Warriors of God

by Nicholas Blanford

  Harb’s mosque and husseiniyah in Jibsheet, decorated with pictures of Khomeini and black flags and banners inscribed with Koranic quotations, became a hub of resistance activities. He refused to meet Israeli officers who asked to see him and famously declared that shaking hands with the enemy was an act of collaboration, while rebuffing them was an act of resistance. With his thick beard and strong dark eyebrows, white turban and gray cloak, Harb was a popular figure in Jibsheet and the surrounding villages. On March 18, 1983, Harb was arrested by the Israelis shortly before he was due to deliver a fatwa in his Friday sermon forbidding all contact with the Israeli occupiers. The Israelis had hoped to forestall the fatwa, but all they did was stir up a hornet’s nest of protest. For the next two weeks, strikes and demonstrations were held and roads repeatedly blocked with burning tires. The Israelis gave in, and in early April, Harb returned to Jibsheet, where he unabashedly continued to encourage resistance. A few months later, he was summoned to Tehran, where he told the Iranians that his home in Lebanon was “the embassy of the Islamic Republic of Iran.” Having impressed the Iranians with his commitment, Harb returned to Jibsheet to continue his mobilization efforts, knowing that he was unlikely to live much longer. Indeed, he frequently forecast his own death to his followers, predicting that the Israelis would “shed my blood.”

  The “Shia Genie”

  Opposition against the Israelis had been building for months in south Lebanon, but the catalyst that turned hostility into rebellion came on October 16, 1983, during the Ashoura commemoration marking the martyrdom of Imam Hussein. As many as sixty thousand Shias had converged upon the southern market town of Nabatiyah for the ceremony when an Israeli patrol of jeeps and trucks made the mistake of barging through the throng. The Israeli soldiers probably had no idea of the significance of their blunder, although the patrol commander had been warned by his superiors to stay away from the town that day. But the enraged celebrants saw the Israeli intrusion on their holiest of days as sacrilege and reacted with fury. The crowd mobbed the vehicles and threw stones. Shots were fired at the patrol, and someone tossed a hand grenade at a jeep, the explosion setting it alight. The frightened Israelis opened fire on the crowd, killing one man and wounding up to ten.

  IDF commanders realized immediately the seriousness of the incident and arrested the patrol commander. But the gesture was undermined when the next day Haddad’s militiamen stormed Nabatiyah and conducted house-to-house searches for those who had attacked the Israeli convoy. The Shia clerics came off the fence and issued calls for confrontation and fatwas forbidding cooperation with the Israelis. The Shia recruits to the Israeli-controlled National Guard deserted and the militia collapsed.

  Worse was to follow for the Israelis. On November 4, a green Chevrolet truck crashed through the main gate of an IDF headquarters housed in a school building on the coastal road south of Tyre. The Israeli guards fired a few shots, at least one round hitting the youthful-looking driver, but the truck continued moving and had almost reached the main building when it exploded. The blast, caused by an estimated 440 pounds of explosive, demolished the building, killing twenty-nine Israelis, mainly border security guards, as well as thirty-two Lebanese and Palestinian detainees.

  The deadly attack not only echoed that of Ahmad Qassir against the previous IDF headquarters in Tyre almost a year before, but also mirrored a devastating simultaneous suicide truck bombing less than two weeks earlier against the U.S. marine barracks at Beirut airport and the French paratroop headquarters in southern Beirut on October 23 that killed 241 American servicemen and 58 French soldiers. The marine casualties were the highest in a single day for the corps since Iwo Jima in World War II. Once again, the mysterious Islamic Jihad claimed responsibility for both attacks as well as the latest bombing of the Tyre headquarters.

  Hezbollah has always officially denied involvement in the bombing of the U.S. marine barracks and French paratroop headquarters, although its leaders publicly supported the attacks at the time. Hezbollah later described them as the “first punishment” of “our people” against the “imams of infidelity of America, France and Israel.”5

  Nearly a quarter of a century later, Tufayli, now no longer a member of the party he helped to found, admitted to me that Hezbollah was responsible for the U.S. marine barracks bombing.

