Warriors of God

by Nicholas Blanford

  It was the first time that Hezbollah had successfully penetrated the armor of a Merkava tank with an antitank missile. The Merkava’s Israeli manufacturers marketed the tank as the safest in the world, thanks to a dense layer of reactive armor designed to explode antitank warheads before the missiles could reach the steel skin. Hezbollah’s newfound ability to blast missiles through the tank’s armor sent the Merkava’s designers hurrying back to the drawing board to check for the “weak point” that Nasrallah boasted his fighters had found.

  The destruction of the Merkava was the result of a steady improvement in Hezbollah’s antitank skills. Hezbollah received the Spigot missile from Iran in 1995. Although the warhead was smaller than that of the AT-3, its velocity was greater, and, crucially, its guidance system allowed for much greater accuracy. The introduction of the AT-4 into south Lebanon forced the Israelis to improve the armor of some tanks and replace others with the top-of-the-line Merkava.

  Hezbollah built a team specialized in antiarmor skills, sending them to training camps in Syria and Iran for intensive courses in which they improved their accuracy against life-sized mock-ups of Merkava tanks. They were taught to aim for the same point on a tank using two or more missiles in succession. The idea was to blast off the layers of reactive armor, exposing the steel skin to follow-up missiles. The technique was refined over the years as Hezbollah learned to “swarm” Israeli armored vehicles with missiles.

  In the weeks that followed the fatal strike against the Merkava in Rihan in September, two more Merkava Mark 2 tanks were destroyed by Hezbollah’s antitank missiles. “Our fighters transformed the Merkava tank into scrap metal. We know all the tank’s secrets, and it is now an easy target,” said Qawq, Hezbollah’s southern commander, boasting that the resistance had “ended the myth of the Merkava.”

  The AT-4 Spigot was not the only second-generation antitank missile employed by Hezbollah. It was also using the U.S.-made TOW missile, which, ironically, had been delivered by Israel to Iran as part of the arms-for-hostages affair during the 1980s. The Iranians had transferred the TOWs to Hezbollah, and the missiles were now being returned to the Israelis on the battlefields of southern Lebanon.

  The disabling attacks against the Merkavas in 1997 could not have been more ill-timed for Israel. The Israeli government was attempting to sell to Turkey a fleet of Merkava Mark 3s as part of a multi-billion-dollar arms deal. Although the tanks hit by Hezbollah were the earlier, Mark 2 version, the Mark 3, which had entered service in 1990, differed from its predecessor only in the size of engine, the caliber of the main gun, and the fire control system. Both tanks shared the same armor protection.4

  Tiring of Lebanon

  To compound Israel’s misery in south Lebanon, Hezbollah’s intelligence penetration of the SLA was reaping deadly rewards. In mid-October, Hezbollah fighters slipped into the zone and reached within a hundred yards of the border. There they detonated a roadside bomb against a convoy of three armor-plated Mercedes carrying senior IDF officers who were on their way to a meeting with SLA commanders at the militia’s 70th battalion headquarters outside Markaba village. The ambush was followed by another attack in the same area against more Israeli officers in civilian cars, this time using a combination of roadside bombs, rocket-propelled grenades, and machine guns. Two Israelis were killed and six wounded in the attacks.

  It was a well-planned ambush, but more worrying for the Israelis was that Hezbollah had clearly gained prior intelligence about the meeting between the Israeli and SLA officers. The Israelis were traveling in civilian cars, but the Hezbollah team was still able to identify them and knew what time they were crossing the border.

  Lieutenant General Amnon Shahak, the IDF chief of staff, admitted a month later that the Israeli army had a “serious intelligence problem” in infiltrating Hezbollah. Senior IDF commanders became hunted figures as Hezbollah used intelligence gathered in the zone to trace their movements and plot attacks against them. “I became a very desirable target of the organization,” recalls Colonel Noam Ben-Zvi, a brigade commander between 1996 and 2000 and the last commander of the western sector of the zone. “They followed me on my tours to SLA posts, also on trips to visit civilians. They tried to hit me with mortar fire to the posts I visited, roadside bombs that were waiting for me personally.”

