Warriors of God

by Nicholas Blanford

Hezbollah employed IEDs fitted with infrared firing switches in Jezzine in the summer of 1997. But the first use of antiarmor EFPs occurred in the latter half of 1998, when Hezbollah stepped up the number and variety of roadside bomb ambushes with lethal results.

  On October 5, a convoy of Israeli Humvees and armored vehicles was ambushed in a double roadside bomb blast in the Druze town of Hasbaya. The blasts killed two soldiers and wounded six more. The Israeli media referred to the bombs as having been “hollow charge,” the first indication that Hezbollah was using something new.

  On November 16, seven soldiers from the Golani Brigade left their outpost on the border at Sheikh Abbad hill and wandered casually down the road toward a firing range for a routine testing of weapons. The Sheikh Abbad compound, distinctive because of its two tall red-and-white-striped radio masts, straddled the border and was deemed relatively safe. Certainly, the seven soldiers were not expecting trouble; they walked bunched together in a group, rather than in patrol formation with spacing between each person. They had reached some thirty-five yards from the front gate of the Sheikh Abbad compound when they were hit by a large roadside bomb packed with steel ball bearings. Three soldiers were killed and four wounded, the highest casualty toll in a single incident since Ansariyah more than a year earlier. The ambush was filmed by a Hezbollah combat cameraman, and the tape was whisked out of the zone and broadcast on Al-Manar television just a few hours later, before the Israelis had even notified the families of the dead soldiers. A subsequent Israeli military investigation found that the Golani unit in the Sheikh Abbad post had walked the same route on twenty consecutive occasions without varying the routine. Hezbollah had probably noticed the pattern and set the ambush accordingly, the investigation concluded. The bomb, although not a shaped-charge device, was thought to have been triggered by an infrared beam.

  Yet how was it possible that Hezbollah fighters had reached within yards of the border and beside the entrance to one of the biggest Israeli outposts in south Lebanon to plant a large IED without being spotted? “It’s not impossible, but it is complicated and demands a high level of training, and that is apparently what happened in this instance,” said Brigadier General Erez Gerstein, the top Israeli commander in south Lebanon.

  But it was not a fluke. On November 25, Hezbollah repeated the attack by detonating another large roadside bomb in almost exactly the same location as the previous ambush nine days earlier. This time, two soldiers were killed. More soldiers died the very next day from a double roadside bomb attack just four hundred yards from the border fence in the western sector of the zone. That ambush was a Hezbollah classic. The first bomb disabled two APCs without causing casualties, but the second bomb targeted the rescue force, killing two soldiers and wounding another two.

  With seven soldiers dead in just ten days, Netanyahu cut short a visit to Europe to deal with the deterioration in south Lebanon. The mood in Israel was extremely tense, and the prospect of another air and artillery blitz on Lebanon was high. “The Israeli army came very close to launching a second Grapes of Wrath,” Timur Goksel recalls.

  But instead of another air and artillery blitz against south Lebanon, Israel mounted an air offensive of a different kind. For several days in early December 1998, Israeli jets streaked at low altitude above Beirut and other cities and towns, causing earsplitting sonic booms. But the muscle-flexing aerial sorties drew the scorn of the war-hardened Lebanese and were treated as evidence of Israel’s impotence against Hezbollah’s attacks. “The only way they found to deal with holy fighters is terrorize the people in hospitals and children in schools,” Nasrallah jeered.

  Roadside bombs accounted for roughly half of Israel’s casualty figures in south Lebanon in the late 1990s; in 1998, 60 IED attacks claimed 16 of the IDF’s 24 fatalities for the year.7 Finding a means of detecting and neutralizing them was a priority. Following the Ansariyah ambush, Israel lobbied the five-nation group monitoring the April Understanding to have IEDs prohibited, a move that had little chance of succeeding. Hezbollah certainly was not going to abandon its most effective weapon.

  Driving along the roads of the occupation zone became a nerve-racking experience for IDF commanders, who were forced to adopt shifting procedures to stay one step ahead of Hezbollah’s bombs. “I traveled to a lot of the SLA posts and villages [and] it was very dangerous,” recalls Colonel Noam Ben-Zvi, who served in south Lebanon as a brigade commander between 1996 and 2000. “We were in armored vehicles, usually Mercedes, that over the years, with the development of [roadside] charges, no longer protected the passengers. Fear accompanied us on all such tours.… We joked about the danger using black humor.”