  “The marines were not civilians. I considered the Americans as an occupying force and I fought them,” he said. While he remained “proud” of the attack, he confessed that he was not personally involved in the planning of the operation. “If I had anything to do with it I would say so because my relations with the Americans are not so good,” he said with a chuckle.

  When the United States declined to retaliate for the attack on the marines, Israel on November 16 struck the IRGC training camp at Janta, the first time it had staged an air raid against its new Shia foes. The jets swooped low over the valley dropping bombs for thirty minutes, killing nearly three dozen Hezbollah recruits and Iranian instructors, among them the youthful-looking Farhan Ali Ismael, who is buried in the “martyrs’ cemetery” in nearby Brital.

  For the Israelis, there was no escaping the fact that they had, as Yitzhak Rabin later put it, “let the Shia genie out of the bottle.” Israel could have taken advantage of the early goodwill shown by the Shias of southern Lebanon to cultivate an amicable and mutually beneficial cross-border relationship. Instead, through a combination of ignorance, negligence, recklessness, and bad luck, Israel had created a ferocious and resolutely determined new enemy.

  The Israeli author of a study on the post-1982 Israeli experience in Lebanon wrote, “The quick change in the south of Lebanon from a relatively hospitable territory to an extremely hostile one was among the greatest failures of national intelligence estimates that Israel had ever known. No one, not even the most persistent opponents of the war, had ever raised this possibility.”6

  The Military Genius

  After the Nabatiyah incident, Amal could no longer ignore the sentiment of its constituents in the south, and at last they came off the fence and endorsed a campaign of active resistance. In the months ahead, the focus of the Amal resistance campaign centered on Marakeh and six other villages lying in the hills to the east of Tyre. Known as the “arc of resistance” or the “seven villages resistance,” it was led by the unlikely figure of Mohammed Saad, an electronics teacher at the Jabal Amil Institute in Bourj Shemali and a prominent activist within the local Amal movement. With his narrow shoulders and skinny “childlike” physique, Saad hardly looked the part of an influential underground military leader. His thick mane of wavy black hair, thin mustache, and scraggly tuft of beard on his lower chin gave him the appearance of an American beat poet from the early 1960s instead of a charismatic guerrilla commander—Bob Dylan rather than Che Guevara.

  Although the Amal leadership had instructed the cadres not to confront the Israeli invasion, Saad and his comrades around Tyre were certain that an active resistance was only a matter of time, and they began making preparations. They shaved off their beards, destroyed any documentation linking them to Amal, and collected and hid any weapons left by the Palestinians.

  One of the main cell leaders in Tyre was Mohammed Zaghloul, then a lean, bespectacled twenty-nine-year-old who had joined Amal in 1978 and was close to Mohammed Saad. “Mohammed was very clever, a military genius, and he put the idea of resistance into people’s heads, convincing those who thought it was hopeless to fight the Israelis,” he recalls. “As young men at the time, we saw something special in him and we decided to follow him.”

  Saad’s key lieutenant in Marakeh was Khalil Jerardi, a charismatic theology teacher at the Jabal Amil Institute. As Saad became more involved in directing resistance attacks, he disappeared from public view, and it was Jerardi, with his languid eyes and his beard, which grew longer and more pointed as the resistance progressed, who became the public face of the Amal resistance.

  The first attacks consisted of roadside bombings and assassinations of
collaborators. The Israeli military headquarters in Tyre was constantly monitored for Lebanese collaborators entering and leaving. “They would follow the suspects on motorcycles from the Israeli headquarters and then put on a hood and shoot them in the head, often in public, in a café in Tyre in front of everybody. Then they would drop leaflets saying ‘This is the fate of all collaborators,’ ” recalls Hassan Siklawi, at the time a UNIFIL liaison officer with local Lebanese groups.