  On one occasion, Israeli military intelligence learned of a specific assassination plot against Ben-Zvi being prepared by a Hezbollah operative who owned a metal workshop in Bint Jbeil. When Israeli troops raided the workshop, they found a photograph of Ben-Zvi that Hezbollah had grabbed from Israeli television footage. “Also, we found written instructions on how to do the preparations and the exact way to recognize me and my car,” Ben-Zvi says.

  Israel’s hold on the occupation zone was unraveling. In the three-month period from August through October 1997, twenty-seven Israeli soldiers had been killed, more than the total for 1996. Hezbollah had learned how to destroy Israeli tanks and stage elaborate ambushes just yards from the border fence. Its intelligence-gathering capabilities had steadily improved. The morale of the SLA was sinking, and the militia was riddled with agents reporting to Hezbollah or Lebanese military intelligence.

  The total of thirty-seven Israeli troop fatalities in south Lebanon in 1997 was the highest since 1985, but in strictly military terms it was easily sustainable, indeed negligible. But Hezbollah was acutely aware of Israel’s sensitivity to casualties. “The more Israelis we kill the more disputes we’ll be sowing among them,” Sheikh Nabil Qawq crowed at the end of October.

  Certainly, Hezbollah’s successes were having an impact in Israel. The Israeli public was fast tiring of Lebanon. How much longer would they have to endure the deaths of their brothers, husbands, and sons in the dust and mud of south Lebanon? The Four Mothers group in Israel staged regular demonstrations outside the Israeli Ministry of Defense and distributed leaflets at road junctions to further their goal of ending Israel’s involvement in Lebanon.

  A poll in September, after the Ansariyah raid, found that 52 percent of Israelis now favored a troop pullout from south Lebanon, so long as it was accompanied by security guarantees. Even Ariel Sharon, the architect of the 1982 invasion of Lebanon and an advocate of expanding the zone to twenty-five miles from the border, now conceded that a unilateral withdrawal was an option for consideration.

  But a military review in November found that the IDF had no choice but to remain in south Lebanon, pending a peace deal with Syria. Instead, troop numbers would be increased in the occupation zone, more aggressive tactics would be introduced, and armored vehicles and Israeli outposts would receive greater protection.

  Yet the new tactics were little more than a holding action, an attempt to stave off the collapse of the zone while the politicians sought to find a means of exiting Lebanon with some reassurances for the postwithdrawal security of northern Israel.

  A “Deluxe Laboratory Without Settlers”

  The Israeli government could not commit to an unconditional withdrawal, despite the rising Israeli public discontent over the Lebanon imbroglio. A unilateral withdrawal from Lebanon would convey the impression of defeat, the idea that the IDF had been chased out by a band of Shia zealots, which would have unwelcome ramifications for Israel’s policy of deterrence against the Palestinians and other Arab foes.

  Brigadier General Erez Gerstein, who as head of the IDF’s Lebanon Liaison Unit was the top Israeli commander in south Lebanon, was a strong supporter of a continued military presence in Lebanon and an outspoken critic of the peaceniks in Israel. “They are certainly a threat to [Israeli] soldiers,” he fumed in the summer of 1998. “Firstly, by encouraging the local population to cooperate with Hezbollah, because we are on our way out of their territory, and secondly, by boosting the morale of the terrorists who feel this is a sign of the IDF’s weakness.”

  The IDF’s general staff, unwilling to abandon the occupation zone, encouraged the government to stand fast. But their reasons went beyond concern over a l
oss of prestige and a weakening of Israel’s deterrence power. After all, for a relatively small price—in military terms at least—of an average of twenty soldiers killed each year, the army controlled what was in effect a free military training ground, a “deluxe laboratory without settlers,” the Israeli Haaretz newspaper once wrote. What better place for the IDF to develop doctrine, test new weapons, provide combat experience to troops and aircrews, and subcontract a proxy militia to do the bulk of the frontline fighting while demanding and receiving a substantial slice of the annual government budget?

