Warriors of God

by Nicholas Blanford

  The Iron Fist

  By late 1984, Israel was in deep trouble in Lebanon. The U.S. marines had pulled out of Lebanon that February after west Beirut fell to the militias and the Lebanese army disintegrated for the second time in eight years. That same month, Saad Haddad, Israel’s top ally in south Lebanon, died after a battle with cancer. Haddad could be petulant and bullheaded, but he had remained a dependable ally of Israel for eight years, and his loss was keenly felt by the IDF. Appointed in his place was Antoine Lahd, a retired brigadier general in the Lebanese army, who was not from the south and lacked the loyal base of support that the major from Marjayoun had built. Then Amine Gemayel, the Lebanese president, formally abrogated the ill-fated May 17 peace agreement with Israel under Syrian pressure.

  The Israeli government also had to contend with a heated domestic debate over what was proving a highly controversial war. Menachem Begin was an early political casualty. His spirit crushed by the mounting casualty toll and domestic criticism of the war, Begin became a near-total recluse in his Jerusalem home before resigning from the premiership in September 1983.

  Even IDF officers and soldiers were torn between those who supported their presence in Lebanon and those who just wanted to go home. This was Israel’s first full war of choice in its four decades of existence, and many soldiers were deeply unhappy at having to risk their lives patrolling the roads of south Lebanon for what they considered an immoral and unsuccessful policy. Nearly 150 soldiers had been punished for refusing to serve in Lebanon. And each soldier killed by a roadside bomb or shot dead in an ambush by elusive Lebanese militants further sapped morale. Nervous Israeli soldiers conducted reconnaissance-by-fire, blasting away with machine guns mounted on armored personnel carriers into the banana groves and orange orchards flanking the roads they patrolled.

  “You see the change first of all in the eyes of the soldiers,” commented Zeev Schiff, the military correspondent for Israel’s Haaretz newspaper, in comparing the deterioration of the IDF in Lebanon over an eighteen-month period from summer 1983 to early 1985. “It’s a look that reminded me of the look in the eyes of the American soldiers I saw in the final stages of Vietnam. It is the look of soldiers and officers who know that their chances of winning in Lebanon are less than zero. In Lebanon you can see an army that has experienced firsthand how military might is rendered impotent.”9

  On January 14, 1985, Israeli announced a three-stage plan for a unilateral pullout from Lebanon. The plan was to withdraw to the old “Haddad enclave” along the border that had existed between 1978 and 1982. The strip would be patrolled by the Israeli-allied militia under the command of Antoine Lahd. Lahd’s Army of Free Lebanon was renamed the South Lebanon Army (SLA) and reorganized along conventional military lines with brigades and battalions. The Israelis hoped to recruit some five thousand soldiers to the SLA, but they were unable to coerce or dragoon sufficient numbers, and the total strength of the militia never exceeded half that figure.

  During the first phase of the withdrawal between January 15 and February 16, the IDF adopted a “velvet glove” approach, concentrating on dismantling its military infrastructure and trucking it southward. The Israelis seemed to hope that the declaration that it was leaving and the visible activity of the withdrawal from Sidon would persuade Amal, if not Hezbollah, to discontinue its attacks. But Amal echoed the official Lebanese stand, which was to demand a total Israeli troop withdrawal from Lebanese territory and the dismantling of the SLA. If the SLA was to remain in control of a security belt along the border, then Israel would still be considered an occupying force. The IDF had faced around fifty attacks a month in 1984, but in the first two months of 1985 the rate nearly doubled. Among the fatalities were two senior officers, a colonel, and a major, killed in separate attacks.

  In response, the IDF implemented a new policy at the end of the first phase of withdrawal, exchanging the velvet glove for the iron fist. Movement in the occupied area was severely restricted with the imposition of a dusk-to-dawn curfew. Motorists were required to carry at least one passenger—a measure to curb suicide bombers, on the assumption that it was harder to find two people willing to blow themselves up at the same time. Motorcycles were banned, and parking was forbidden along main roads. The crossing points into the Israeli-occupied area were sealed, preventing the exchange of goods from Beirut and agricultural produce from the south. Prices of basic commodities steadily climbed in the occupation zone.