  Cut off initially from a regular supply of weapons, ammunition, and funds in Beirut, the Amal fighters were forced to improvise. They constructed homemade bombs by mixing fertilizer, sugar, and sawdust in kitchen sinks and packing the explosive with nails into empty powdered milk tins. Gas cylinders were also turned into crude incendiary bombs. The IEDs were usually planted along the coastal road near Tyre, the main route used by the IDF traveling between Israel and the front lines farther north. Initially, traditional lit fuses were used to detonate the charges. The resistance fighters learned through trial and error when to light the fuse so that the bomb would explode just as the IDF target passed by. Later they acquired electrical fuses and detonated the bombs using command wires that they would disguise by stringing them along telegraph pylons beside real telephone cables.

  Israeli casualties began to increase in tandem with the rising rate of attacks. IDF bulldozers destroyed stone or cinder block walls along the coastal road and uprooted orange and lemon trees and banana groves to deprive the resistance men of cover to launch attacks. The Israelis attempted without success to revive anti-Palestinian feeling among the Shias by spreading rumors that Musa Sadr had been discovered as a prisoner of the PLO in the Rashidiyah Palestinian refugee camp south of Tyre. Israeli-allied militiamen or plainclothes Israeli security personnel were sent into villages to smash down front doors, search homes, and arrest “suspects,” who could face interrogation in the IDF intelligence headquarters in Tyre or incarceration in the Ansar prison camp.

  Looking for Mohammed Saad

  To evade capture, the Amal men dug small chambers and tunnels beneath their homes with disguised entrances. Other hiding places included fake water tanks that were only half filled with water, the other half providing space for a man to hide. They made use of the natural caves that riddled the limestone valleys around the villages, employing children to cover the entrances with bushes and twigs. Resistance became a community effort. When the Israelis approached a village, the warning would be relayed from the loudspeaker attached to the minaret of the mosque or husseiniyah, alerting the residents. Women and children would gather in the street or clamber on the roofs of buildings to hurl stones and pans of boiling oil at the Israeli soldiers while the men in the village hurried to their hideouts.

  On one occasion, the IDF learned that Mohammed Saad was in Kfar Sir and surrounded the village with troops. Saad ran into a house and without saying a word to the startled family climbed into a pair of pajamas he saw lying on a bed. When Israeli soldiers banged at the front door, Saad himself opened it. The soldiers said they were looking for Mohammed Saad. Saad turned to the family inside and said, “Mother, they’re looking for someone called Mohammed Saad.”

  “Never heard of him,” the mother replied, and the soldiers left.

  The Amal resistance lived by secrecy and caution. Messages were sent between separate cells in simple yet inventive ways. One method was to write a message or press statement on cigarette papers, which the courier would crumple and leave in the ashtray of his car until he reached his destination. Sometimes two resistance men would identify themselves to each other by matching the two halves of a torn Lebanese one-lira note.

  They developed ingenious methods of smuggling weapons and ammunition into the occupied area. One morning, Sheikh Najib Sweidan, the Shia mufti of Tyre, found a written death threat on his doorstep. The worried cleric met with Saad and showed him the letter. Saad told Sweidan that he must be careful and should no longer travel to Beirut alone in case he was ambushed along the way. A few days later, Sweidan contacted Saad and told him that he needed to go to Beirut the next day. Saad told the mufti that he would send a chauffeur to his home. The chauffeur turned out to be Saad himself, and he drove Sweidan to the capital and back again. They repeated the trips several times, although unknown to the mufti, Saad was packing the car with weapons and ammunition in Beirut before returning to Tyre. Saad calculated that the Israelis would never inspect too thoroughly the vehicle of such a prominent religious figure. However, one day Saad learned that the Israelis had grown suspicious of Sweidan and guessed that his vehicle might be carrying arms to the resistance in Tyre. On the next trip, Sweidan traveled alone to Beirut while Saad stayed at home. On the return journey, the infuriated mufti had his car searched at every IDF checkpoint. The Israelis, finding no weapons, allowed the fuming Sweidan to proceed. Later, when the mufti complained to Saad about his treatment at the hands of the Israelis, Saad broke into laughter and confessed that he had been using the mufti’s car all along to smuggle weapons. What’s more, he told the stunned cleric, it was Saad who had written the death threat that encouraged Sweidan to seek the protection of the wily resistance commander in the first place.

