybe doing some reconnaissance. They chose specific houses because nobody was living there and nobody would know.”

  “Did they choose to come to this town for strategic or tactical reasons?” Noah said. “Or was it because it’s a Christian town?”

  “Strategically, of course,” Jad said. “It’s a high peak. It is very good strategically. But they could have chosen these parts, these lands. . .” He gestured with his arm toward the valley below, the place Alan promised to take us next. “It would have been more protection for them than this village. So why did they come here? I think it’s because it’s a Christian village. They do this.”

  “Did anybody who lives here try to get Hezbollah to leave the village?” I said.

  “We don’t have any arms,” Jad said. “Hezbollah has arms. But there was this incident that happened. Next to a guy’s place they were firing Katyushas—you know, missiles. They were firing from the house. This guy went out and said, ‘Please do not fire from our home, from in front of our house. My father is very ill and there are some children in the house.’ They came to him and said, ‘Shut up, go in your house, this is none of your business.’”

  What Jad said closely matched what Alan had told me.

  Then he told me something off the record. He made me turn off my voice recorder before he would say it. I cannot and will not relay what he told me, but he wanted me to know that the people of Ain Ebel did use secret nonviolent countermeasures against Hezbollah, and that Hezbollah had no idea what was happening. Their countermeasures sounded smart to me, and it seemed as though they were partly effective.

  I turned my voice recorder back on, but I didn’t realize until later that it was stuck on “pause.” So I’ll have to paraphrase what he said next.

  He told me that eighteen days after the start of the war, a large group of civilians decided it was time to leave Ain Ebel and flee to the north. They were no longer willing to stay while Israel fired back at Hezbollah’s rocket launchers. It was too dangerous, and Hezbollah insisted on staying and endangering those who lived there.

  So they fled the area in a convoy of civilian vehicles. It was safer, they figured, to travel in a group than to travel alone.

  On their way out of the village, Hezbollah fighters stood on the side of the road and opened fire with automatic weapons on the fleeing civilians.

  I was shocked, and I asked Alan if he could confirm this. Was it really true? Hezbollah opened fire on Lebanese civilians? Alan confirmed this was true.

  “Why?” I knew why, but I wanted a local person to say it.

  “Because,” Alan said, “Hezbollah wanted to use the civilians of Ain Ebel as human shields.”

  Fortunately, Hezbollah didn’t kill anybody when they opened fire. One person was shot in the hand, and another was shot in the shoulder. This was enough, though, to get the job done. The civilians turned around and went back to the village under Israeli bombardment.

  The same story made its way onto the Internet in late July. A Lebanese blogger who went by the anonymous handle N10452 tried to sound the alarm.

  “The situation in Ain Ebel is unbearable,” he wrote.1 “Thousands of civilians have fled to the village from nearby villages and more than 1,000 rockets have hit the village. There is no more food, neither clean water and diseases are spreading. Now here comes the most sickening part: Hezbollah has been firing rocket
s from the village since Day 1 hiding behind innocent people’s places and even churches. No one is allowed to argue with the Hezbollah gunmen who won’t hesitate to shoot you, and I’ve heard about more than one shooting incident including young men from the village and Hezbollah. Urgent appeals have been done through phone calls from terrified people who wouldn’t give out their name fearing Hezbollah might harm or even eliminate them.”

  “I’m from Ain Ebel,” wrote another.2 “The situation is real bad. People are being used as human shields for Hezbollah to launch rockets. No one dares to stop them, they are threatening the citizens if they argue with them. Hezbollah guerrillas are holding rockets and launching them and then hide between the houses or in the bushes. The people don’t have food. For example my uncle lost around 7kg. All they have is to get one small meal a day, rgheef khibiz, and 2, 3 cups of water.”

  New York Times correspondent Sabrina Tavernise reported something similar the next day.3

  “Hezbollah came to Ain Ebel to shoot its rockets,” Fayad Hanna Amar said in Tyre. “They are shooting from between our houses. Please, write that in your newspaper.”

