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

by Michael Totten

  Royce got a ride out of West Beirut. His journalist friend Matt Nash swooped in from the east side of the city to pick him up. Somehow they made it through all the checkpoints.

  Nobody rescued Charles.

  When the shooting picked up in Hamra again, he called three young women who lived in an apartment two streets away—Dana from Lebanon, Sara from Syria, and Hala, a Palestinian. All were dual nationals and carried American passports.

  “I’m going to try to leave in a taxi,” he said, “and there’s room for all of you if want to come with me.”

  He packed his most precious personal belongings into disheveled boxes, thinking there was a real chance he’d never see anything he left in his apartment ever again.

  “Please call a taxi,” he said downstairs at the desk.

  “Where do you want to go?”

  “Achrafieh,” he said. “And then to the mountains.”

  Almost everyone Charles talked to in Hamra hoped to flee to Christian areas even if they weren’t Christians themselves. His Sunni and Syrian friends didn’t think Achrafieh in East Beirut was far enough. They wanted to go all the way to the Christian hinterlands. That’s where they’d be protected. Even Sunni women who wore hijabs and were obvious Muslims at one hundred yards yearned for the Christian hinterlands. Nobody would shoot at them there. They might get dirty looks from a couple of people, especially under the circumstances, but Lebanon was an open country, and everyone would know displaced Sunnis weren’t terrorists or invaders, but refugees.

  Hala, Dana, and Sara walked over and met Charles in the lobby. The sound of gunfire wasn’t as terrifying anymore, and since nobody was shooting on their particular street at that particular moment, there was no sense in getting overly worked up about it.

  As soon as they left in the taxi, gunshots cracked from just a few hundred yards to the right, and militiamen began closing streets. The driver slammed the accelerator into the floor and drove the wrong way down one-ways.

  There wasn’t a chance they could punch all the way through to the east side without clearing one checkpoint or another. The key now was to pick which one looked easiest.

  Dodgy-looking men with guns up ahead covered their faces with keffiyehs and balaclavas and flew the SSNP’s swastika. They were more dangerous and sadistic than even Hezbollah, and the driver nearly crashed fishtailing the car around a corner.

  “Okay,” Charles said and laughed nervously. “I guess we won’t be taking that road.”

  Directly ahead was another checkpoint staffed by clean-shaven young men contentedly smoking cigarettes and flying the Amal insignia. This was the checkpoint they wanted. Some March 14 Lebanese still held out hope that the secular Shias of Amal would tire of Hezbollah’s Iranian masters. Some thought that’s what would almost have to happen eventually. Amal’s counterparts in Iran had turned against the likes of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Ali Khamenei long ago.

  “Sorry,” one of the young Amal men said to the driver. “You can’t drive through here.”

  They had their orders. They weren’t really allowed to say anything else. But this was Lebanon, where rules were often downgraded into suggestions.

  “Listen, Habibi,” the driver said. “I’ve got three girls and their brother here. Their parents are in the Gulf. They’re worried and they want their kids in Achrafieh.”

  “Okay, okay,” the militiaman said and waved them through. He didn’t inspect the car or ask any more questions.

  “That was easy,” Charles said.

  “We got lucky,” the driver said and wiped his forehead with a handkerchief.

  Crossing to the Christian side of the city—a mere forty-minute walk from the center of Hamra—was like driving four days into the past. Nothing at all was out of the ordinary. Shops were open. Traffic was normal. People were out on the street. Nobody was shooting at anybody, and nobody seemed concerned in the slightest that anybody might start.

  The driver pulled over next to the Starbucks at Sassine Square and asked for twenty dollars.

  “That’s outrageous,” said Sara, the young woman from Syria. Normally the ride would have cost five.

  “It’s fine,” Charles said and paid. “He just got us out of a war zone.”

  The girls got out. Charles continued into the mountains. Because he was heading into the secure Christian heartland, his driver charged him the usual rate. He blew out his cheeks and felt fifty pounds lighter as they approached Rabieh, a rather posh area on the side of the mountain near the American Embassy, where his journalist friend Habib had prepared a spare bedroom.