  The crackdown was marked by a series of punitive raids against villages. The pattern was repeated throughout the zone: A mechanized battalion would surround and cordon off the targeted village, blocking all approach roads. Troops accompanied by sniffer dogs and plainclothes Shin Bet (Israeli Security Agency) officers would round up all males between the ages of fourteen and seventy and hold them for interrogations, while houses were searched for militants and weapons. The homes of suspected resistance fighters were bulldozed, and there were repeated incidents of deliberate vandalism. Troops took dogs into mosques and husseiniyahs knowing that it was a grave insult to Muslims. Copies of the Koran were torn up and the pages scattered on the ground for the dogs to walk over. Sacks of lentils, rice, and wheat were split open and mixed together, making the contents inedible.

  Israeli troops made use of civilians as “human shields” to protect them when passing through hostile villages. On one occasion, the Israelis tied a young man to the front of an armored personnel carrier as they drove through Tyre. The Israelis denied the incident, but a photograph was taken showing the unfortunate man strapped to the APC.

  Dozens of men were handcuffed, blindfolded, and taken away during the raids. Some were shot, their bodies left in the rubble of bulldozed homes or found later lying on the side of the road, victims of executions, according to the villagers. At least fifteen Lebanese were killed in the raids, all but one “shot while trying to escape,” according to the Israelis.10 In UNIFIL’s area of operations, more than 773 Shias were detained and forty-nine houses were bulldozed.11 French UNIFIL troops often attempted to block the IDF bulldozers from demolishing homes and made sure that at least they were present when the raids were conducted. Inevitably, tempers frayed, and after scuffles broke out in one village between French and IDF soldiers, Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli defense minister, castigated the peacekeepers as “bastards.”

  It must have been evident to the IDF that its repressive “iron fist” measures would not crush the resistance but instead only harden its resolve and sow greater hatred for the Israeli occupiers among the Shia population of the south. Indeed, the gratuitous destruction, vandalism, and brutality meted out by the Israeli troops reflected their fear, resentment, and frustration. It was a cathartic lashing out against their unseen tormentors, the ghosts that flitted from wadi to wadi, orchard to orchard, silently plucking the lives of Israeli soldiers before disappearing once again.

  On March 2, Marakeh became the target of the largest raid yet. As usual, Mohammed Saad, Khalil Jerardi, and the others slipped away to their hiding places when the Israeli armored column was spotted grinding up the hill toward the village. Around 800 IDF troops and Shin Bet agents took part in the operation backed by 50 armored vehicles and bulldozers. One man was shot while “trying to escape.” Some 350 men were rounded up and questioned in the village school, with 17 of them taken away. The husseiniyah in the center of the village was ransacked, the troops climbing the outside staircase to search the second-floor offices where Saad and his lieutenants often met to plot their operations.

  Two days later, Saad, Jerardi, and several other resistance figures met in a small back office on the first floor of the husseiniyah. The building had been thoroughly searched for explosives following the Israeli raid on the village, but nothing had been found. Unknown to the resistance commanders meeting in the first-floor office, however, their arrival at the husseiniyah had been noted by a collaborator who had been keeping watch on the building from the balcony of his home about a hundred yards away. When he saw the resi
stance leaders climbing the outside staircase of the husseiniyah, he raised a walkie-talkie to his mouth and quietly informed the Israelis.

  Jerardi was sitting on the edge of the desk and speaking to the men assembled in the office. Saad was leaning against the open doorway and had been listening quietly when he suddenly interrupted his friend.

  “Something is wrong,” Saad told them. “We should leave immediately.”

  But the building was searched. It’s safe, he was told.

  “No, no,” Saad insisted. “We need to leave right now.”12

  Just then, the twenty-five-pound bomb hidden beneath the desk on which Jerardi was sitting exploded, destroying the office and most of the second floor. It took several hours for the villagers and French UNIFIL soldiers to dig the casualties from the rubble. Saad was found first and rushed to the UNIFIL hospital in Naqoura while Jerardi was still lying under the rubble. But the two leaders were dead, along with ten other people, the biggest blow suffered by the Amal-led resistance of the “seven villages” since it began in 1982.