  One local resident told Tavernise that Hezbollah killed a man who tried to flee Ain Ebel as the Israelis blew up the launchers from the other side of the horizon and from the skies.

  Alan then took me, Noah, and Said down into the valley below the village, the previously restricted military zone where Hezbollah fighters built bunkers, dug foxholes, and stashed weapons before they moved their operations into civilian areas.

  A local teenager named Victor came along for the ride. He thought it would be cool to check out the area now that someone would show him.

  Alan told us to stay on the road because Israeli land mines might still be around. There were, perhaps, more land mines in South Lebanon than there were people.

  The road into the valley was made of dirt and large stones. Vegetation looked like Mediterranean scrub bush from a distance, but up close it was clear that some of these “bushes” were three times my height.

  “Did Hezbollah build this road?” I asked.

  “No,” Alan said. “It is agricultural.”

  Victor spotted some camouflage netting in one of the bushes. He and Noah pulled it out. “Radar scattering,” Noah said as he read the tag. “This is American.”

  He tried to cut the tag so he could keep it as a souvenir, but it wouldn’t come off.

  The valley did seem like it would have provided better cover for Hezbollah than the village. The sky above was open enough that Katyusha rockets easily could be fired directly at Israel. Camouflaged foxholes and bunkers among the bushes and trees provided much better protection than houses that could be easily spotted by the Israeli Air Force and that showed up prominently on satellite and aerial surveillance photographs. No Israeli ground troops would have wanted to go into that valley without first softening up the area with air strikes and artillery. It was the perfect environment for ambushes and sniper attacks.

  The sun dropped quickly below the horizon. South Lebanon is not as high as the Mount Lebanon range in the north, but it’s high enough that the cool Levantine air of early winter turned frigid as the light went out of the sky.

  “There is a destroyed bunker up ahead,” Alan said as he stepped off the road. “Come on.”

  “Is it safe?” I said. “What about land mines?”

  “I have been here before,” Alan said. “Hezbollah was here. It should be safe.”

  So we stepped off the road and walked through a dense grove of olive trees toward one of Hezbollah’s demolished fortifications. I walked gingerly and tried to step in the footprints of others.

  There was no sound in the valley. I couldn’t hear anything but grass and twigs gently giving way under five pairs of feet. Alan was probably right that there were no land mines in the immediate area. Otherwise, Hezbollah would have dug in somewhere else.

  But what about unexploded ordnance from Israeli cluster bombs? Those were still lying around. I might as well have stepped on a land mine if I ended up kicking a bomblet by accident.

  The faint cold light of dusk illuminated the sky like a backlit screen, but all was dark in the valley on the trail beneath the trees. I tried to imagine what it must have been like if Israeli soldiers walked the same path only a few months before. Some Hezbollah fighters wore the uniforms of the Israel Defense Forces. They used nightvision goggles. They hunkered down in foxholes and waited.

  The valley must have been reasonably safe or Alan wouldn’t have taken us down there, but the enveloping darkness and the all-too-recent violence made me wonder, although not very seriously, if Hezbollah had really been flushed out and kept out.

  The bombed-out bunker was just up ahead under some trees. It was, indeed, very well hidden.

  “If I were going to build a bunker,” Noah said, “this is where I’d put it.”

  Nevertheless, it had been hit. And it was hit badly. Anyone hiding inside during the air strike surely would have been killed.

  We dug through the rubble. There were a few pieces of rusted metal and splintered wood here and there, but the bunker had been made mostly of cinder blocks that had gone flying in every direction.

  “There was a sink,” Alan said and pointed to the right of the entrance. “And here is some cable for faxes and phones.”

  “Look,” Victor said. “A lid from a weapons crate.”

  “Dude,” Noah said. “Check out the showerhead.”

  Sure enough, there was a showerhead at my feet.