  The next day he had lunch with one of his relatives down in Dbayeh, one of Beirut’s northern suburbs on the beach just south of Jounieh. The Christian areas were untouched by the war, but Christian thoughts weren’t.

  “The Christians,” Charles told me, “were thinking, ‘Wow. Look at them. They’re at it again.’ Things were going crazy in Beirut, and there were constant references on TV to the battle on 888 Hill in the Druze mountains. There are Christians in those areas, too. We didn’t know how long we could hold out before the fighting spread everywhere.”

  The fighting didn’t spread everywhere. It didn’t even last very much longer. Lebanon’s government caved. Walid Jumblatt whipped Nasrallah’s boys just outside Aley, but even he caved. His people fought fiercely and well, but their numbers were small, and they no longer had a logistics infrastructure that could sustain them throughout a protracted conflict. Hezbollah had Syria and Iran, the Sunnis had most of the Arab world at their back, but the Druze, like the Kurds, had no friends but the mountains.

  Hezbollah won. And that, as they say, was that.

  When Charles returned to Hamra, Beirut felt like another city. Everything was trashed, the ground seemed to list sideways, and the SSNP flags were still flying.

  Hezbollah had previously left that part of the city alone. There seemed to be an unspoken agreement that it was off-limits, if not outright protected, but khallas, that was finished now. The entire western half of the capital, including the vast majority of the city’s hotels and resorts, was cast into the shatter zone.

  Young people drifted apart from each other. The political divisions between March 14 and March 8 strained friendships during the Beirut Spring and wounded them severely after the July War. Hezbollah’s invasion of Beirut damn near shot them through the brain and the heart and finished them off for good.

  “It became a real emotional battle,” one resident said. “Anybody who wasn’t Shia was hating the Shia. Even my Syrian friends were saying the next time they saw their Shia friends, they were going to punch them in the face, even if their Shia friends were with March 14.”

  Rising sectarianism was hardly just a “street” level phenomenon. The zuama felt it, too, or at least had to pander to it.

  Former Member of Parliament Khaled Al-Dhaher blasted away.7 “Since the army and the security forces are incapable of defending our sons, our religion, our faith, and our liberty,” he said, “we in the Islamic Gathering have decided to launch a national-Islamic resistance, in order to protect Lebanon and defend its people, and in order to prevent the Persian enterprise from getting its clutches on an Arab capital, because the people who have occupied Beirut belong to the Persian-Iranian army.”

  Lebanon’s divided Christian community sat out the fighting. Perhaps the only reason they remained divided was because they sat out the fighting. Free Patriotic Movement leader Michel Aoun had been hemorrhaging Christian supporters for years thanks to his cynical alliance with Hezbollah, and he would likely lose nearly all of them if Hezbollah blew up Christian cities or neighborhoods. If Nasrallah didn’t understand that from the beginning, he almost surely figured it out when his Druze allies turned on him in the Chouf.

  “I finally understand why the Lebanese don’t have civic trust,” Charles said. “The people who lived next door wanted to kill me over politics. I didn’t really know the Hezbollah people. They were mostly from the dahiyeh. But some of the peo
ple who lived in a building just down the street from me were with Amal and the SSNP. They intentionally terrorized us. We all tried to hide it, but everyone on the street was full of rage.”

  He’d hardly left his comfort zone in the Beirut bubble since the July War ended two years before, and by the time the May conflict started, he had all but forgotten about the rest of the country. He knew there were lots of poor people without much education even in Beirut, but he didn’t move in those circles.

  “When all these militiamen came out of the woodwork,” he said, “I first wondered where on earth they all came from. A lot of people said they were from the dahiyeh, but no. Not all of them.”

  Many Hamra residents were indeed in denial about this at first. Few wanted to believe they were being shot at by some of their neighbors.

