Warriors of God

by Nicholas Blanford

  Building a community committed to an all-encompassing concept of resistance—resistance as a way of life—does not occur overnight. The resistance organization must inculcate this idea into the populace through the gentle arts of persuasion and emulation, immersing the community in a culture of resistance that begins in childhood and continues uninterrupted into young adulthood and beyond. The culture of resistance has been sustained through lectures, meetings, study groups, media propaganda—Hezbollah’s Al-Ahad weekly newspaper began publication in 1984, and two years later its Al-Nour radio station began broadcasting.

  The process of cultivating the “society of resistance” was intended as an enduring enterprise, one spanning generations, testifying to Hezbollah’s patience and willingness to forgo short-term benefits for long-term sustainability.

  “Becoming More Radical”

  The process of building the “society of resistance” has grown more intensive and sophisticated over the years as Hezbollah has gained influence and experience. Initially, however, its methods were crude and clumsy. The Hezbollah men from Beirut and the Bekaa who infiltrated the villages of the south imposed on the generally laid-back residents a stringent moral regimen. Alcohol was banished from shops and restaurants; card and board games, including the ubiquitous backgammon, were banned. Women were required to wear headscarves, and the playing of music was frowned upon.

  The UNIFIL peacekeepers watched with some unease as the area and people with which they had grown familiar over the previous eight years became steadily radicalized. “We noticed the increasing Islamization of the locals,” recalls Commandant John Hamill, who served five tours with the Irish UNIFIL battalion, two of them during the 1980s. “In 1978, there were few headscarves in our area, but by the late 1980s, they were becoming more radical.”

  Some of the older southerners were ill at ease with the arrival of the zealous Hezbollah cadres, but many of the younger men were inspired by the party’s religious rhetoric, which filled a void in their lives that the more secular Amal had ignored.

  One veteran Hezbollah combatant says his eagerness to embrace the party was shaped by an upbringing in a south Lebanon border village that blended religious observance with violence, occupation, and eviction:

  Being evicted from my village and having my village occupied left a strong impression upon me. It made me very angry. I wanted to do something about it. I was very young then. All the factors of anger and youth were polished by an Islamic upbringing. I was motivated to read—especially the Koran. I watched events unfold between 1979 and 1982 like the Islamic revolution in Iran, which meant a great deal to me because it was related to my religious beliefs. I wanted to be a resistance fighter anyway, but when Hezbollah appeared on the scene I was naturally drawn to it because of its culture and ideology.

  Besides the intrusive moral code it imposed on southern villages, Hezbollah quickly gained attention for its bold attacks against the Israelis and the SLA. By mid-1985, Hezbollah was accounting for the majority of attacks against the occupation forces. UNIFIL recorded 248 attacks in its area of operations alone in the period between May and September 1985. In the second half of 1986, Hezbollah began launching “human wave” assaults against Israeli and SLA outposts dotting the front line of the occupation zone. The SLA’s outposts were usually circular fortifications with walls of bulldozed earth and cement-filled oil barrels supplemented by a layer of old car tires, ringed by minefields and located on hills with dominant views of the terrain to the north of the zone. The positions had something of a medieval aspect, dominating, as many of them did, villages on the edge of the zone like feudal castles of old.

  On January 2, 1987, Hezbollah launched an assault against the SLA outpost on a hill overlooking the village of Braasheet in what was the first concerted attempt to storm and overrun a militia position. The attack was headed by the Kid, the shy young man who had earned his spurs executing collaborators in the Sidon area as a member of al-Shabab al-Aamel. By 1987, he was a well-respected combatant and a sector commander responsible for part of the western edge of the occupation zone.

  Prior to the nighttime attack, the unit spearheading the assault, consisting of about twelve fighters, walked beneath a Koran held aloft by Sayyed Abbas Mussawi as a blessing. Then the assault unit made its way through the darkness up the hill toward the SLA outpost. The Kid split his team into two columns for the final approach. There was another unit held in reserve and a fire support unit armed with mortars to the rear. They cut a path through the barbed wire and reached the wall of the compound, close enough to see the glow of a cigarette being smoked by a militiaman on the ramparts above. Once the attack began, several fighters equipped with RPGs quickly knocked out the SLA machine gun nests.

