Warriors of God

by Nicholas Blanford

  Nasrallah spent the next eighteen months immersed in studies alongside a handful of other students under the guidance of Mussawi, whom the future Hezbollah leader considered as “a father, an educator, a friend.”

  “Under Sayyed Abbas, our group broke all routines, never took time off, and never rested, because Sayyed Abbas converted us into an active beehive and made us thirsty for learning,” Nasrallah said.11

  But his studies were cut short in early 1978 when the Iraqi regime launched a crackdown on the Najaf seminaries, arresting and expelling Lebanese clerical students. Nasrallah slipped out of Iraq avoiding arrest and returned to Lebanon, where he enrolled in a new hawza established by Mussawi in Baalbek.

  Territorial Integrity

  Nasrallah’s return to Lebanon in mid-1978 coincided with several pivotal developments that were to have a profound impact on Lebanon’s Shia community.

  On March 11, a dozen armed Fatah fighters infiltrated northern Israel by sea, hijacked a bus with its passengers, and embarked on a shooting spree along the highway toward Tel Aviv. By the time the fighting had ended, all but two of the Palestinians were dead, along with thirty-seven Israelis, twenty-five of whom burned to death when the Fatah fighters blew up the bus with hand grenades.

  The Israelis had been looking for an excuse to move into south Lebanon to drive out the PLO and consolidate Saad Haddad’s militia. Now they had one. On the night of March 14, the Israelis invaded south Lebanon, punching north along four main axes between the coastal road in the west and the mountainous Arkoub district in the east. The Israeli government said it had no intention of occupying the area, but General Mordechai Gur, the IDF chief of staff, said that the goal was to link up Haddad’s militia-controlled Christian enclaves and establish a “security belt” along the length of the border. The PLO had been expecting a major operation by the Israelis after the bus hijacking, but they underestimated the scale of the attack and were driven northward.

  On March 19, the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 425, which called for “strict respect” of Lebanon’s “territorial integrity, sovereignty and political independence” and demanded of Israel “immediately to cease its military action” against Lebanon and “withdraw forthwith its forces from all Lebanese territory.” It also agreed to establish a UN Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) to oversee the Israeli withdrawal and help the Lebanese government restore its authority over the area.

  The Israelis agreed to a cease-fire on March 21, by which time the IDF had occupied much of the area between the border and the Litani River. On May 22, Israel announced that it would withdraw its forces from Lebanon by June 13. But on the scheduled day of withdrawal, the departing Israelis handed over the border strip to its ally Saad Haddad rather than to UNIFIL, a move that simultaneously prevented the peacekeeping force from deploying along the border and fulfilled General Gur’s pledge to establish a “security zone” in the south.

  The Israelis refused to implement Resolution 425, and there was a lack of international will to force Israel to comply. The peacekeepers of UNIFIL suddenly found themselves uncomfortably sandwiched between two enemies—Haddad’s militia to the south and the PLO factions to the north. As the stalemate hardened, the “Interim” of UNIFIL’s name soon became ironic; by 2011, the peacekeeping force was more than double the size of the six thousand peacekeepers that originally deployed in south Lebanon thirty-three years earlier.

  Hemmed in on both sides, it was not long before UNIFIL was coming under regular attack from PLO fighters attempting to infiltrate its area and from Haddad’s militia, which routinely harassed the peacekeepers with artillery and heavy machine gun fire.

  The Vanished Imam

  Just over two months after Israel’s purported withdrawal from Lebanon, Musa Sadr vanished, along with his two companions, while on a visit to Libya. The Libyan authorities said that Sadr had left the country on an Alitalia flight bound for Rome, but the cleric and his two colleagues failed to arrive in Italy, and they have never been seen since.

  Most probably Colonel Moammar Qaddafi, Libya’s leader, had Sadr killed, for any number of possible reasons, and the cleric’s body lies buried somewhere in the Libyan desert. Yet many Shias openly cling to the hope that Sadr is still alive (although he was already fifty years old in 1978) and will one day return to resume his role as champion of the community.

