Warriors of God

by Nicholas Blanford

  “Hallaq looked at me for help, still thinking I was an agent for Israeli intelligence,” Ramzi says. “But I told him ‘I know who you are. You are Ahmad Hallaq. I am not with the Israelis. You are very wrong.’ When he heard me say that, Hallaq seemed to crumple.”

  It took all four conspirators to subdue the burly ex-militiaman. They bound him with duct tape and injected him with more sedatives. The desperate Hallaq, his eyes wide with fear, begged his captors to kill him there and then. “Hezbollah will use chain saws on me for what I did to Mughniyah,” he wailed.

  Having swaddled Hallaq with the tape, they dumped him unconscious into the trunk of a Mercedes taxi and drove in two cars to the crossing point in Jezzine. They were prepared to shoot their way through the SLA checkpoint at Jezzine, but drastic measures were unnecessary. Maher Touma’s brother was a senior SLA officer in Jezzine and well known to the guards at the crossing. As Ramzi, Mufid, and Touma returned to Ibl es-Saqi, Hallaq was driven by Fadi Qassar through the two-mile no-man’s-land to the first Lebanese army checkpoint, where intelligence agents were waiting to arrest him.

  Toward the end of the next day, the Israelis realized that Hallaq was missing, and suspicion fell on the Nohra brothers. In the following days, the entire cell, apart from Mufid Nohra and Fadi Qassar, was rounded up and imprisoned in Israel. Mufid hid in a safe house before slipping out of the zone through the rugged ravines near Shebaa village.

  The hapless Hallaq was subsequently convicted of murder in a military court in Beirut and sentenced to death. Shortly before dawn on September 21, 1996, the onetime militia chief and assassin was led from his cell into the courtyard of the Roumiyah prison in the hills east of Beirut and executed by firing squad.

  After the success of the Hallaq abduction, the Lebanese authorities asked Mufid Nohra to prepare a plan to kidnap Abdel-Karim as-Saadi, also known as Abu Mohjen, the leader of the al Qaeda–linked Esbat al-Ansar group in the Ain al-Hilweh Palestinian refugee camp. Mufid drew up a scheme in which two dozen soldiers would charge into the densely populated camp and kill or capture Abu Mohjen. The Lebanese authorities were unimpressed and dropped the plan. Mufid also was asked by Lebanese and Syrian military intelligence for the name of another senior collaborator with Israel who could be targeted for abduction. Mufid suggested Etienne Saqr, the leader of the ultranationalist Guardians of the Cedars militia, who had lived in Jezzine since the end of the civil war. That plan was also dropped, after the Syrians surmised that such an operation would upset Cardinal Nasrallah Sfeir, the Maronite patriarch.

  As for Ramzi, he faced an array of charges in Israel, including kidnapping, supplying information to an enemy state, and even an old drug conviction. But protracted plea bargaining on the sidelines saw his sentence gradually reduced from ten years to four. Ramzi was led from the court and placed in solitary confinement in an Israeli prison. But his days as an agent for Lebanese intelligence were far from over.

  “It Took Us Too Long to Adjust”

  By the mid-1990s, the reinvigorated resistance campaign in south Lebanon was exacting an increasing toll of Israeli and SLA casualties. Thirteen IDF soldiers were killed in 1992, twelve in 1993, and twenty-one in 1994. More significantly, the IDF–Hezbollah fatality ratio was narrowing in the latter’s favor. In 1990, five Hezbollah fighters were killed for every IDF fatality, but by 1991, the figure had dropped to two Hezbollah dead for every Israeli soldier killed. A year later it had narrowed further, to 1.7 to 1, and it remained at around 1.5 to 1 for the rest of the decade.14

  The rate of attacks was steadily increasing as well. UNIFIL recorded a total of eighty attacks for 1991 in its area of operations, which excluded those conducted in the northern sector above the Litani River. By 1994, the number of attacks in the UNIFIL area had risen to 146. An unofficial tally recorded by UNIFIL for all attacks against the IDF and SLA recorded the much larger figure of 644 operations for 1994, increasing to 908 for 1995.