  “Martyrdom Operations”

  By the first half of 1983, Hezbollah’s influence was seeping from the scattered villages in the plain of the northern Bekaa into the cramped slums of Beirut’s southern suburbs, where the new party intended to consolidate a presence before projecting its influence more deeply into the south. The impoverished district was a melting pot of Shia families and clans from south Lebanon and the Bekaa, and Hezbollah faced little difficulty in attracting a loyal support base.

  Slowly, Hezbollah’s presence began to grow in the southern villages. Residents of Amal-dominated villages noticed the arrival of severe-looking young men with neatly trimmed pointed beards wearing long-sleeved shirts who constantly fingered prayer beads and spent most of their time in local mosques deep in prayer. The local Amal leadership paid the new Hezbollah arrivals little heed initially, thinking that all they were interested in was prayer and that they could not possibly pose a challenge to the well-entrenched movement.

  With resistance activity heating up, the Israelis struck back. On the evening of February 16, 1984, Sheikh Ragheb Harb was gunned down by three Lebanese collaborators as he walked to his home in Jibsheet, fulfilling the cleric’s prediction that he would die at the hands of the Israelis. His murder sparked a wave of demonstrations and strikes in south Lebanon and southern Beirut.

  It also hastened the emergence of a new tactic of warfare into the south Lebanon theater. On April 12, 1984, Ali Safieddine drove his explosives-laden car between two Israeli armored personnel carriers near Deir Qanoun and blew himself up, killing six soldiers. Safieddine was Hezbollah’s first official suicide bomber (Ahmad Qassir had not yet been identified as the perpetrator of the 1982 IDF headquarters blast), and his immolation was the organization’s revenge for Harb’s assassination.

  Other bombers followed, and not only from Shia groups such as Amal and Hezbollah. Strikingly, the majority of suicide attacks against the Israelis and their Lebanese militia allies in the mid-1980s were carried out not by religious Shia militants drawing upon the sect’s tradition of martyrdom, but by volunteers from secular political parties, notably the Syrian Social Nationalist Party (SSNP), which accounted for more suicide bombings in the 1980s than any other group. Indeed, during the peak of the suicide bombing phenomenon in 1985, of the nineteen attacks recorded, only one was by Hezbollah.7

  Although the phenomenon of suicide bombing captured international headlines and underlined the determination of the Lebanese to rid their country of the Israelis, as a military tactic the results were mixed. Other than the carefully planned Hezbollah spectaculars against the IDF headquarters in 1982 and 1983, which accounted for a total of 136 fatalities, 104 of them Israelis, most attacks killed only a handful of soldiers or militiamen. Fifteen of the thirty-three attacks, including Amal’s two operations, failed
to kill anybody other than the bomber. As the number of suicide bombings increased, the tactic became a source of competition between the different factions, especially among the secular parties. For the SSNP and the Baathists in particular, suicide bombings were acts of prestige and patriotism, powerful declarations of commitment to the cause of liberating Lebanon. The results of the attacks in terms of enemy casualties were less important than the acts themselves and the propaganda value they accrued.

  Hezbollah could justify sending suicide bombers against Israeli targets on religious grounds, as well as for “nationalist” reasons of liberating occupied territory, but it used the tactic sparingly, and generally each operation was planned with more care than those of its secular counterparts. Martyrdom for the sake of martyrdom was deemed wasteful and possibly haram, or forbidden by Islamic convention. Hezbollah, Nasrallah explained in 1996, does not carry out “indiscriminate martyrdom operations.” Although he admitted coming under pressure every day from young men eager to carry out suicide missions that he could easily have authorized, he said, “If the operation is not productive and effective, and [doesn’t] cause the enemy to bleed, we cannot legally, religiously, morally, or humanely justify giving an explosive device to our brothers and telling them, ‘Go and become martyrs, no matter how’!”8

  Suicide bombings began to tail off in the latter half of the 1980s as the influence of the secular groups began to wane and Hezbollah came to dominate the resistance.