  Inevitably, his mysterious disappearance evoked comparisons to the “hidden Imam” who vanished in the ninth century and whose return, the Twelver Shias believe, will herald the end of the world, and their salvation. It was an appropriately ambiguous end for a cleric who had so skillfully exploited the Shia motifs of Karbala and the martyrdom of Imams Ali and Hussein to mobilize the Shias from their communal languor.

  The leadership of Amal fell in 1980 to Nabih Berri, a lawyer who had recently returned from the United States and who would emerge as one of Lebanon’s most enduring and wily political players. Under Berri, Amal moved in a secular direction, to the dismay of the religious cadres. In response, several prominent Dawa activists joined Amal, including Hassan Nasrallah, in a covert attempt to subtly influence the group along radical Islamic lines. Nasrallah became an official for Amal in the Bekaa Valley, organizing seminars, cultural meetings, and lectures in husseiniyahs and mosques to raise Islamic awareness among the local population.

  Nonetheless, for the bulk of Lebanese Shias, the disappearance of Musa Sadr left a gaping void at the level of the community’s leadership that could not be filled by the relatively colorless Berri and the secretive activities of a handful of Islamic activists. The vanished imam left many Shias hungry for a new leader who would inspire them and in whom they could invest their hopes for the future.

  Absolute Authority

  That figurehead emerged within months of Sadr’s disappearance in the form of Ruhollah Khomeini, an Iranian Grand Ayatollah who by 1978 was regarded by many Iranians as the spiritual and political leader of the opposition to Mohammed Reza Shah Pahlavi, the ruler of Iran.

  Khomeini had been a persistent critic of the Shah for many years and was exiled in 1964 for his verbal attacks against the Pahlavi regime. He settled in Najaf the following year, where he became known to a wider audience of Shia students and clerics.

  In early 1970, Khomeini gave a landmark series of lectures in which he outlined his theories of an Islamic government, known as the wilayat al-faqih—the guardianship of the jurisprudent. Khomeini postulated that the laws of a nation should be the laws of God, the Sharia, and therefore those holding power should possess a full knowledge and understanding of the holy laws. The ruler of an Islamic state should be the preeminent faqih, or jurist, who “surpasses all others in knowledge” and whose ordinances must be obeyed because “the law of Islam, divine command, has absolute authority over all individuals and the Islamic government.”

  His theory was not unique but was a distillation of ideas propounded by earlier prominent clerics. But it was controversial and many Shia clerics opposed it, believing that the clergy’s role was to provide guidance and advice on religious and moral matters, not running the daily affairs of a state.

  By the beginning of 1978, unrest against the Shah in Iran had erupted into street demonstrations drawing tens of thousands of protesters, which turned into revolution as the months progressed. In January 1979, the Shah fled Iran, and two weeks later Khomeini set foot on Iranian soil for the first time in fourteen years.

  The establishment of a theocratic Shia state in Iran was greeted with silent dismay among most Arab states. Syria, however, was the first Arab nation to offer congratulations to Khomeini, followed by the PLO, Algeria, and Libya. Despite Khomeini’s absorption with Iranian politics during his long years of exile, he was a committed supporter of the Palestinian cause. Since the early 1970s, Yasser Arafat’s Fatah movement had provided military training in camps in Lebanon to Iranian anti-Shah revolutionaries, including one of Khomeini’s sons. Arafat had craftily cultivated public displays of support for Khomeini
(even putting up posters of the Iranian ayatollah in PLO-controlled areas of Beirut) in an attempt to soften the hostility of southern Lebanese Shias toward the Palestinians. Arafat was the first foreign official to travel to Iran following Khomeini’s return, and he was rewarded with the newly vacated Israeli embassy in Tehran to house the Palestinian diplomatic mission.

  For Lebanon’s Shias, the Islamic revolution had an electrifying effect. Khomeini and his fellow revolutionaries had boldly demonstrated the benefits of organized religious action and given a new sense of empowerment and pride to Shias in general. Khomeini quickly became the new inspiration and leader for Lebanese Shias lamenting the vanished Musa Sadr and for those who considered the Islamic revolution an exemplar of action against one’s oppressors and enemies.