  Furthermore, the conflict was conducted out of sight of the Israeli media—journalists were banned from the zone except under rare and controlled circumstances, allowing the military to manipulate the flow of information to the public. And new battlefield skills and tactics could be honed. Egoz, the Israeli army’s elite antiguerrilla warfare unit, owed its existence to the conflict in south Lebanon. Hezbollah’s ability to destroy Merkava tanks in 1997 with AT-4 and TOW antitank missiles helped shape the design of the Merkava Mark 4, the latest version, which entered service in 2002. As a consequence of that experience in south Lebanon in the 1990s, the Merkava Mark 4, one of the most heavily armored tanks in the world, coped remarkably well against Hezbollah’s third-generation antitank missiles in its first proper combat action during the July 2006 war.

  Artillery crews used south Lebanon as a firing range beyond the requirements of combating Hezbollah attacks. Outdated stocks of ammunition were routinely fired into south Lebanon, according to senior UNIFIL officers, a more cost effective means of disposing of old ammunition than transporting it to the Negev desert in southern Israel for destruction.

  “A Slap on the Face of the Zionists”

  One spring morning in 1999, while I was driving through a small frontline village called Jabal Botm, the sudden roar of an Israeli F-16 swooping over the village and a tall column of smoke and dust blooming above a hill warned that yet another air raid was in progress. In the center of the village, a cluster of small stone and cement houses on a steep hill, a Hezbollah man in combat trousers and a black baseball cap held a walkie-talkie to his face and watched the raid. An old woman sat on a rug nearby, enjoying the morning sunshine as she sorted through a pile of freshly picked thyme and peppery arugula leaves. Hezbollah had shelled a nearby Israeli outpost about half an hour earlier, and the air raid was Israel’s response.

  The two jets, like flecks of silver, floated lazily across the sky in sweeping circles, taking turns to drop, nose first, into a graceful dive, release a bomb, and then rise again, leaving a trail of antimissile flares in their wake. The unperturbed Hezbollah man counted into his walkie-talkie each bomb dropped into the nearby wadi, while the old woman smiled contentedly as she picked through her herbs, completely ignoring the air raid. The measured pace of the bombing runs and the calm indifference of the woman and the Hezbollah man made the air raid seem soporific and banal.

  Air combat patrols increased beginning in 1998, when Israeli troops spent more time hunkered down in newly hardened hilltop outposts. That year, Israel staged almost 150 air raids (compared to just 21 in 1990), but the vast bulk of them consisted of dropping aerial bombs into wadis vacated earlier by Hezbollah’s “shoot and scoot” teams. “Crushing rocks” was the cynical term used by UNIFIL officers for these air strikes. But the combat air patrols speeded up the response time to Hezbollah attacks in the zone and also granted the crews useful experience, operating in a war scenario and flying over hostile territory.

  Other than the routine combat patrols, the Israelis employed helicopter gunships for pinpoint strikes and assassinations and UAVs for reconnaissance and remote control IED detonation. The war in south Lebanon helped Israel become one of the world’s leading pioneers in UAV technology, second only to the United States.

  In October 1999, a pair of Cobra helicopters staged a missile strike against a house on the edge of Qabrikha, which overlooked the rolling grassland of the zone’s central sector. I was in the village at the time, chatting with residents, when our conversation was interrupted by the sound of approaching helicopters. A loud explosion shook the village, then we saw two Cobras, painted in drab olive brown, emerge from a backdrop of dun-colored hills. Shedding antimissile flares in their wake, the helicopters wheeled and turned a few hundred yards east of the village before heading toward the low hills on the horizon that marked the border. Two cars, horns blaring, raced down the lane. In the backseat of the rear car, a man had his face buried in his hands. The explosion was caused by a missile fired from one of the helicopters that struck a half-built home of cinder block walls. A crowd had gathered in the center of the village: women with anxious faces, old men kneading worry beads. Grim-faced Hezbollah members cordoned off the targeted house while their comrades sifted through the rubble. Fragments of the missile lay scattered in the garden, some of the components still too hot to touch. A UAV, which had been circling the village all morning, continued to whine overhead, filming the aftermath of the helicopter strike.

