Warriors of God

by Nicholas Blanford

  Ariel Sharon at last had his excuse for war.

  TWO

  The “Shia Genie”

  We are prepared to put our facilities and necessary training at the disposal of all the Muslims who are prepared to fight against the Zionist regime.

  —ALI KHAMENEI,

  President of Iran, June 1982

  JUNE 6, 1982

  DAMASCUS, Syria—Sheikh Sobhi Tufayli was told the news while waiting at Damascus airport for a flight to Tehran: Israel was bombing PLO bases in Beirut and south Lebanon. Columns of Israeli troops and tanks were massed along the border, and it was evident that the long-anticipated invasion of Lebanon was about to begin. Tufayli and his young colleague, Sheikh Ragheb Harb, the imam of Jibsheet village in south Lebanon, were traveling to the Iranian capital to attend a conference of Islamic liberation movements. But Israel’s imminent invasion was bound to overshadow the event. Normally dour and severe, Tufayli felt a tremor of excitement as he contemplated what this would mean for the goal of building an Islamic resistance against Israel. Although Tufayli and other Lebanese Shia leaders had held many discussions with top Iranian officials about how to build an anti-Israel resistance, nothing concrete had emerged. But now, surely, with the Israelis poised to charge into Lebanon, it would change everything, Tufayli thought.1

  At nine o’clock that same Sunday morning, General William Callaghan, commander of UNIFIL, received a phone call from General Eitan, the IDF chief of staff, requesting an urgent meeting. The border was only a five-minute drive from Callaghan’s headquarters in Naqoura. The Irish general assumed the meeting was in connection with the impending invasion, which looked set to occur at any moment.

  The meeting with Eitan was brief, and once it was over, Callaghan, seething at the short notice given him by the Israelis, telephoned UNIFIL headquarters from Israel and said tersely, “Rubicon”—the peacekeepers’ code word that the invasion was on.

  The first tanks crossed the border at 10:00 A.M., entering Lebanon at five main points along the frontier. The UNIFIL troops were impotent in the face of Israel’s armored juggernaut. A unit of Dutch soldiers manning a checkpoint on the coast two miles north of Naqoura threw obstacles onto the road to block the advance. The lead tank, a British-built Centurion, struck the steel obstacles and was disabled, and the second Israeli tank lost a caterpillar track. After that, the six Dutch soldiers ran out of tank traps and stood by helplessly. One soldier fetched a camera and took pictures as the armored column rumbled past.

  In Naqoura, Timur Goksel, a Turkish UNIFIL press officer who had joined the peacekeeping force three years earlier, watched the seemingly endless armored vehicles trundle by. “They were facing so little opposition that they did not bother with a combat formation,” he recalled. “In Naqoura alone, we counted twelve hundred tanks and four thousand armored personnel carriers. God knows what else was pouring in. If a tank braked in Tyre, they were backed up all the way to Nahariya in Israel.”

  UNIFIL’s helplessness irked Yasser Arafat, who had forlornly hoped that the moral authority of the UN might slow the advance. “At least you could have shot in the air, like when our people approach you,” he later grumbled to a UN official.2 But the PLO had done itself few favors in its lack of adequate defensive preparations to confront an invasion that had been expected for months. The main roads were unmined and the bridges left intact, the latter contrary to the expectations of even Israeli military commanders. With many PLO commanders fleeing north, the fighters simply dropped their weapons, shed their uniforms, and tried to escape the approaching Israelis.

  The poor performance was redeemed somewhat by courageous individual stands. Among them were the handful of Palestinian defenders of Beaufort Castle who fought to the death against a unit of Golani Brigade commandos, the last one firing his machine gun from a concrete bunker until it was destroyed by a hurled satchel of explosives.

  The stiffest defense mounted in south Lebanon was by the militias guarding the Palestinian refugee camps. The Palestinians, including children as young as thirteen or fourteen, blocked the narrow alleyways and fought the Israelis at close range with rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs). Even with air raids, it still took four days to subdue the Tyre camps. The fighting in the larger refugee camp of Ain al-Hilweh, on the outskirts of Sidon, was even fiercer. The Israelis razed the camp with artillery, air strikes, and tank fire after failing to persuade the residents to leave by dropping leaflets and broadcasting warnings over mosque loudspeakers.

