Warriors of God

by Nicholas Blanford

  “Go to your cars. Get out now,” the soldier yelled. Rifle shots rang out and we ran for cover as bullets cracked past us, striking cars and flicking the dust on the road. Qassem Dergham, a sound engineer for Abu Dhabi television and a veteran of Lebanon’s wars, was hit in the back—fortunately, by a plastic bullet rather than a live round, and he was not seriously hurt.

  The SLA warned that anyone approaching the village from then on would be shot. But if the Israelis hoped that seizing Arnoun would ease the pressure on Beaufort, they were mistaken. Over the following month, Hezbollah concentrated its efforts on the castle, finding little difficulty in penetrating the new defenses around Arnoun to plant further roadside bombs. On May 4, three Israeli soldiers were wounded when Hezbollah mortar teams dropped rounds with impressive accuracy right on top of the Israeli fortifications inside the castle.

  “It’s All a Matter of Luck”

  The highlight of Hezbollah’s roadside bomb campaign came at the end of February 1999. Brigadier General Erez Gerstein, the top Israeli commander in Lebanon, had driven to Shebaa on the eastern tip of the occupation zone to pay condolences to the family of a local SLA intelligence chief murdered two months earlier in a dispute over the sharing of proceeds in the lucrative cross-border smuggling trade into Syria, which lay a short donkey ride over the mountain passes of Mount Hermon northeast of the village. Shortly before midday, Gerstein left Shebaa in his armor-plated Mercedes, accompanied by three other civilian vehicles. Traveling with the general in his car were two soldiers and a reporter from Israel Radio.

  The convoy had just passed an Indian UNIFIL position near the village of Kawkaba when the Mercedes carrying Gerstein broke an infrared beam and detonated a shaped-charge IED that blasted the vehicle off the road, sending it tumbling down the side of a valley in a ball of fire. The car was completely destroyed and all four occupants killed. A second bomb exploded twenty-five minutes later against an SLA vehicle, wounding two militiamen.

  This was the second attempt by Hezbollah to kill Gerstein, and it was planned well in advance. The bombs had been planted a month earlier by a Hezbollah Special Forces team that infiltrated the zone from the north and crept through the rugged hills near Kawkaba to the stretch of road selected for the ambush. A second Hezbollah unit even slipped back into the zone after a couple of weeks to exchange the battery on the main IED for a fully charged replacement. But the batteries on three other IEDs were not replaced, an oversight that spared the Israelis further casualties in the minutes after Gerstein’s Mercedes was blasted off the road.

  In the days that followed, Israeli and SLA forces imposed a clampdown on neighboring villages, suspecting Hezbollah had inside assistance for the assassination. Although the culprits were never found, several Lebanese intelligence sources confirmed that the information on Gerstein’s condolence trip to Shebaa was leaked to Syrian military intelligence by a network of agents under the control of Ramzi Nohra. After his expulsion from the zone in July 1998 following his release from prison in Israel, Ramzi had continued his clandestine activities from Beirut. His network covered much of the northern sector, the corridor running from his home village of Ibl es-Saqi to Jezzine at the northern tip of the zone.

  Gerstein’s assassination was a spectacular success for Hezbollah. He was the most senior Israeli commander to be assassinated in Lebanon since Israel’s military involvement with its northern neighbor began in the mid-1970s. A few months before his death, Gerstein had been asked by a reporter if he believed that his armored Mercedes could withstand a roadside bomb attack. “It’s all a matter of luck,” Gerstein had replied.

  Sheikh Nabil Qawq would later tell me that Gerstein’s killing ranked alongside the 1997 Ansariyah ambush and Ahmad Qassir’s suicide bombing of the Israeli headquarters in Tyre in 1982 as the top three operations carried out by Hezbollah during the years of occupation.

  The loss of the IDF’s top commander in Lebanon had a profound impact on Israeli public opinion. This was not a junior-ranking soldier serving in dangerous frontline positions or on ambush duty in Wadi Salouqi. Gerstein was the tough, no-nonsense combat commander who believed in the value of the “security zone” and viewed Hezbollah as “third-rate terrorists.”10 His death underlined the stark fact that no Israeli soldier in south Lebanon was immune to Hezbollah’s bombs and missiles, that the Shia group seemingly could pick off whomever it wanted whenever it wanted.