  “One of the Lahd militiamen (SLA) was going berserk with his machine gun, firing wildly all over the place. One of our RPGs destroyed his position. There was a big explosion and he was killed,” the Kid recalls. The attackers scrambled over the parapets and down into the center of the compound. The militiamen ducked into concrete bunkers and bolted the steel doors from the inside, leaving the Kid and his men roaming around the position. The Hezbollah men blew up an old Sherman tank and captured an armored personnel carrier, which they drove out of the occupation zone. The APC was driven all the way to Beirut with the Kid riding in triumph on the vehicle and Mussawi following behind in his car.

  There was never any intention to hold on to captured SLA outposts. This was a campaign of hit-and-run assaults. Hezbollah’s strategy in those early days, as articulated by Sayyed Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah at the funeral of the two fighters killed in Braasheet, was to “terrorize” and “exhaust” the SLA. If the SLA were to fall apart, Israel’s hold on the south Lebanon “security zone” would inevitably weaken, requiring the Israelis either to reinforce the zone with their own troops, thus risking further casualties, or to pull out altogether.

  While Hezbollah’s strategy may have been sound, the tactics employed generally were counterproductive. The “human wave” assaults, some of which saw as many as two hundred fighters charging the well-defended SLA outposts in broad daylight, exacted a costly toll among the resistance cadres. In April 1987, about a third of the attacking force of sixty Hezbollah fighters were killed during a single assault on an SLA outpost.

  Many of the Hezbollah men moving into the south were from the Bekaa and Beirut and were unfamiliar with the peacekeeping troops deployed with UNIFIL. While the local residents had come to appreciate the presence of UNIFIL in their villages, and Amal especially had cordial relations with the peacekeepers, to Hezbollah, the UN troops were just another foreign army on Lebanese soil whose checkpoints and patrols hampered the ability of the Islamic Resistance to confront the Israeli occupation forces. In August 1986, Hezbollah began attacking UNIFIL troops, mainly French soldiers. In early September, a roadside bomb killed three French soldiers on a morning run, and days later another French soldier died in a bomb attack against his patrol. The sudden slew of attacks led to the French pulling the bulk of its troops from UNIFIL.

  Daily Harassment

  The Irish battalion also faced its own problems with local militants, specifically members of a radical offshoot from Amal that later allied with Hezbollah: the Believers’ Resistance, led by Mustafa Dirani. A young Irish lieutenant, Aonghus Murphy, was killed by a roadside bomb in August 1986 while leading a mine-clearing patrol along a dirt track near At-Tiri village. The attack deliberately targeted the patrol and was orchestrated, the Irish believe, by Jawad Kaspi, a local official with the Believers’ Resistance, who had grown irritated at the peacekeepers’ ability to uncover his IEDs. Irish soldiers nearby apprehended two teenagers who had detonated the bomb and turned them over to the local police, whereupon they vanished. More than two years later, when the Believers’ Resistance was operationally dormant, Israeli troops abducted Kaspi in the hope that he had information on the fate of Ron Arad, an Israeli Air Force navigator, who had been captured by Amal militants in 198
6 after bailing out of his Phantom F-4 jet when a faulty bomb exploded beneath it. The Believers’ Resistance suspected that the Israelis were aided by the Irish peacekeepers in revenge for Murphy’s death. Irish posts came under attack and three Irish soldiers were briefly abducted. A few months later, three Irish soldiers were killed when a large mine blew up a truck. It is still unclear whether the explosion was a deliberate attack or an accident; however, following the deadly incident tensions began to ease in the Irish area.

  UNIFIL not only had to put up with threats from newly radicalized militants, it continued to face daily harassment from the IDF and SLA. SLA militiamen routinely fired heavy machine guns and mortar rounds in the general direction of UNIFIL outposts, sometimes with the deliberate intention of causing casualties, more often out of frustration at Hezbollah’s attacks.