  It was impossible to tell when the bunker was hit, whether it was at the beginning, during the middle, or at the end of the war. Since there was no evidence that anyone was inside when the strike came, I assumed it was hit in the middle or at the end after Hezbollah had already moved into Ain Ebel.

  I’m not a military forensics expert, but everything Alan told me about Hezbollah relocating to Ain Ebel during the war seemed to add up and match the physical evidence I could see. The valley obviously was used as a military area, and so was the village. But the village wasn’t controlled by Hezbollah before the war started. Its fighters had clearly moved into Ain Ebel at some point.

  We walked back to the car in absolute darkness and drove for a minute or so. Alan parked alongside an open ditch next to the road.

  “The Israelis were here,” he said. “They left some of their food.”

  At my feet was an empty can of tinned fish. Some of the words on the can were written in Hebrew.

  Alan was right. The Israelis were there, recently enough that no one had bothered to pick up their trash yet. I tossed the can of fish back into the ditch, thinking with a grim almost certainty that they would be back.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  the solution is in tehran

  The solution is not in Lebanon.

  —WALID JUMBLATT

  Every one of my Lebanese friends and sources told me to stay the hell out of the dahiyeh. Driving down south with locals who knew the back roads was one thing. Poking around in Hezbollah’s shattered command and control center was another. In the wake of the July War, the most paranoid party in Lebanon was more twitchy than ever.

  That was before I met Sayyed Mohammad Ali al-Husseini, a Shia cleric who outranked Hassan Nasrallah and waged a one-man campaign against the Party of God from right under its nose.

  He took me for a ride through the southern suburbs in his sporty SUV outfitted with four-wheel drive and tinted black windows. With his beard, glasses, and turban, he looked a bit like Nasrallah himself, and he drove through the streets like a stuntman in an action movie, thrilling to the high-tech growl of his engine when he depressed the accelerator.

  The scene was one of mass destruction and misery. “You can take pictures,” he said and flicked a button that lowered my window on the passenger side. “Don’t worry. No one will do anything or say anything to you if you are with me.”

  This was important. Hussein Naboulsi from Hezbollah’s media relations departm
ent explicitly warned me never to do it. Even local people weren’t allowed to photograph their own neighborhood without being detained and investigated by security men from the party. Lebanese citizens in Hezbollah territory fed massive amounts of intelligence to the Israelis, and Nasrallah knew he was at the top of the IDF’s hit list.

  Al-Husseini wore the black turban of a sayyed—a descendent of the Prophet Muhammad. He could take pictures of anything he damn well pleased, and so could his guests. He was as close to being untouchable as a person could be in an assassination-plagued country like Lebanon.

  Our first stop was just a few streets from his house. Entire blocks where twelve-story towers once stood were now craters, some deep enough that you’d break your neck if you fell into them. Thousands of tons of rubble had been carted away, and thousands of tons still remained.

  “Did you stay here during the war?” I said and shuddered at the thought of hunkering down while these massive structures exploded around me.

  “No!” he said, like I was crazy even for asking. “No one could stay here. Everyone had to leave.”

  The Israelis dropped leaflets over the neighborhood warning residents to clear out of the way of incoming air strikes. They had to. The dahiyeh was vertically packed with tens of thousands of civilians. It was also where Hezbollah concentrated its critical infrastructure and was therefore hit harder than any other built-up place in the country. Israel’s government hoped demolishing Nasrallah’s stronghold would at least deter future attacks if it didn’t destroy the leadership altogether.

  It’s possible that Nasrallah quietly decided not to start any more fights with his neighbors, but there wasn’t much evidence that that was the case. He insisted the “resistance” would continue indefinitely, and he was rapidly replenishing and even upgrading his rocket and missile stocks from Iran via Syria. His constituents cheered him even while thousands lost their homes and even more lived in fear next to shattered apartment buildings towering precariously over the ruined cityscape.