  While the Palestinians in the camps greeted the Israeli invaders with RPGs and grenades, the Lebanese Shias of the south, for the most part, welcomed them with handfuls of thrown rice. For the Shia population, the Israelis were liberators, driving the boorish and detested Palestinian gunmen from their villages and towns. Amal’s leadership in the south instructed the fighters not to resist the Israelis, and even ordered them to hand over their weapons if required.

  Syrian forces in the southern Bekaa Valley fought bravely against overwhelming odds. The Israeli Air Force first jammed and destroyed Syrian radar, then attacked the blinded surface-to-air missile (SAM) sites in the Bekaa. The Syrian Air Force was completely outmatched in the skies over southern Lebanon when some seventy Syrian MiGs took on about a hundred Israeli F-15s and F-16s, losing a total of sixty-four planes in two days’ fighting. With Syria’s air cover smashed, the IDF charged up the Bekaa Valley toward the Syrian positions. The Syrian ground forces fought stubbornly for every inch of ground gained by the IDF. An Israeli armored column was halted by Syrian tanks at the village of Sultan Yacoub and prevented from reaching the crucial Beirut–Damascus highway that bisected the Bekaa Valley.

  The Israelis also met with fierce and unexpected resistance at Khalde at the southern approach to Beirut. Here a mixed bag of Syrian soldiers, Syrian-backed Palestinian fighters, Lebanese militiamen, Amal militants, and Khomeini-inspired Shia radicals checked the Israeli armored column as it pushed up the coastal road. Among them were Imad Mughniyah and his friends, who tied strips of cloth around their foreheads in emulation of Iranian fighters battling Iraqi troops and rushed out of the southern suburbs to confront the advancing Israelis. They fought with suicidal abandon, blasting Israeli tanks with RPGs at point-blank range. Ahmad Hallaq, a fearsome, bearded giant of a man who fought with the Syrian-backed As-Saiqa Palestinian faction, even captured an Israeli Centurion tank and rode it in triumph back to his headquarters in the Shatila refugee camp.

  Meanwhile, in Tehran, Tufayli and Harb were busy arranging Iranian support for a new Shia resistance force to confront the Israelis. Even though Iran was focused on war with neighboring Iraq, its leaders recognized that the Israeli invasion of Lebanon was an opportunity to spread the Islamic revolution to the front lines of the Arab-Israeli conflict. It was an opportunity that had to be seized.

  “I met with certain leaders and they recognized the need for support. Khomeini was very realistic about this,” Tufayli recalls. “When the invasion happened it accelerated everything.”

  A military communiqué in Tehran said that Iranian troops and Revolutionary Guards were being dispatched to Lebanon “to engage in face-to-face battle against Israel, the primary enemy of Islam and the Muslims.” Two days into the invasion, an Iranian delegation comprising the defense minister and top army commanders was in Damascus discussing terms of military assistance with the Syrians.

  “To us, there is no difference between the fronts in the south of Iran [against Iraq] and in south Lebanon,” said Ali Khamenei, then president of Iran. “We are prepared to put our facilities and necessary training at the disposal of all the Muslims who are prepared to fight against the Zionist regime.”

  Preaching Religion

  Farhan Ali Ismael could have been no older than twenty when he died on November 16, 1983. The Iranian soldier’s youthful face gazes with a wide-eyed and slightly nervous expression from a black-and-white photograph tucked into a small glass box filled with colorful plastic and silk flowers that sits on a stan
d above the gray marble slab marking his grave. Ismael is one of eight Iranian Revolutionary Guards buried in the “martyrs’ cemetery” in a corner of Brital, a dusty, disheveled village scattered along either side of a shallow stream running down the rugged, barren mountains on the eastern flank of the Bekaa Valley. There are no Iranian soldiers stationed in Brital today, but it was here and in the surrounding Shia villages in 1982 that the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) began the process of mobilization, recruitment, religious education, and military training that provided the foundation for the emergence of Hezbollah.