  Given the attacks and harassment they faced from both sides, UNIFIL performed its duties with admirable restraint, despite the urge felt by many peacekeepers over the years to shoot back. In the early 1980s, the Dutch peacekeepers monitoring a stretch of the coastal littoral just north of the occupation zone were routinely harassed by a local SLA commander. The Dutch battalion was replaced in 1985 by troops from Fiji. The Fijians, while gentle giants most of the time, had little patience for the SLA commander’s routine provocations. One day, a Fijian officer spotted the militia officer at a checkpoint more than four hundred yards away. Undeterred by the distance, the Fijian officer raised his M-16 rifle and shot the militiaman through the throat. The SLA officer survived, but the Fijian area suddenly became very quiet.

  Hezbollah’s harassment of UNIFIL further exacerbated tensions with Amal, the latter already unhappy with the emergence of a robust Shia rival in its traditional stomping ground. By early 1988, it became obvious that a battle between Hezbollah and Amal for control of the south was imminent. Indeed, the catalyst for what would prove to be the first round in a bloody fratricidal war was Hezbollah’s abduction of Lieutenant Colonel William Higgins, the head of the 76-man Observer Group Lebanon (OGL), the unarmed UN observer force that had patrolled the Lebanon-Israel border since 1949.

  On February 17, 1988, Higgins held a routine liaison meeting in Tyre with Daoud Daoud, the top Amal leader in the south after Mohammed Saad’s death. After the meeting, Higgins was returning to UNIFIL headquarters in Naqoura when his white UN-marked Jeep Wagoneer was intercepted on the potholed coastal road south of Tyre by a brown Volvo. Armed men dragged Higgins out of his car and into the Volvo, which then disappeared into the narrow lanes cutting though the coastal belt of orange orchards.

  Two days later, a group called the Organization of the Oppressed on Earth issued a statement declaring it had snatched Higgins, “the criminal agent of the satanic CIA.” The kidnappers demanded the withdrawal of Israeli forces from south Lebanon; the release of all Lebanese detainees held in Khiam prison and all Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails; the end of U.S. influence in Lebanon; and the closure of all American diplomatic missions in the Middle East.

  Although Hezbollah denied responsibility for kidnapping Higgins, it is common knowledge in south Lebanon that the operation was carried out by local Hezbollah men familiar with the area. According to several well-placed sources in south Lebanon, Hezbollah bribed a local Amal security officer to ensure safe passage for the kidnappers through territory controlled by the movement. According to the sources, Higgins was initially held in the husseiniyah of Siddiqine village, a few minutes drive from the scene of the abduction, before being transferred elsewhere.

  More than a year later, in July 1989, Israeli helicopter-borne commandos kidnapped Sheikh Abdel-Karim Obeid, who had replaced Sheikh Ragheb Harb as imam of Jibsheet village following the latter’s murder in 1984. The Israelis justified the kidnapping on the basis that Obeid had information on the whereabouts of Ron Arad, the missing Israeli Air Force navigator, and two Israeli soldiers abducted by Hezbollah from the occupation zone in 1986. Furious at the abduction of Obeid, the kidnappers warned that they would execute Higgins unless the Lebanese cleric was freed. When the Israelis ignored the ultimatum, a videotape was released showing Higgins’s lifeless body swinging from a makeshift gallows.

  Higgins’s remains were recovered in 1991, and a forensic examination confirmed that the videotaped execution had been a fake. The marine colonel had been tortured to death earlier and his body preserved. The United States offered a reward of $4 million for information leading to the arrest of Higgins’s kidnappers. No American has served with OGL since.

  In a twist to the story, in 2003, Zvi Rish, Sheikh Obeid’s Israeli lawyer, claimed that the abduction of the Lebanese cleric had nothing to do with Arad and other missing Israelis but was a jointly planned operation by the United States and Israel to allow American investigators to question Obeid about the fate of Higgins and use him as a bargaining chip for the colonel’s release. It was suspected that Higgins had been held in Jibsheet at one point and that a relative of Obeid had been involved in the snatch.

  “It didn’t sound good to admit that we kidnapped Obeid for the sake of Colonel Higgins,” Rish said. “It sounded better to say we did it for Ron Arad. It was a cynical exploitation of Arad’s plight, because he had become a national myth by then.”