  “These guys were the ones whose faces you don’t normally look at,” he said, paraphrasing the philosophers Emmanuel Levinas and Jean-Luc Marion, “the ones who just sit in the alleys, who don’t have jobs and just hang out all day. They sit around, you walk by, you glance over, but then you keep walking because they’re just five schlubs sitting there doing nothing. You see that all the time in Lebanon, guys without jobs and without anything to do, bullshitting all day long, consuming stupid sectarian rhetoric, and getting in fights with each other. They don’t generally cause problems for the neighborhood, but when they do, it’s a big problem.”

  Though he spent most of his time in the bubble, he still wasn’t all that surprised Hezbollah invaded Beirut. Anyone in Lebanon who didn’t live in a complete state of denial knew a foreign-sponsored militia and international terrorist organization with armed resistance as its raison d’être could never be trusted to keep its guns in the armory. What shocked him the most—what shocked a lot of people the most who hadn’t lived through the civil war—was what he learned about human nature.

  “People I knew,” he said, “stopped looking at me as a person. I became a political position in human form. They stopped thinking of me as Charles and could only see me as a function of politics. And they took up arms against me. Instantly. Everything I held dear in Lebanon and in my neighborhood was destroyed. All the trust I had was destroyed. You can work really hard at being nice and being friendly, and you can do it for years, but when they decide they want to kill you, they’ll do it.”

  Royce wasn’t surprised that Hezbollah invaded, either. He studied conflict for a living and wouldn’t even be in Lebanon if the country were stable. The very day he got off the plane, assassins killed Kataeb Party Member of Parliament Antoine Ghanem in Beirut’s Sin al-Fil neighborhood with a car bomb. Hezbollah’s occupation of downtown had already been in place for months, and the war against Fatah al-Islam in the north was well under way. What did surprise him, though, was how quickly his neighbors chalked the whole thing up to the new normal.

  “They call it the May events,” he told me, “which is such a euphemism. Imagine if that happened in America. They were saying, yeah, well, that was the events of May, that was weeks ago. I saw this in Haiti. Most people may not want war, but they’re used to it. When you see it as an outsider, it’s horrific, but for them it’s just Tuesday.”

  For Charles, though, and for plenty of others I knew, it could never be Tuesday. More than half the friends I made in Lebanon in early 2005 relocated to the United States, the European Union, or Dubai by 2008.

  Charles left, too. “Hezbollah proved they’re willing to attack other Lebanese,” he said after he moved from Beirut to Chicago.

  “Nobody else is interested in their ideology,” another Hamra resident told me. “And they’d rather kill us than talk to us about it.”

  “Nasrallah is like Ariel Sharon!” Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud Al-Faisal said at an Arab League conference shortly after the fighting died down.8 “They both invaded Beirut. The legitimate government in Lebanon is being subjected to an all-out war. We, the Arab world, cannot stand idly by as this happens.”

  When Faisal said “the Arab world,” he meant, of course, the Sunnis. The Shia Arabs of Hezbollah and the Alawite rulers of Syria were the enemy.

  “We must do whatever it takes in order to stop this war and save Lebanon,” he continued, “even if this requires the establishment of an Arab force that will quickly be deployed there, thus protecting the existing legitimate government.”

  Nothing remotely like this, however, happened.

  Leaders from Lebanon’s warring parties met in Doha, Qatar, on May 21. Ostensibly they were there to negotiate a compromise, but what they really did was hash out the terms of surrender. Nasrallah walked away with everything in his pocket. Brigadier General Wafiq Choucair had already been reinstated as the chief of airport security, and the government agreed to leave Hezbollah’s telecoms network alone. And now March 8 got its “blocking third” veto power in the cabinet. Nasrallah spent eighteen months trying to wrench that out of his enemies’ hands with civil disobedience and mostly nonviolent protests, and he failed. Yet it was his after less than a week of armed “resistance” in the streets.

  It didn’t bode well for Lebanon’s future. Hezbollah had no incentive to limit itself to peaceful opposition when war yielded better results, and yielded them instantly.

  “No victor, no vanquished,” is a formula civilized Lebanese leaders use to peacefully resolve conflicts with each other, but Nasrallah was not a civilized leader. He was a terrorist.