  Israel denied involvement in the bombing; Uri Lubrani, Israel’s Lebanon coordinator, claimed that it was the result of rising tensions between Amal and Hezbollah. But the Lebanese had no doubt that Israel was responsible. The collaborator who alerted the Israelis to the arrival of Saad and Jerardi at the husseiniyah was subsequently arrested by Amal and executed, his family expelled from Marakeh. Sheikh Mahdi Shamseddine, the deputy head of the Higher Shia Council, called for a “relentless jihad” against Israel as long as Israeli troops remained on Lebanese soil.

  The Open Letter

  With the death of Saad and Jerardi, Amal’s contribution to the resistance against the Israeli occupation began to decline. Even before the Israelis completed the pullback to their new occupied belt along the border in June 1985, Amal, acting on the orders of Syria, had become embroiled in a savage war against Yasser Arafat’s Fatah movement in the Palestinian refugee camps of Beirut. The Syrians wanted to smash Arafat’s influence in the camps of Beirut and the south once and for all, and they used Amal as their proxy to implement the policy. The “war of the camps” ran for three years before Arafat’s men were finally defeated. But the conflict inflicted a costly toll on Amal’s cadres, with some of its top commanders and combatants killed fighting the Palestinians. The “war of the camps” diverted Amal’s attention from the continuing resistance against the Israelis and SLA in south Lebanon, which, along with the loss of charismatic leaders like Mohammed Saad, provided a point of entry for Hezbollah’s influence to seep farther south and begin the long process of supplanting Amal as the dominant Shia force in the area.

  A foretaste of Hezbollah’s determination to expand its influence came on February 18, 1985, two days after the last Israeli troops pulled out of Sidon, when thousands of armed Hezbollah men drove from the southern suburbs of Beirut to hold a rally in the newly liberated port town.

  Chanting “Allah u-Akbar,” and carrying banners describing Amine Gemayel as the “Shah of Lebanon,” the Hezbollah men drove through the center of the town and ended the day by burning three bars and smashing bottles of whisky in the street.13

  The rally, the most public manifestation yet of Hezbollah’s growing strength, came as the party formally announced its existence in a press conference in a mosque in the southern Beirut quarter of Ouzai. The date chosen for Hezbollah’s unveiling, February 16, was the first anniversary of the assassination of Sheikh Ragheb Harb. Hezbollah used the occasion to publish its political charter, the “Open Letter Addressed by Hezbollah to the Downtrodden in Lebanon and in the World,” which articulated its political goals and ideology.

  The forty-eight-page document, read out by Sayyed Ibrahim al-Amine, Hezbollah’s spokesman, proclaimed that the party abided by the “orders of a single wise and just command” currently embodied by Khomeini, “the rightly-guided imam who combines the qualities of the total imam, who has detonated the Muslim’s revolution, and who is bringing about the glorious Islamic renaissance.”

  It listed its objectives in Lebanon as driving Israel out of the country “as a prelude to its final obliteration from existence and the liberation of the venerable Jerusalem from the talons of occupation”; an end to American and French influence in Lebanon; and allowing the Lebanese to select a system of government of their own choosing. The Open Letter stated Hezbollah’s preference for a system of Islamic rule in Lebanon, but carefully added that “we do not wish to impose Islam on anybody.… But we stress that we are convinced of Islam as a faith, system, thought, and rule, and we urge all to recognize it and to resort to its law.”

  This public introduction was Hezbollah’s first move toward formally establishing itself as an entity within the Lebanese political arena. Before 1985, Hezbollah had existed as a secret underground movement, lacking a formal structure and invariably referred to by the Western press as “shadowy.” By publishing its ideology, agenda, and ambitions in documentary format for the enlightenment of other Lebanese, both friends and foes, Hezbollah had conveyed its determination to remain an enduring presence in Lebanon, one that other factions and players could not ignore or dismiss as a fleeting aberration of the civil war.

  Nonetheless, the tone and language used in the document reflected a certain arrogance of conviction, like an angry, self-righteous teenager brashly challenging the status quo of the older generation. Even in the years ahead, as developments in Lebanon and the region compelled Hezbollah to adopt greater pragmatism in pursuing its agenda, the fundamental aspirations set forth in the Open Letter—resistance against Israel, the destruction of the Jewish state, and the desire for an Islamic state in Lebanon—would remain the immutable ideological pillars upon which the party rested.