  “The Shia Community Is Committing Mass Suicide”

  Higgins’s kidnapping embarrassed and angered Nabih Berri and the Amal leadership in the south and brought the rivalry with Hezbollah to a breaking point. For Amal and its Syrian patrons, Hezbollah had gone too far. The Syrians already were unhappy at the extent to which its Iranian ally had penetrated Lebanon’s Shia community. Furthermore, Hezbollah had cheekily assisted Fatah in its “war of the camps” with Amal by sending weapons and ammunition to the besieged Palestinians. The support was due partly to a moral sympathy for the Palestinian cause but also to a desire to further emasculate its Shia rival in a costly conflict. Hezbollah had even clashed with Syrian troops in early 1987, when Damascus sent its forces into west Beirut to smash the rule of the militias and restore some semblance of order. When Hezbollah refused to turn over a barracks in the Basta neighborhood of Beirut, Syrian soldiers killed twenty-three Hezbollah militants. Hezbollah leaders denounced the killings, and some fifty thousand supporters took to the streets in protest. Hezbollah militants even attempted to assassinate Colonel Ghazi Kanaan, the head of Syrian military intelligence in Lebanon, by firing rocket-propelled grenades at his car.

  With the backing of Damascus, Amal launched a massive manhunt in cooperation with UNIFIL to locate Higgins, and in the process they cracked down on their Hezbollah rival. Fighting quickly spread throughout the south in what Hezbollah dubbed the “war for domination.” Hezbollah lost ground, and its cadres retreated to its mountain redoubts in the villages of the Iqlim al-Touffah heights east of Sidon.

  Fresh fighting erupted in Beirut’s southern suburbs a month later. This time, Hezbollah had the upper hand against an Amal that was weakened by poor leadership and undermined by Islamists within its ranks who secretly cooperated with Hezbollah. In one of the more bizarre tactical alliances that emerged during Lebanon’s civil war, Samir Geagea’s Lebanese Forces militia, Israel’s ally in 1982 and an enemy of Damascus, began sending weapons from Christian east Beirut to Hezbollah’s cadres in the southern suburbs. In desperation, Nabih Berri appealed for a Syrian military intervention to crush his Islamist rivals. Hafez al-Assad decided instead to meet with a small delegation of senior Hezbollah officials at his summer palace in Latakia to hear their views directly. In his first meeting with Hezbollah representatives, Assad was told that the party did not seek to supplant Amal, but was primarily a resistance force against the Israeli occupation.

  As Nasrallah explained a few months later, “we do not seek power and do not wish to compete with anyone over state positions; our political movement is based on the premise of fighting Israel.… For us, safeguarding the Islamic Resistance is what really matters.”23

  Hezbollah was learning the logic of survival throu
gh pragmatism and compromise to defend its resistance priority. The cold reality facing Hezbollah and its sponsors in Iran was that the party faced annihilation if Assad chose to send his troops against it. A compromise was arranged at the end of May in which Syrian troops were allowed to deploy into the southern suburbs, while Hezbollah was permitted to keep its arms and resume limited operations against the Israelis in the south.

  Despite the presence of Syrian troops in the southern suburbs, intermittent street battles broke out during the summer months between Hezbollah and Amal. In September, three top Amal officials, including Daoud Daoud, were killed in an ambush mounted by Hezbollah. Two months later, several Hezbollah leaders, including Nasrallah, Tufayli, and Mussawi, narrowly escaped injury when a bomb exploded beside their ten-car motorcade in the Bekaa Valley.

  The worst clashes occurred in January 1989, when Hezbollah launched an offensive from its bases in the Iqlim al-Touffah heights against Amal-controlled villages to the west. Hezbollah quickly overran the villages, killing their Shia rivals in their homes and barracks. Amal rallied and launched a counteroffensive, slowly driving the Hezbollah cadres back into their strongholds of Jbaa and Ain Boussoir, villages that tower over the landscape to the west. Using old Soviet T-54 tanks, RPGs, and even axes and knives, the Shia combatants, many of them high on Valium and hashish, butchered one another with a ferocity scarcely matched at any other time during the civil war. Corpses with heads chopped off or throats slit littered the bloody streets. “Alas, the Shia community is committing mass suicide,” wailed Sheikh Abdel-Amir Qabalan, a senior Amal cleric.