  Sure, some nice-sounding things were put into the Doha Agreement.9 “The parties commit to abstain from having recourse or resuming the use of weapons and violence in order to record political gains,” for example. Hezbollah also agreed on paper to the following: “Reasserting the commitment of the Lebanese political leaders to immediately abstain from resorting to the rhetoric of treason or political or sectarian instigation.”

  But this was just blather. There wasn’t a chance Hezbollah would tolerate another attempt by the government to clamp down on its war-making or surveillance capabilities. Nasrallah would again accuse them of treason and would again declare war.

  Army commander Michel Suleiman was chosen as a “compromise” president, at last filling the vacancy left behind by Emile Lahoud. Suleiman wasn’t the venal pro-Syrian toady Lahoud had always been. He was only moderately pro-Syrian, and he was much more of a gentleman. While clearly an improvement and hardly a would-be tyrant himself, he wasn’t what March 14 had in mind as a replacement for al-Assad’s yes-man in Baabda.

  Nasrallah permitted majority leaders to portray the Doha Agreement as a compromise so they could save face, but everyone understood that he won. No Arab force landed in Beirut to shore up the government, and the region’s Sunnis had to face up to the fact that they were no longer dominant in the Middle East. The agenda in their part of the world was now being set by the Persians and by the Israelis.

  The governments of Egypt and Saudi Arabia made it clear that they weren’t on Nasrallah’s side during the opening days of the July War, and that was when Hezbollah was shooting at Jews. Now that Iran’s private army was at war with Lebanon’s Sunnis, Sunni leaders elsewhere would have to think long and hard about which side of the Persian-Israeli conflict they’d have to come down on if and when all the stops were pulled out.

  What they decided was something few, if any, Middle East experts during the previous several decades would have expected. But as Middle East blogger Jesse Aizenstat wrote,10 “There’s nothing like a fanatical band of Persian cats to bind the Semitic tribes.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  the mystic in his bunker

  We are this East’s saints and its devils, we are its cross and its spear, we are its light and its fire.

  —BASHIR GEMAYEL

  Cold winter rain off the brooding Mediterranean lashed the sides of the mountain in sheets. My driver rubbed condensation off the inside of the windshield with a cloth while the van’s tired wipers struggled to keep up on the outside. Lebanon is a dense country, almost entirely lacking in wilderness, and the lo
wer elevations north of Beirut are chockablock with apartment towers, but we found ourselves on a rare lonely road winding its way through trees and grass as though we were approaching a hermitage.

  The driver stopped in front of a swing gate, where five men wielding AK-47s waited in dripping ponchos.

  “We get out here,” he said. “They will take us the rest of the way.”

  I accompanied a small group of Western journalists and foreign-policy analysts to a meeting with Lebanese Forces leader Samir Geagea, a pillar of the March 14 coalition whose alliance with Saad Hariri and the Future Movement proved more durable over time than any other.

  As its name implies, the Lebanese Forces was founded as a militia during the civil war. Geagea seized command in 1986 from his rival and onetime ally Elie Hobeika and transformed the organization into one of the most formidable fighting forces in Lebanon. Most of its members and supporters were Maronites, and they fought hard against Syria’s invasion and conquest. Competent fighters as they may have been, they were too weak and too few to stave off defeat and de facto annexation forever, and they surrendered their weapons at the end of the war.

  Like some of the other warlords from that era, Geagea matured into Lebanon’s version of a regular politician in the early 1990s. Unlike most of the others, however, he continued resisting the Syrians when Hafez al-Assad’s regime broke one promise after another. It was clear almost from the beginning that the Syrian ruler had no intention of leaving the country and letting its people govern themselves.

  In 1994, Syrian authorities ordered their Lebanese subordinates to frame Geagea for setting off a bomb in the Our Lady of Deliverance church in Zouk that killed nine people. He was acquitted in the church bombing, but the accusation voided his inclusion in the general amnesty for crimes committed during the civil war. The court found him guilty on several counts from that period and gave him four life sentences in solitary confinement.