  Various safety precautions were instituted, such as traveling at night, changing routines, and avoiding known or suspected ambush sites. IDF and SLA patrols learned literally to count the number of rocks on the sides of roads during daily foot patrols to see if any new “rocks” had materialized overnight. Israeli D-9 armored bulldozers routinely uprooted trees and scraped away vegetation and topsoil for a distance of twenty or thirty yards on either side of main roads to remove cover for Hezbollah’s bombs and destroy any IEDs already in place. Remote control video cameras with long-range infrared sensors were placed beside outposts, along tracks and roads, and even in the rough terrain of wadis to trace potential Hezbollah infiltrators. But Hezbollah fighters were equipped with their own night vision goggles, and they sometimes wore camouflaged neoprene diving suits to mask their heat signature from Israeli thermal-imaging equipment. To infiltrate close to Israeli positions, the wet-suit-clad Hezbollah man would crawl on all fours with his equipment strapped to his chest, appearing on Israeli sensors as nothing more threatening than a wild boar rooting in the undergrowth.

  By the end of 1999, the Israeli army was claiming that it and the SLA were discovering and neutralizing 90 percent of roadside bombs planted in the zone.

  “Hezbollah is constantly trying to improve and increase the destructive powers of the devices,” said Brigadier General Amos Malka, the head of Israeli Military Intelligence in November 1998. “There is a constant improvement on their part and an improvement in our countermeasures. There is a contest of technology and a contest of brain power.”8

  The threat of roadside bombs in early 1999 prompted the Israeli military to provide additional training to SLA militiamen so that they could replace Israeli soldiers manning the vulnerable frontline outposts. No wonder Hezbollah mocked the SLA as Israel’s “sandbags.” The IED threat also required IDF soldiers to serve especially lengthy tours in the zone without leave because of their vulnerability during troop rotations. Sometimes, troops were ferried in and out of the zone by helicopter at night. Some were even transported in civilian vans.

  “Stop! The Border Is in Front of You”

  In January 1999, the struggle between Hezbollah and Israel over the roadside bomb cast the spotlight on the small, isolated village of Arnoun, three miles east of Nabatiyah on the edge of the zone, where only 250 people continued to live, most of them elderly.

  By a quirk of the zone’s configuration, the eastern half of Arnoun was incorporated inside Israeli-controlled territory, while the western half fell into an uneasy no-man’s-land where the Lebanese state had no jurisdiction. A rusty metal swing gate marked the boundary in the center of the village.

  Dominating the village on a bluff to the east was Beaufort Castle, the Crusader-era fortress where a handful of PLO fighters had fought to the death during the 1982 invasion. The Israelis had bolstered Beaufort’s crumbling, weed-encrusted walls with reinforced concrete bunkers, accommodation blocks, machine gun nests, and bomb shelters. Concrete T-walls and ragged sheets of camouflage netting lined the upper reaches of the road winding down the hill from the castle to the village, intended to hide Israeli patrols from Hezbollah’s missiles and bomb ambushes.

  The imposing castle garrisoned by army troops and the huddled village lying in its shadow conjured irresistible images of feudal eras past. On the grassy slopes
below the castle walls, now stealthily traversed by Hezbollah fighters on bomb-laying missions, Salah Eddine, the great Muslim warrior, once bound and tortured Reynaud of Sidon in an unsuccessful attempt to persuade the Frankish occupants to surrender. The Templars had owned the castle for eight years in the thirteenth century before it was stormed and captured by the Mamluke Sultan Baibars. Ahmad Pasha al-Jazzar had destroyed much of Beaufort’s upper fortifications when he seized it along with the other forts strung throughout south Lebanon during his bloody purges against the rebellious Shias of Jabal Amil in the late eighteenth century. What centuries of war and neglect left intact was largely destroyed by Israeli F-16 jets in 1982 before Israeli commandos wrested the castle from its Palestinian defenders. Where Crusader pennants and Islamic banners once adorned the castle ramparts, the blue and white Star of David flag now defiantly snapped in the breeze, an ineluctable reminder to the villagers below of the identity of their latest conqueror.