  Not only Shias were inspired by the Islamic revolution. Khomeini’s ideas of an Islamic state were not rooted in exclusivist Shia dogma, but were a pan-Islamic concept to be embraced by all Muslims. Anis Naqqash, the Fatah guerilla commander who helped train Imad Mughniyah, was a Sunni but became an early convert to the Islamic revolution, which he hoped would help him construct a Lebanese anti-Israel resistance.

  “After the Islamic revolution, we changed all our articles and speeches to support Khomeini,” Naqqash recalls. He left Fatah following the 1978 Israeli invasion and established a small militant group called Harakat al-Lubnan al-Arabi, the Arab Lebanese Movement. The ALM consisted of some 150 recruits drawn from Fatah’s Student Battalions as well as other factions.

  The Lebanese Dawa activists also formed a network of secret armed cells, dubbed Qassam, that was based mainly in Beirut and clashed regularly with fighters from the Iraqi Baath Party, particularly after war broke out between Iran and Iraq in 1980. The Qassam militants also served as bodyguards to senior figures in the Lebanese Dawa, and its cadres would later play an important role in the Islamic Resistance, Hezbollah’s military wing.

  The success of the Islamic revolution inevitably aggravated the divergent viewpoints within Amal, distancing even further the besuited secularists of Nabih Berri from the turbaned Islamists such as Hassan Nasrallah. It was evident to the Iranians that Amal was not a suitable vehicle to carry the Islamic revolution into Lebanon. Khomeini was profoundly sympathetic to the Palestinian cause and lent support to PLO factions in Lebanon. But Amal’s relations with the Palestinians deteriorated steadily from 1979 on, clashes between the two erupting with increasing regularity and ferocity. Furthermore, Iran enjoyed warm relations with Colonel Moammar Qaddafi of Libya, whom Amal’s leadership continued to blame for Musa Sadr’s disappearance. The Iranians effectively ignored Amal’s entreaties to use their ties with Libya to discover Sadr’s fate.

  But Iran’s disregard for Amal did not translate into immediate financial and logistical support for the pro-Khomeini Islamist elements in Lebanon. For the first two years after the revolution, Khomeini and his Islamic radicals were locked in competition with the Iranian leftist revolutionaries for control of the republic. Then, starting in 1980, Iran was embroiled in a debilitating war with neighboring Iraq. Both priorities sidetracked Iran from mobilizing the state’s resources to promote the Islamic revolution in Lebanon. Sheikh Sobhi Tufayli, a gruff, dark-skinned cleric with piercing coal-black eyes from the Bekaa village of Brital, remembers that many discussions were held between Lebanese Islamists and the new leadership in Iran about the “ideas of Imam Khomeini on liberating Jerusalem from Lebanon.”

  “The only thing we lacked was financial support to lay the foundation of our resistance,” he says.

  Ariel Sharon’s Grand Plan

  In April 1979, Saad Haddad irrevocably split from the Lebanese state and confirmed his alliance with Israel by proclaiming his narrow border strip as “Independent Free Lebanon” and his militia as the “Army of Free Lebanon.” The pugnacious major marked the announcement by bombarding the UNIFIL headquarters in the coastal village of Naqoura, which actually lay inside Haddad’s area, using rockets, artillery, and heavy machine guns. Eight peacekeepers were wounded in the exchange and three UN helicopters damaged. The next day, the Lebanese government condemned Haddad as a traitor and officially dismissed him from the Lebanese army. Haddad and his Army of Free Lebanon militia were now wholly dependent on Israeli support.

  The AFL was still essentially a Christian militia, but some Israeli commanders believed that recruitment should be broadened to other communities, especially the Shia, now that the border “security belt” had expanded. There had been some attempts before the 1978 invasion to win over those Shia villages adjacent to the Christian enclaves. Six villages were approached by the Israelis in early 1978 with promises of jobs in Israel and protection from the PLO if the residents agreed to be linked to the IDF Northern Command headquarters by radio and telephones. All six villages declined the offer.12

  Further attempts to recruit Shias into Haddad’s militia followed the 1978 invasion. “We organized Ashoura celebrations for them and allowed them to come into Israel to work,” recalls Ephraim Sneh, the commander of the IDF’s Lebanon Liaison Unit before 1982. On one occasion, he arranged for five thousand Shias to enter Israel to pray at the shrine of Nabi Yusha, which had been a popular place of pilgrimage before 1948. “It was risky,” he says. “If just five of the five thousand had decided to stay in Israel and cause trouble, my head would have been chopped off.”