  Israel was conducting peace negotiations with Syria and Lebanon during this period, and the conflict in south Lebanon was initially seen as the last fling of die-hard militants from the war-torn 1980s. But it gradually became evident to IDF commanders that what they were facing in south Lebanon was a full-fledged insurgency by an enemy trained and armed by Iran, politically protected by Syria, and implementing ever more effective and deadly tactics.

  “We felt that the resistance had ended with the end of the civil war,” recalls Major General Moshe Kaplinsky, who was head of the IDF’s Golani Brigade from 1993 to 1997. “Then it started with an attack here and there, but we didn’t change our attitude. We were too conservative. We slowly realized between 1990 and 1993 that we were facing a guerrilla war. It took us too long to adjust our behavior.”

  In a series of deadly assaults in July 1993, seven Israeli soldiers were killed and a barrage of Katyusha rockets struck northern Israel in response to IDF artillery shelling against Lebanese villages lying north of the zone. The IDF found itself caught in a trap largely of its own making: Hezbollah would kill Israeli soldiers in the zone, but when Israel’s inevitable retaliatory artillery shelling or air strikes caused civilian casualties or damage, rockets would be fired into northern Israel. The problem for the IDF was that it had yet to figure out a way of striking back effectively at Hezbollah without risking Lebanese casualties and thus provoking the Katyusha salvos into the north. The IDF’s main weapons in south Lebanon—artillery and air power—were too clumsy for the challenge it faced. It was like trying to swat a mosquito with a baseball bat in a china shop.

  With seven soldiers killed in three weeks, a frustrated IDF lashed back, deliberately directing its firepower against civilian targets in south Lebanon in a week-long air and artillery offensive to inflict mass punishment on the Lebanese. There was no attempt to disguise the purpose of the operation; Israeli officials readily admitted that the aim was to batter south Lebanon and force the Lebanese government to curb Hezbollah. “We want Lebanese villagers to flee and we want to damage all those who were parties to Hezbollah’s activities,” Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin told the Israeli Knesset.

  Even the name for the offensive, Operation Accountability, left no room for doubt that this was a campaign of punishment and retribution. But the Israeli government was profoundly mistaken if it thought that bombing south Lebanon would improve the IDF’s position in the occupation zone. Syria was the true authority in Lebanon, and the suffering of civilians in south Lebanon was not going to persuade Hafez al-Assad to alter his policy of using Hezbollah to further his negotiating position in peace talks with Israel.

  By the time a cease-fire went into effect on July 31, 1993, after seven days of fighting, almost 130 Lebanese civilians had died, with another 500 wounded. Around three hundred thousand civilians were temporarily displaced, and damage to Lebanon was estimated at $28.8 million. Hezbollah had fired some three hundred Katyusha rockets into the occupation zone and northern Israel, killing two Israeli civilians and wounding about twenty-four.

  Operation Accountability ended with a secret unwritten agreement brokered by Warren Christopher, the U.S. secretary of state, in which both sides agreed not to target civilians. It meant that Israel could no longer shell and bomb Lebanese villages and Hezbollah could not fire rockets into northern Israel, but both sides could continue to kill each other’s combatants in the occupation zone.

  The test of the cease-fire’s durability came almost three weeks after Operation Accountability ended, when, on August 19, nine Israeli soldiers were killed in two roadside bomb attacks. The IDF, however, refrained from shelling areas facing the scene of the attack, opting instead for selective air strikes against a Hezbollah-operated radio station in the northern Bekaa Valley and the training area south of Janta village near the border with Syria.

  The agreement had held—no Lebanese civilians were hurt, and no Katyusha rockets were fired into Israel. Yet the IDF still faced the same problem: how to blunt Hezbollah’s deadly resistance campaign.

 
“A Learning Organization”

  By late 1994, Israel had signed the Oslo Accords with the PLO that were supposed to lead to the gradual emergence of a Palestinian state, and had struck a peace deal with Jordan. But a breakthrough with Syria, which would lead to a treaty with Lebanon and an end to the occupation of south Lebanon, remained elusive.