  The rise and lethality of roadside bomb attacks in the Beaufort Castle area in 1998 led the Israelis and the SLA to impose harsher measures on the residents of Arnoun. On December 27, hours after Hezbollah fighters detonated a roadside bomb beneath the castle wall, Israeli troops demolished seven houses close to where the bomb was planted. Ten days later, the Israelis bulldozed sixteen uninhabited houses after another roadside bomb attack in the same location wounded an Israeli soldier, the first casualty of 1999. The Monitoring Group ruled that the house demolitions were a violation of the 1996 April Understanding, but the Israelis were past caring.

  On February 17, Israeli and SLA forces marched into Arnoun and annexed the unoccupied half of the village into the zone. The few dozen residents awoke the next morning to find themselves separated from the rest of Lebanon by new barricades of bulldozed earth and coils of barbed wire. Dangling from the wire were yellow metal signs warning of land mines, helpfully inscribed in Arabic, English, and Hebrew. On the reverse side was a message written in Arabic: “Stop! The border is in front of you.”

  The IDF said that the measures in Arnoun were designed to “protect its residents” from attacks by Hezbollah. But it was the Israelis in Beaufort Castle that needed protecting from Hezbollah’s roadside bombs, not the hapless residents.

  “We don’t want to live here any longer, not if the wire is going to stay in place. The whole village wants to leave now,” said Khadija Khawaja, a forty-year-old mother, one of several residents who stood on that first morning in a disconsolate huddle behind the wire facing a crowd of reporters and relatives.

  Over the following days, relatives and friends traveled to the edge of the barricaded village to exchange news and hurl bags of bananas, oranges, and flat unleavened bread to the residents. The Lebanese government wrung its hands and fired off volleys of formal, and futile, complaints to the Monitoring Group and the UN Security Council.

  Nine days after Israel sealed off Arnoun, some thousand students from a Communist youth group were bused from Beirut to the outskirts of the village. They carried Lebanese flags and sang patriotic songs, observed from the other side of the fence by a handful of anxious residents. As the crowd grew more boisterous, some of them began tugging at the metal stakes tying down the barbed wire. By now it was well known that the yellow land mine warning signs attached to the wire barricades were fake—the Israelis had not planted any mines when they annexed the village. Someone produced some wire cutters, and with a roar of triumph, the students pulled aside the severed barbed wire and surged into the village. The word quickly spread through mosque loudspeakers in nearby villages and radios and television. As hundreds of people converged on Arnoun, the astonished Israelis could do nothing but watch from the ramparts of Beaufort Castle. The swing gate in the center of the village was shoved open and the students began advancing along the road, past the recently demolished houses, up the hill toward the castle. The Israelis fired warning shots with a machine gun to keep the crowd at bay, but they were powerless to reverse this unexpected development.

  That weekend, Arnoun turned into a circus with thousands of people flocking to celebrate the liberation of the village. Politicians, many of whom had probably never heard of Arnoun a month earlier, hurried to the village to bask in the glow of camera lights and to deliver banal statements.

  The government quickly stepped in, bulldozing away the earth ramparts and barbed wire, asphalting a new road, mending the electricity cables, and digging trenches for water pipes. Prime Minister Salim Hoss also visited the village, promising that the government’s facilities were at the disposal of this “dear part of Lebanon.”

  Suddenly, it seemed, everyone loved Arnoun.

  Crowds of enthusiastic young men played a game of dare with the Israelis in Beaufort Castle, marching up the road to see how close they could get. The dare ended each time with the vicious whip-crack of bullets fired from Israeli machine guns over the heads of the protesters, prompting a swift retreat back to the center of the village.

  Inevitably, after a day of baiting the Israelis in this fashion, a group of youngsters ignored the initial warning shots and continued their progress toward the castle; and, with equal inevitability, the Israeli soldiers, tiring of the sport, lowered their aim and shot and wounded a teenager.