  Hezbollah had emerged from the stygian murk of war, and in time it would become renowned for its martial exploits against Israeli troops occupying south Lebanon. But in those early years, Hezbollah’s identity was irredeemably linked in the public mind to attacks against Western targets in Lebanon, particularly the kidnapping of foreigners.

  Hezbollah’s leaders have always denied involvement in any of the kidnappings of nearly a hundred foreigners that plagued Lebanon from 1982 until the release of the last hostages a decade later. While it is possible that some of the militant Shia kidnappers were operating independently of Hezbollah as an organization (the kidnappers generally operated in clan and family networks to preserve security), it is stretching the bounds of credibility to accept that the party was totally uninvolved. Some of the hostages are known to have been incarcerated in Hezbollah-controlled areas, including Beirut’s southern suburbs and the Sheikh Abdullah barracks in Baalbek (which was a base for the IRGC at the time). The CIA believes that Nasrallah himself was involved in helping organize the kidnapping operations.14 The demands of the kidnappers reflected the political objectives of Hezbollah: to rid Lebanon of Westerners and Western influence and to secure the release of Lebanese Shia detainees held by Israel. When Israel closed the Ansar prison camp in April 1985 during its phased pullback to the border, it released 752 detainees but transferred the remaining 1,167 to a new prison in Atlit in northern Israel.15 It also opened a new SLA-run prison in the old French mandate barracks in the border village of Khiam to replace the facility at Ansar. The detainees transferred to Israel apparently were intended as bargaining chips to secure information on missing Israeli servicemen in Lebanon. Instead, it provoked Hezbollah into hijacking TWA Flight 847 in June 1985 and demanding the release of the Lebanese prisoners from Atlit. Imad Mughniyah himself allegedly ran the hijacking operation, which later earned him a U.S. federal indictment. The crisis lasted ten tense days and ended with Israel’s agreeing to the staged release of 764 prisoners from Atlit over the following three months.

  “The Hostages Were a Big Treasure for Iran”

  The demands of the kidnappers in Beirut also reflected personal interests of some key figures linked to Hezbollah and Islamic Amal, namely, Imad Mughniyah and Hussein Mussawi. Mughn
iyah’s brother-in-law, Mustafa Badreddine, who traveled on a fake Lebanese passport identifying him as a Christian named Elias Saab, and a cousin of Mussawi were among seventeen Shia militants convicted by a court in Kuwait for a string of attacks in the emirate, including bombings of the U.S. and French embassies, in December 1983.

  French citizens were targeted for abduction in the mid-1980s in an attempt to secure the release of Anis Naqqash, Mughniyah’s Lebanese friend and instructor from the late 1970s. Naqqash was languishing in a French prison for killing a policeman in Paris in a bungled assassination attempt against Shapour Bakhtiar, a former Iranian prime minister under the Shah who was a leader of the anti-Khomeinist opposition.

  The responses of nations whose citizens were abducted in Lebanon varied from country to country. As part of the U.S. government’s clandestine efforts to build covert counterterrorist groups in Lebanon, the CIA helped train a special unit of the Lebanese Forces, the Christian militia then headed by Elie Hobeika, whose militiamen had carried out the massacre of Palestinians and Lebanese in the Sabra/Shatila refugee camps in September 1982. According to a former member of the unit, Hobeika recognized early on that the emerging Hezbollah would become a major power in Lebanon and began working with the Americans and French against the nascent Shia organization.

  The CIA also assembled and trained another unit, dubbed “Strike Force” and consisting of some fifty people drawn mainly from elite Lebanese army units. Trained by three or four CIA paramilitary operatives, Strike Force was created as a hostage rescue unit. But it never carried out any missions, despite obtaining actionable intelligence on at least one occasion on the location of several hostages.

  “The Americans wanted guarantees of the mission’s success and that none of the hostages would be killed,” recalls a former Lebanese intelligence officer involved with Strike Force. “It was impossible to give such guarantees, so nothing happened. The Americans got cold feet.”