  By now, it was evident to IDF commanders that a different approach was required in dealing with an enemy that was showing distinct and constant improvements on the battlefield. The structure of the occupation zone was too static, the troop deployment too cumbersome. Hilltop outposts were magnets for Hezbollah’s mortars, rockets, and missiles. Routine foot patrols along roads and dirt tracks were desperately vulnerable to Hezbollah’s increasingly sophisticated and powerful roadside bombs. The terrain of south Lebanon, with its rocky, steep-sided hills and narrow valley floors, relegated Israel’s fleet of tanks to little more than mobile artillery platforms. At dusk, tanks would maneuver into forward positions overlooking the front line, using their thermal imaging sights to scan for intruders, before slinking back to better protected compounds at dawn.

  “We were a strong army, but we didn’t have the right capabilities for [combating] guerrilla warfare,” Kaplinsky, the Golani Brigade commander, told me. “Hezbollah is a learning organization. They would debrief after every operation. They had very good intelligence capabilities. We were playing into their hands in those days. We were operating in a heavy and high-intensity tactical manner, and they were studying us.”

  In February 1995, Lieutenant General Amnon Lipkin-Shahak, the IDF chief of staff, asked Kaplinsky to put together a new counterguerrilla unit under the command of the Golani Brigade in the Northern Command. The new unit was called Egoz, the Hebrew acronym for Anti-Guerrilla Micro-Warfare. While there were several other elite special forces units in the Israeli army, some of them regularly deployed in south Lebanon, Egoz was the only unit to be trained specifically in guerrilla warfare tactics to fight Hezbollah. “Shahak called me and said, ‘You’ve got three months to build a special unit,’ ” Kaplinsky recalls. “We took soldiers from all infantry units with good commanders, people with open minds. We trained them in completely new tactics and in areas that resembled south Lebanon.”

  The Egoz volunteers, based at Kiryat Tivon near Haifa, were given weeks of clandestine training to prepare them for combat in the dense undergrowth and steep mountains and hills of southern Lebanon. The first recruits were drawn mainly from other special forces units, such as Sayeret Matkal, the Paratroop Reconnaissance Battalion, and Shayetet 13, the Israeli equivalent of the U.S. Navy SEALs or the Royal Navy’s Special Boat Service. Already schooled in special operations, the first intake of Egoz recruits were ready for action in a relatively short period of time. Today, Egoz recruits undergo a fourteen-month training period that includes specialized courses in parachuting, airborne insertions, and navigation, with an emphasis on camouflage and fieldcraft.

  “A Matter of Statistics”

  The top secret company-sized unit became operational in July 1995 and was soon engaged in missions in the zone and beyond. But the IDF fatality count continued to rise. In 1995, twenty-three soldiers were killed in south Lebanon, two more than in the previous year, and another ninety-nine were wounded. Morale was sinking among troops serving in the zone, reminiscent of the fears experienced by an earlier generation of Israeli soldiers in south Lebanon before the 1985 pullback to the border zone. In early 1995, an Israeli paratrooper unit was disbanded after several of its soldiers asked their commander for an alternative mission on learning that they were to be sent to Lebanon for one last tour of duty before ending their compulsory service in the IDF. The furious commander told the soldiers that they were “not worth the spit of a dead monkey” and split up the unit.15

  By fall 1995, the Israeli-Syrian peace track had reached an impasse. On November 4, Yitzhak Rabin was shot dead by a Jewish extremist as he emerged from a peace rally in Tel Aviv. Rabin was replaced by Shimon Peres, and the peace negotiations with Syria resumed the following month. Peres hoped that a deal could be reached with Syria before the next general election in Israel, scheduled for October 1996. The looming election was regarded as an opportunity for Israel to decide whether it wished to continue pursuing regional peace under Peres or opt for a more cautious and less yielding approach under Peres’s rival, Benjamin Netanyahu, leader of the Likud Party.

  The ruling Labor Party was riding high in the polls, buoyed by sympathy over Rabin’s assassination, but Peres, a career politician who was more comfortable with negotiation, dialogue, and deal making than striking military poses, was keenly aware that the Israeli public was uncertain whether he was sufficiently robust on national security. After a top Hamas bomb maker was assassinated in January 1996, Israel was rocked by four deadly suicide bomb attacks in eight days that left almost sixty Israelis dead and many more wounded. The Labor Party’s lead in the polls began to slip as a furious and frightened electorate blamed Peres for failing to stop the bombings. To compound Peres’s woes, the ever-cautious Assad clearly was not going to be hurried into a peace deal with Israel just to save the Israeli premier’s electoral skin. While Assad was willing to keep the talks going with the Israelis, he spurned a request by Peres for a summit between the two leaders. In umbrage, Peres brought forward the date of the election to May and postponed further peace moves with Syria until after the polls.