  “Reality has thrown us a slap in the face. Of all people, Erez was a guy who was wholeheartedly in favor of staying in Lebanon and taking a tough stance, a fellow who always belittled the Hezbollah,” said an anonymous senior Israeli army officer in an extraordinary and frank monologue published by Israel’s Haaretz newspaper, entitled “Time to Go.”11

  The time has come to stop mincing words: we have no business staying in Lebanon.… Have you been to south Lebanon recently? Have you seen what kind of outposts we’ve built there in the last year? We are sitting in these huge armored fortresses, which of course invite enemy shelling, and we make convoys leading to them into easy targets. Little by little we’re becoming Crusaders who primarily guard only ourselves.

  Ehud Barak, then the leader of the opposition Labor Party, sensed the declining public support for continued Israeli involvement in Lebanon and announced the day after Gerstein was killed that if he won the elections that May, he would “bring the boys home” from Lebanon within a year.

  “A Strategic Weapon in Lebanese Hands”

  While Hezbollah’s roadside bombs provided the main tactical challenge to Israeli troops and SLA militiamen in the zone in the late 1990s, the Netanyahu government found itself confounded by the strategic threat posed by the Katyusha rocket.

  Since the Grapes of Wrath operation, Hezbollah had further refined its Katyusha tactic. When Israel or the SLA caused an insufficient number of Lebanese civilian casualties to warrant a full-scale cross-border rocket attack, Hezbollah would send a “limited” warning by pounding IDF positions straddling the border, allowing a few stray rounds to fly over the frontier to explode harmlessly in Israel.

  One August morning in 1998, two Israeli Apache helicopter gunships killed Hussam Amine, a longtime Amal member who served on Nabih Berri’s bodyguard detail. Amine was driving along a lane through orange orchards near the coast south of Tyre when the helicopters struck. The first missile missed Amine’s blue Mercedes and burrowed deep into the sun-softened asphalt of the road before exploding. The second hit the vehicle, knocking it off the road and blowing Amine to pieces. Thick gouts of blood pooled on the seats of the fire-blackened car. Strips of red meat hung like grotesque fruit from the branches of an orange tree as youngsters scampered through the undergrowth retrieving wreckage from the car and the scattered remains of the dead Amal man.

  That evening, Hezbollah fired forty-seven Katyusha rockets into northern Israel, slightly wounding seventeen civilians. The gut instinct of the Israeli government and army was to lash back at Hezbollah to avenge the rocket attack as well as the deaths of three Israeli soldiers in separate attacks that week. But the Israeli government knew that a retaliation in Lebanon risked triggering more Katyusha rocket salvos. The dilemma facing the Israelis was that Hezbollah’s rocket barrage had nothing to do with Amine’s death. While the Apache helicopters were firing missiles at Amine’s car, Hezbollah guerrillas farther north killed an SLA militiaman in the Jezzine district. The SLA retaliated by shelling Mashghara, a mixed Christian and Shia village adjacent to the Jezzine enclave, wounding six civilians, setting a car on fire, and damaging houses. Hezbollah had cautioned just two days earlier that the rate of Lebanese civilian casualties was increasing and that it could force a Katyusha rocket response against Israel. Hezbollah fulfilled its warning and rocketed Israel, and the Israeli government, tacitly acknowledging that Hezbollah had played within the rules of the game, was stuck for a counterresponse.

  “In the past, anyone who launched rockets into Israel could count on a counterstrike by the Israel Defense Forces; nowa
days, Hezbollah has the last word,” wrote Zvi Barel, an Israeli commentator in Haaretz. “The primitive Katyusha rocket has become, in the Israeli-Lebanese arena, a strategic weapon in Lebanese hands.”

  “This Time We Will Respond”

  The Netanyahu government found itself stuck, once again, for a retaliatory option when Hezbollah fired a volley of rockets into Israel four months later in response to the deaths of seven members of a family during an Israeli air strike against a Hezbollah radio antenna in the Bekaa Valley. Israel was at fault for the civilian deaths, and Hezbollah had retaliated according to the unwritten rules of the game.

  Netanyahu, who had been criticized for not retaliating for the Katyusha attack the previous August, told reporters during a tour of rocket damage in Kiryat Shemona, “This time we will respond.” But he didn’t.