  In mid-August 1999, a UAV was employed to kill a senior Hezbollah military commander, one of Israel’s most successful assassinations in Lebanon. Ali Deeb, also known as Khodr “Abu Hassan” Salameh, the same operative who had kidnapped four Russian diplomats in 1985, was the head of Hezbollah’s special operations unit for south Lebanon in the late 1990s. Deeb was killed while driving his old BMW in a Sidon suburb when two bombs exploded beside his vehicle, detonated by a UAV overhead. Although the Israelis denied involvement in the assassination at the time, it was a significant intelligence coup to locate and kill a Hezbollah commander of such stature and experience.

  The Israelis almost repeated that success six months later in a helicopter assassination attempt against Ibrahim Aql, a close aide to Imad Mughniyah and a top military commander. Four Apache helicopters sped across the zone and tailed a red Mercedes carrying Aql and one other person. One of the Apaches fired a missile at his car. It missed and struck an adjacent building. Alerted by the explosion, Aql leaped out of the car just before a second missile struck the vehicle. A third missile hit the road beside him but failed to explode. Aql jumped to his feet and ran into a building as the helicopters abandoned the attack and returned to Israel.

  Aql was a top resistance leader, so his narrow escape received little comment from Hezbollah. But a similar incident a few days earlier was given the full propaganda treatment. A four-man Hezbollah squad had penetrated the zone’s central sector and clashed with an SLA patrol near the village of Markaba. One of the Hezbollah men told his comrades he would provide covering fire for them to slip out of the zone. Now on his own, the fighter was spotted by an Israeli UAV, which tracked him as he ran past a house, across a field, and down a street in Markaba. He entered an empty house and moments later jumped out the back just before a helicopter fired a missile into the building. The UAV continued to track the lone fighter as he ran through more fields. An F-16, one of several jets circling overhead, fired a missile at the fighter, and there was a large explosion. It appeared to be a job well done, and in a rare move, the Israeli Air Force handed a copy of the UAV video footage to Israeli television stations. The previous day, three officers from the Paratroop Reconnaissance Battalion had been killed in a Hezbollah ambush. The release of the dramatic UAV tape appeared to be an attempt to show the Israeli public that despite setbacks, the IDF was also achieving successes in Lebanon.

  But two days later, the star of the UAV tape showed up alive and only moderately wounded in a hospital in Sidon. He said that the missile fired by the F-16 had landed just feet away, and that he was struck by shrapnel and lost his hearing briefly. Once he recovered his senses, he continued running until he reached safe territory and reported back to his unit.

  “What will they field next against the holy fighters?” crowed a commentary on Hezbollah radio. “They have tried electronic sensors, drones, infrared cameras, jets, helicopters.… What a slap on the face of the Zionists who aired this footage to give t
he impression of great success to their impotent army.”

  Crucially for a casualty-conscious Israel, despite the variety of aerial tactics used in Lebanon—air combat patrols, UAV surveillance, helicopter gunship assassinations—the risk of losing Israeli air crews to Hezbollah ground fire was almost nonexistent. Hezbollah’s rudimentary air defense systems—23 mm and 57 mm cannons and shoulder-fired SAM-7 missiles—represented little threat to Israeli jets. Low-flying helicopters were more vulnerable to these weapons, especially when Hezbollah’s antiaircraft guns began playing a more prominent role in 1998 in response to Israel’s increased use of airpower in Lebanon. But the Israeli helicopter crews soon developed countermeasures against the menace of Hezbollah ground fire. UNIFIL peacekeepers reported witnessing on several occasions Israeli helicopter gunships deliberately hovering just out of range to draw Hezbollah fire while other helicopters attacked the antiaircraft positions at low level. No Israeli jets were downed over Lebanon in the 1990s, and only one helicopter, a Cobra, fell victim to ground fire when its tail rotor was struck and damaged by a 23 mm gun in June 1999 and it crash-landed inside the zone.