  In June 1981, the Likud government of Prime Minister Menachem Begin was reelected and Ariel Sharon was appointed defense minister. Sharon was a war hero in Israel, a barrel-chested warrior of the old school, a brilliant tactician who had played important roles in Israel’s earlier conflicts. But he was also compulsive and politically ambitious, a bulldozing character who brooked no dissension.

  A month after the Israeli election, the most serious fighting in years erupted between the Palestinians and Israel. The PLO’s restraint against repeated Israeli air strikes in the spring of 1981 finally ended in early July, when it launched a sustained and unprecedented rocket barrage against northern Israel. Thousands of Israeli civilians fled Kiryat Shemona and other towns in the north, the first time rocket fire from Lebanon had spurred such an exodus. The Israelis hit back by bombing PLO centers in the densely populated Fakhani district in Beirut, killing scores of civilians. But the Israelis had no answer for the Katyusha rocket barrages, and after two weeks of fighting, they agreed to a U.S.-brokered cease-fire deal.

  With the guns on both sides falling silent, Sharon concluded that the only solution to the Katyusha problem was to drive the PLO out of Lebanon altogether. In the following months, he devised a grand scheme that he believed not only would end the PLO scourge but would change the very shape of the region. Israel would mount an all-out invasion of Lebanon to oust the PLO and remove Syrian forces. The IDF would link up with its Christian militia allies, and Bashir Gemayel, the head of the Kataeb, the most powerful faction, would be installed as Lebanese president. Israel and Lebanon would then sign a peace treaty, and all would be well.

  The full details of the plan Sharon kept to himself and his key lieutenants, but by the beginning of 1982 it was common knowledge that Israel was looking to stage a second, larger incursion into Lebanon. As the months passed, Ariel Sharon was like a tethered pit bull terrier straining at the leash and desperately looking for an excuse to launch his grand plan. But the Palestinians knew what was coming and ignored Israel’s repeated provocations in the spring of 1982, which included IDF troop surges in the Haddad enclave, jets flying over Syrian positions, and an air strike against PLO positions after an Israeli soldier was killed when he stepped on an old land mine in south Lebanon. Although an invasion was clearly imminent, the PLO was ill prepared to confront the Israelis. By 1982, the fighting strength of the PLO was around five thousand full-time Palestinian fighters and another eight or nine thousand part-timers and Lebanese volunteers marshaled into regular military structures from platoons to companies, battalions, and brigades.13 But most units were well below strength, the fighters insufficientl
y trained, poorly organized, and lacking a military doctrine to successfully make the switch from small-unit guerrilla tactics with which most cadres were familiar. Furthermore, the PLO failed to draw up contingency plans in which the semi-organized military structure could be broken down into autonomous guerrilla units to harass the Israeli supply lines and attack troops to the rear. Indeed, General Rafael Eitan, the IDF chief of staff in 1982, had expressed satisfaction at the sight of the PLO “going regular,” knowing that it would be easier to smash them as a weak conventional force than as bands of lightly armed and mobile guerrillas.14

  In the end, the catalyst for the invasion did not occur along the Lebanon-Israel border, nor indeed in the Middle East, but four thousand miles away, in London. On June 3, Shlomo Argov, the Israeli ambassador, was shot and badly wounded by members of the radical Revolutionary Fatah Council of Abu Nidal, a sworn enemy of Yasser Arafat.

  Although the assassination attempt was clearly the act of an agent provocateur, Israel launched retaliatory air raids against PLO offices and facilities in Beirut, killing more than two hundred people. General Eitan, who had recommended the option of air strikes to the Israeli cabinet, knew that the PLO had standing orders to automatically shell settlements in northern Israel in response to raids on its headquarters in Beirut, a fact he omitted to mention to the ministers.15

  As Eitan expected, two hours after the air raids, the Palestinians opened fire on northern Israel for the first time since the July 1981 cease-fire.