  Two months later, on February 28, 1999, hours after General Gerstein was killed, Netanyahu, Major General Shaul Mofaz, the IDF chief of staff, and Moshe Arens, the defense minister, stood before the television cameras and announced the launch of a new offensive against Hezbollah. The Israelis were understandably incensed over Gerstein’s assassination as well as the deaths five days earlier of three officers, including a major, when a unit from the Paratroop Reconnaissance Battalion stumbled into a Hezbollah ambush. But the roadside bomb attack against Gerstein and the ambush against the paratroops fell within the April Understanding and could not be used to justify a punishing counterstrike. So the Israeli government seized upon a pair of Katyusha rockets fired across the border hours before Gerstein was killed as the excuse for launching the offensive, even though Hezbollah had denied firing any rockets and UNIFIL said it had seen nothing. As Israeli jets flew up the Bekaa Valley to bomb a building near Baalbek as well as other targets along the edges of the zone, a stern-faced Mofaz told reporters assembled in the ministry of defense, “The offensive action will continue also on the ground, from the air and the sea. The army will fight Hezbollah.”

  In an apparent gesture of Israeli resolve, a convoy of armored personnel carriers and self-propelled artillery guns drove through the streets of Kiryat Shemona, slowly enough to be filmed by eager television crews, conveying the impression that the Israeli army was preparing to smash Hezbollah.

  UNIFIL went on red alert, anticipating another Grapes of Wrath operation. Civilians in northern Israel hurried into their air-conditioned underground bomb shelters and civilians in southern Lebanon closed their front doors, lit cigarettes, and awaited Israel’s latest punishment.

  But after the initial half dozen air raids that night, nothing more happened.

  As I stood the next morning on the rooftop ramparts of the Crusader castle in Tibnine with its panoramic views over the hills and ridges of the western and central sectors of the zone, nothing stirred. Not a bullet, shell, or bomb interrupted the pastoral calm.

  Netanyahu’s fist-shaking threats and vows of retaliation were becoming King Lear–like in their emptiness. Israeli columnist Alex Fishman cuttingly wrote of the one-night offensive, “It wasn’t a lion that roared. It was a mouse crying before it wriggled back into its hole.”12

  The beleaguered Israeli prime minister was loath to undertake any action that risked more rockets on northern Israel and more unfavorable press headlines. He was fighting a tough electoral battle against Ehud Barak, whose pledge to pull the troops out of Lebanon within a year of taking office had won broad public support.

  Barak subsequently trounced his Likud rival in the general election in mid-May 1999. He had won a broad mandate to pursue peace with Syria, but the clock was ticking. He had promised the electorate that Israel would be out of Lebanon within a year. But the collapsing morale of the SLA militia in the Jezzine salient at the northern tip of the zone suggested that a major reconfiguration of the occupation zone was imminent and would not await diplomatic developments between Israel and Syria.

  SIX

  “The Lebanese Valley of the Dead”

  This is one war we have lost. If we are fated to leave anyway—let’s do it now.

  —YOEL MARCUS,

  Haaretz, February 11, 2000

  JUNE 1, 1999

  JEZZINE, south Lebanon—The thunderclap of an explosion burst along the broad main street and echoed off the steep limestone mountains that flanked the town. A column of black smoke coiled swiftly into the air from behind pale gray stone houses on the northern edge of Jezzine, just around the corner from where we were chatting with a group of SLA militiamen. Hezbollah fighters hidden in the rocky slopes of Niha Mountain, which towered over Jezzine to the east, had detonated a roadside bomb. Militiamen in the stark gray cinder block fortress that housed the SLA’s Jezzine battalion headquarters opened fire with heavy machine guns, raking the imposing slopes of the adjacent mountains in a hopeless attempt to hit the perpetrators of the bombing. Hezbollah mortar rounds pummeled an SLA outpost on a hill to the southwest of the town, each round sending up blossoms of yellow dust and gray smoke.

  The roadside bomb had targeted a car driven by one of the SLA militiamen deployed at the checkpoint at the northern entrance of the town. The blast killed the militiaman and knocked his car off the road onto the roof of a house in the valley below. Hezbollah had apparently earmarked the militiaman for assassination. A subsequent videotape of the bomb attack broadcast on Al-Manar showed a civilian car passing the hidden bomb. The audio just caught the faint voice of a Hezbollah man saying “No, no, no,” telling a colleague that it was not the correct target. Moments later the hapless militiaman’s vehicle came into view and then disappeared in a puff of gray smoke as the bomb exploded.