  The first Iranians to arrive in Syria in the wake of the Israeli invasion consisted of some five thousand Iranian Revolutionary Guards and religious officers who were expecting to deploy quickly into Lebanon and confront the IDF advance up the southern Bekaa Valley. But by the time they landed at Damascus airport, the fighting between the IDF and Syrian forces in the Bekaa Valley was over. The Israelis had halted a few miles south of the key Beirut–Damascus highway, well short of the Bekaa’s Shia areas farther north. Assad had no desire to allow the IRGC into Lebanon to reignite a war that had proved so costly to Syria in equipment and manpower and could yet threaten his regime. But he did agree to a military accord with Tehran in which the Iranians would help build a Lebanese resistance force to do the fighting instead. In exchange for this Iranian toehold on Lebanese soil, Tehran agreed to supply Syria with 9 million tons of free oil a year.

  Most of the Revolutionary Guards returned to Iran, but around fifteen hundred elements, mainly drawn from the IRGC’s Office of the Islamic Liberation Movements, stayed behind to establish a base of operations in Syria on the outskirts of the resort town of Zabadani on the border with Lebanon.

  The physical link between the new IRGC base at Zabadani and the nearest Shia villages in the Bekaa was an old smuggler’s track that snaked through a narrow valley cutting through barren 4,500-foot-high mountains. The track terminated at the hamlet of Janta, a cluster of small stone houses beside a river, lined with poplar and walnut trees, that gushed and splashed through a steep valley of towering limestone crags before emerging into the Bekaa plain.

  The first few hundred Revolutionary Guards used this track to move into the Bekaa, renting houses in Baalbek and then visiting the surrounding villages. They adopted a low-key and convivial approach. The IRGC wore khaki military uniforms, but they were unarmed. The mission initially was to raise the religious consciousness of the local people and to spread the teachings of Khomeini in preparation for resistance against Israel.

  Among the Iranians arriving in the Bekaa was a diminutive engineer in his late twenties with narrow eyes, called Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The future president of the Islamic Republic was one of a group of Iranians who set up a camp beside a copse of spindly poplar trees in a shallow valley called Hawsh Bay near the village of Taraya. Local residents still remember Ahmadinejad with affection and not a little pride at his later public role.

  Before the civil war, Baalbek attracted coachloads of tourists who came to gape at the magnificent Roman temples beside the town and attend the world-renowned music festival each summer. But with the arrival of the Iranians, Baalbek and some of the nearby villages soon began to take on the trappings of a mini-Iran. Huge, eye-catching murals appeared on walls depicting Shia motifs and images—Imam Hussein in the blood-splattered sands of Karbala; Khomeini gazing with beetle-browed intensity at the Al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem, Islam’s third holiest site. Iranian flags fluttered alongside banners hanging from electricity pylons or suspended across roads exhorting “Death to America.” The main square in Baalbek was renamed after Khomeini. Women began to wear the full-length black chador. Alcohol was removed from the shelves in shops and hotels. IRGC clerics taught classes on the Koran and Khomeini’s theories on Islam. Others visited husseiniyahs in villages to give lectures on the Iranian revolution and show films of the Iran-Iraq war.

  It was a slow process, but the Iranians were methodical and patient.

  “Most people were happy to see them, but others were suspicious,” recalls Hussein Hamiyah, then a university student from the Bekaa village of Taraya. “Some thought that the Iranians should have fought the Israelis and couldn’t understand why they were wasting their time preaching religion to us.”

  The Iranian campaign to persuade and recruit the Shias was aided by a split within the ranks of Amal a week into the Israeli invasion when Nabih Berri, the movement’s leader, agreed to join a committee of “national salvation” under the leadership of President Elias Sarkis. Also included in the committee was Bashir Gemayel, leader of the Christian Kataeb militia, whom Ariel Sharon had earmarked as the next president of Lebanon. The Islamists within Amal were outraged that Berri would sit at the same table as an ally of Israel. Hussein Mussawi, the deputy leader of Amal, angrily denounced Berri as a collaborator and moved to the Bekaa with his followers to establish a new faction called Islamic Amal. In Tehran, Sayyed Ibrahim al-Amine, Amal’s representative to the Iranian capital, publicly announced his split from the movement. Another defector from Amal was Hassan Nasrallah.