  The storming of Arnoun was not preplanned. But it was a stark demonstration of the power of mass action by unarmed civilians marching against troops whose weapons suddenly were rendered impotent. The lesson was not lost on the Israelis.

  “Can you imagine what would happen if ten thousand [Lebanese] residents came and simply marched up to the Beaufort? What would we do? Shoot them?” asked an unidentified Israeli army officer of Haaretz. The officer noted that the Palestinian intifada a few years earlier had succeeded because of the mobilization of the masses. “As soon as the intifada is employed in the Lebanese context, we’re going to have an even more difficult problem.”9

  The officer could not have known at the time just how prescient were his remarks. In a little over a year, a spontaneous march by a crowd of civilians would bring the occupation to a swift and surprising conclusion.

  “Now We Are Finished”

  In the days that followed the liberation of Arnoun, the crowds began to dwindle, and slowly a semblance of normality returned to the village. The Israelis had no intention of accepting the status quo, however.

  After the SLA allegedly discovered six more IEDs inside an empty house on the still-occupied eastern half of the village, Israel issued a complaint to the Monitoring Group that Hezbollah was using “populated areas to launch terror operations.” It was evident that Israel was preparing the ground for retaking the village.

  The new sense of despondency pervading Arnoun matched the bleak weather one Sunday in late March as a cold wind moaned through the newly strung electric cables and icy rain spattered the pristine black asphalt roads laid in the wake of the village’s liberation. Up the hill toward Beaufort Castle, Israeli engineers worked in the rain to erect more concrete T-walls along the exposed road. Nearby, bulldozers wheeled to and fro, building a new road to bypass the bomb alley in Arnoun.

  A patrol of Israeli soldiers, backed by two armored personnel carriers, inched cautiously down the road from the castle toward the center of the village, each soldier separated from his neighbor by several yards. A bomb-sniffing dog and his handler led the way while the other soldiers followed, moving with catlike stealth, rifles raised, their heads constantly turning, eyes sweeping the sides of the road. Hussein Marouni, an elderly man hunched over a brazier of burning twigs outside his stable, stiffened as the soldiers approached the swing gate just ten yards away, fearful that they might cross into “liberated” Arnoun. As the soldiers reached the gate, one of them squatted on his haunches and slowly aimed his rifle at us, blinking away the rain and squinting through his telescopic sight. After a few seconds, he rose to his feet, and without saying a word, the patrol slowly moved on until they disappeared into a dip in the road.

  In early April, after a hiatu
s of two months, Hezbollah staged two roadside bomb ambushes along the Beaufort–Arnoun road in the space of one week. The second bomb, which killed a soldier, was placed just yards from the entrance to the castle. The next day, two more bombs were detonated against SLA militiamen patrolling near Beaufort.

  Arnoun’s short-lived freedom ended on the night of April 15. Israeli troops and armored vehicles moved into the village to seal it off once and for all with rows of coiled razor wire thirty yards deep. The road, which had been constructed and asphalted with such haste following Arnoun’s liberation six weeks earlier, was destroyed. At least two trenches three feet deep were dug across the road, severing the newly installed water pipes.

  Guarding access to Arnoun was a new outpost of bulldozed earth rammed up against the first house in the village. From behind the earth ramparts the silhouettes of Israeli soldiers were clearly visible against the rising sun the following morning. Some individuals abandoned the village, walking along a narrow dirt path through the coils of razor wire, carrying suitcases or bundles of clothing tied up with belts or cord. Among them was Saed Alawiyah, who claimed to be a hundred years old. Bent double with age and helped along by his wife, Kemli, the frail couple struggled across the uneven path before being defeated by one of the trenches. The pathetic sight of the old man feebly trying to climb out of the trench stirred one reporter to raise his hands in the air for the benefit of the watching soldiers and walk forward to help.

  In a tremulous voice, Alawiyah said, “We built Arnoun, we have always lived here, but now we are finished.”

  Using a bullhorn, a soldier told the throng of reporters, in Arabic, to leave the area, and a handful of smoke grenades were hurled across the barricades to encourage our departure. But the billowing clouds of white smoke proved an attractive sight to capture on film and failed to disperse the journalists.