  “Are you coming?” a Lebanese reporter called to me, holding the door of his car open as other journalists crammed inside. I squeezed into the back and we tore down the road toward the scene of the bombing. But militiamen on the embankment above us fired their rifles in the air and yelled at us to go back. An M-113 armored personnel carrier clattered down the high street at high speed, swerving violently. A wild-eyed militiaman stood through the hatch and screamed at reporters not to take photographs. “Mamnoua! Mamnoua! (Forbidden! Forbidden!)” he yelled.

  It was the second day of the SLA’s pullout from the mountainous Jezzine salient, and it was not going well.

  “Jesus, Save Me!”

  The SLA battalion in Jezzine had all but lost control of the enclave in the first few months of 1999, and it was clear that the militia could not hold on for another year while Ehud Barak tentatively explored the diplomatic track with Syria. At the beginning of January, seventeen men abruptly announced they were quitting the militia and requested asylum from the Lebanese government. In February, Hezbollah staged an unprecedented assault on the headquarters of the SLA in the center of Jezzine, pinning down SLA reinforcements in nearby hilltop outposts with accurate mortar fire while destroying armored vehicles and buildings inside the compound.

  Emile Nasr had been replaced as commander of the SLA’s Jezzine battalion the previous August after he suffered a nervous breakdown brought on by the threat of assassination by Hezbollah. According to sources connected to Lebanese military intelligence as well as former SLA double agents, shortly before Nasr returned to his home village of Aishiyah, a few miles south of Jezzine, he brokered a deal through Ramzi Nohra in which he offered to provide intelligence from inside the zone in exchange for his life. The offer was accepted, and Nasr lived the last months of the occupation in peace. Nasr slipped out of the zone in May 2000, just days before the Israelis withdrew, and turned himself over to the Lebanese army.

  Nasr’s replacement, Joseph Karam, nicknamed “Alloush,” was critically wounded in an IED ambush in April, the third to target the SLA commander since he took over the Jezzine battalion. His driver was killed, and Karam was flown to Israel for treatment.

  The Israelis struggled to find a replacement for Karam, but no one wanted a job that was little more than a suicide mission. Mouna Touma, the brother of Maher who had assisted Ramzi Nohra in the abduction of Ahmad Hallaq, w
as appointed acting SLA commander pending a full-time replacement. According to former intelligence sources, Hezbollah had warned Maher Touma that it was about to begin targeting senior SLA commanders and he should tell his brother to quit the militia before it was too late. If he stayed, he could end up dead. But Mouna Touma did not heed the advice. Two weeks after the IED ambush that ended Karam’s tenure in Jezzine, Touma was killed in another roadside bomb ambush staged in almost exactly the same location.

  SLA militiamen from farther south were deployed to the salient to help reinforce the dwindling battalion, which now numbered fewer than two hundred militiamen, most of whom stayed at home and refused to travel along the bomb-lined roads. Armed Hezbollah fighters began roaming the district in broad daylight, twice setting up checkpoints on main roads and abducting militiamen. “Collaborators! Watch and learn what your fate will be if you don’t repent,” Al-Manar television said in a commentary accompanying one of the filmed abductions.

  Two weeks after Touma’s death, Antoine Lahd, the SLA chief, finally gave up. He informed the IDF that the situation in Jezzine was no longer tenable and that the militia would have to be withdrawn from the salient.

  The pullout began on May 27 when families of SLA militiamen living in Jezzine packed their belongings into cars and drove south toward Marjayoun. Three days later, the SLA abandoned outposts to the west of Jezzine and pulled back to the mountain town. A convoy of T-55 tanks and armored personnel carriers transported militiamen and equipment from Jezzine along a winding mountain road toward the new frontline positions nearly six miles to the south. Hezbollah was waiting for them, however. An hour after the convoy departed, a series of flashes lit up the night sky to the south, followed seconds later by the thump of explosions as Hezbollah fighters, hidden in the hills flanking the road, detonated a string of IEDs. One militiaman was killed and another wounded in the attacks, which bogged down the retreat and left several bomb-damaged vehicles abandoned on the side of the road. A nervous militiaman in Jezzine fired a burst from his .50 caliber machine gun into the mountains to the east where Hezbollah had its hidden observation posts overlooking the town. A T-55 tank parked on the edge of the town fired a few shells into the hills, orange bubbles of flame from each exploding round pricking the blackness of the night.