  Gradually, shepherded by the IRGC, a loose coalition began to emerge in the Bekaa consisting of the Amal defectors, Mussawi’s Islamic Amal, members of the Lebanese Union of Muslim Students, and adherents of the Lebanese Dawa party, as well as numerous tiny institutes and study groups that comprised the radical Shia milieu in Lebanon. Although they lacked an organizational framework, they shared common ideas and outlooks. The ranks were also augmented with those Shias who had fought with Palestinian factions and were looking for a new paymaster after the bulk of the PLO evacuated from Beirut at the end of August. Among them was Imad Mughniyah, who recognized that the new group coalescing in the Bekaa under Iranian stewardship was the right vehicle for him and his comrades. Mughniyah exploited his connections with Fatah and Anis Naqqash’s Arab Lebanese Movement to persuade fresh recruits to join the new Iranian-directed resistance in the Bekaa.

  The leaders were Lebanese clerics, mainly from the Bekaa, such as Sheikh Sobhi Tufayli, Sayyed Abbas Mussawi, and Sheikh Mohammed Yazbek, all of whom had studied in Najaf under Sayyed Mohammed Baqr as-Sadr. They expressed commitment to Khomeini’s leadership and sought to build an organization rooted in Islam that looked beyond Lebanon’s parochial purview and was dedicated to the struggle against Israel.

  “We wanted our own organization, which would be more pan-Islamic and supportive of the Palestinians [than Amal],” Tufayli recalls. “We wanted to lay the foundations of an institution that would be independent and not have specific influences on the Lebanese scene. We wanted it to be completely dependent on Islamic law and not influenced by nationalist ideologies. During that period there were many discussions and details worked out.”

  The result was the “Manifesto of the Nine,” a synthesis of the new organization’s ideas and goals. The three main tenets of the manifesto were, first, the recognition of Islam as the “comprehensive, complete and appropriate program for a better life” that would provide the “intellectual, religious, ideological and practical foundation” of the new organization; second, that resistance against Israel was the “ultimate confrontation priority,” requiring the creation of a “jihad structure”; and third, recognition of the “legitimate leadership” of the wali al-faqih, whose “commands and proscriptions are enforceable.”3 Nine delegates were selected to represent the different elements within the new movement—three from the Bekaa, three from Islamic Amal, and three representing the other factions.

  The new movement initially went unnamed, and it was not until the beginning of 1984 that the leadership settled on a quotation from the Koran to provide the name of the new organization: “Verily, the party of God shall be victorious.”

  “ ‘Hezbollah’ is a Koranic term, and we used to see Iranian leaders address crowds, saying ‘O Hezbollah,’ and we chose that phrase as our new name,” Tufayli recalls.

  The nascent organization made its first move on November 21, 1982, the
eve of Lebanon’s independence day, when units of Mussawi’s Islamic Amal stormed Baalbek, seizing the municipal offices and the Sheikh Abdullah army barracks on a hill overlooking the town. The Lebanese troops in the barracks were expelled from Baalbek along a main road lined with armed and jeering Shia militants. The Sheikh Abdullah barracks became the new Bekaa headquarters for the Revolutionary Guards.

  Amal’s leadership watched with unease as the Revolutionary Guards mobilized the Shias of the Bekaa Valley. Although Amal dominated the south, it was evident that the movement was beginning to lose traction in the Bekaa.

  “We tried talking to the Iranians, saying that we didn’t want tensions,” recalls Aql Hamiyah, by 1982 a top military commander in Amal. “Hezbollah became more stubborn in Baalbek and the villages around Baalbek. The Iranians told us that we could resist together, but on the ground things were going differently. The Iranians had their own agenda. The Iranians were working for something new.”

  “We Called Ourselves Al-Shabab al-Aamel”

  In south Lebanon, meanwhile, the Israeli troops were enjoying a halcyon existence, having been seduced by the handfuls of thrown rice and the cheers that had greeted their armored columns into believing that the Shias cared only about the departure of the detested Palestinians and had no objection to the Israelis’ filling the vacuum. In those early weeks of the occupation, Israeli troops frequented local shops, lounged in the sun atop armored vehicles, and visited movie theaters. Road signs in Hebrew were erected. Coachloads of Israeli tourists visited the Roman ruins in Tyre and looked for bargains in the Sidon souks. Israel’s national flag carrier, El Al, opened an office in Sidon and in its first two weeks sold 350 tickets to Lebanese, Egyptians, Palestinians, Saudis, foreigners, and others.4