  The embattled Israeli premier was also facing serious difficulties in south Lebanon. Hezbollah stepped up operations in mid-February and March, with UNIFIL recording more than two hundred attacks for the first three months of the year, including two simultaneous assaults against multiple IDF and SLA positions. IDF casualties climbed significantly in March in a series of ambushes. On March 4, four Israeli soldiers were killed and nine wounded while chasing a squad of Hezbollah fighters across the central sector of the zone. The Hezbollah team had ambushed the IDF patrol near the border. The Israelis gave chase, but the fleeing Hezbollah men led the soldiers into a cluster of roadside bombs detonated by another squad lying in wait.

  Another soldier died and twelve more were wounded in separate IED ambushes in the following days. In mid-March, Ali Asmar, a fresh-faced Hezbollah fighter, accompanied by two comrades, slipped into the central sector of the zone and worked his way to the edge of Rubb Thalatheen village near the border. Asmar climbed into a well to hide while his two colleagues retreated out of the zone. Three days later, Asmar, known within Hezbollah circles as Al-Shaheed al-Ammar, the Martyr of the Moon, for his round, youthful face, emerged from the well and blew himself up beside a passing IDF convoy, killing an officer.

  On March 30, the IDF fired an antitank missile at three Lebanese workers repairing a water tower in the village of Yater, killing two of them. Hezbollah responded by firing more than twenty rockets into Israel. Peres admitted the next day that the IDF action had been a “mistake,” but the damage was done, and it was evident from the surge in IDF casualties that Hezbollah and the Israelis were heading for another showdown.

  “It was always a matter of statistics for me,” recalls Timur Goksel, UNIFIL’s veteran senior adviser, who had been watching developments in south Lebanon with growing unease. “Whenever there was an unusually heavy number of [IDF] casualties that attracted attention to Israel or the Israeli presence in Lebanon, and these casualties occurred in a short period of time, there was always the possibility that the Israelis would react very heavily.… Too many casualties in a short period of time meant big trouble.”

  FOUR

  The Scent of Orange Blossom in the Spring

  I look outside and see the spring flowers and remember that the last time I saw them, my family were all here and alive.

  —HAMEEDA DEEB,

  Qana massacre survivor, April 3, 1997

  APRIL 9, 1996

  BRAASHEET, south Lebanon—It was early evening, and a chill wind ruffled sixteen-year-old Mazen Farhat’s sandy-colored hair as he trudged up the narrow
, winding lane behind his parents’ house.

  Mazen’s seven-year-old brother, Ibrahim, and his cousin Mohammed, down from Beirut for the spring holidays, followed a few paces behind. There were few people about, just a handful of farmers planting tobacco seedlings in the stony chocolate-colored soil. A compound defended by SLA militiamen was perched on a steep hill south of Braasheet, dominating the village like a scruffy medieval castle.

  As the youngsters passed alongside a low stone wall, Mazen noticed a pale gray rock lying beside the road. He knew the lane intimately, and he was certain that the rock hadn’t been there a few days ago.

  Despite his youth, Mazen, like all residents of frontline villages, was well aware of “rock bombs”—those cunningly disguised IEDs used by both Hezbollah and the Israelis in which the explosive charge was hidden inside a fiberglass shell spray-painted to match the local geology.

  Mohammed stood beside the road and urinated lazily against the stone wall as his cousin bent over to take a closer look at the rock.

  Suddenly, Mazen realized what he was looking at. “Oh, mother,” he wailed. And the bomb exploded.

  Mazen’s heavily pregnant mother, Amal, was chatting with friends in the living room of her house, less than two hundred yards from where the three boys had stopped to examine the strange rock. When Amal heard the blast, she was filled with an awful premonition that her children were involved. She ran screaming from the house and followed a crowd of people to the scene of the explosion.