Warriors of God

by Nicholas Blanford

  But he had had enough. He had spent the night in his outpost in Rihan sheltering while Hezbollah had pounded his compound and the neighboring Israeli position, dropping mortar shells with merciless accuracy onto the reinforced concrete roofs of the bunkers. The stocky militiaman babbled incessantly. He held my arm and tugged it for emphasis, imploring me to do something to help him. I was British, yes? Couldn’t I ask the British embassy to get him a passport? Was there much work in London? His plainclothes colleague writing our names in the ledger smirked but said nothing. My fellow passengers from the taxi looked embarrassed and turned away.

  Gradually his tone changed, his desperation turning into a jumbled stream of bitterness and despair. Why wouldn’t the Lebanese government grant amnesty to the SLA? All they were doing was protecting themselves, their families and homes. The SLA were patriots, so why were they being treated like traitors? At last he fell silent and let go of my arm. With his AK-47 rifle dangling loosely from his hand, the broken militiaman wandered away up the road.

  His despair was emblematic of the disintegration of morale and manpower afflicting the SLA. Hezbollah’s threats, the Lebanese government’s refusal to offer amnesty, and Israel’s silence on its plans to protect the SLA had further aggravated the already deep-rooted paranoia that existed within the militia.

  By early 2000, Shia militiamen were deserting their positions, slipping out of the zone to hand themselves over to the Lebanese army. Hezbollah had begun snatching militiamen from inside the zone, echoing the tactic of a year earlier in the weeks before the SLA withdrawal from Jezzine. Some Christian villagers had already left south Lebanon, and many others were making plans to flee. The exodus of nervous residents had sparked a lucrative spin-off business in some Christian villages. Elias, a resident of Qlaya who had left the SLA a few months earlier, said he had paid $2,000 for a fake Lebanese passport. His service in the SLA prevented him from obtaining a genuine passport. Another $1,000 secured his airfare from Israel to Canada. If the forged travel documents were discovered on arrival in Canada, he would plead political asylum.

  Elias articulated a widely held belief in the zone: that Hezbollah men would steal into their homes at night and slaughter them in their beds after the Israelis had gone. His wife muttered darkly that she had heard many of the SLA men who surrendered the previous year during the pullout from Jezzine had been secretly executed in prison. “But they have hushed it up,” she whispered.

  While some militiamen were packing their bags and making plans to be well away by the time Israel withdrew, others struck a tone of defiance, proclaiming their determination to continue defending their villages and homes against the “outsiders” of Hezbollah.

  A month earlier, Antoine Lahd, the SLA commander who spent much of his time in Paris, vowed to continue fighting Hezbollah after the Israelis had gone. “We will prefer to commit suicide as in Masada, rather than become refugees,” he said, referring to the Jewish Zealots defending the Masada fortress in A.D. 70 who chose to die by their own hand rather than surrender to the Roman legions.

  Such bravado was echoed by several SLA intelligence officers sipping tiny cups of Turkish coffee in a café in Qlaya. “We will fight until the end,” said one, to mutters of approval from his comrades. “If Hezbollah attacks civilians, we will shoot all over the south. They fire one rocket at civilians and we will fire twenty rockets at them.”

  These men were among the originals, former Lebanese soldiers who returned to their homes in Qlaya in 1975 when the army split apart, and formed the nucleus of Saad Haddad’s Army of Free Lebanon (later the SLA). Now gray-haired and paunchy, they were contemplating a return to the past, reviving the old Haddad enclave of the late 1970s and resurrecting the village militias in Christian- and Druze-populated areas of the border district. Already new SLA checkpoints were sprouting up on the edges of Christian villages. Civilians were buying up weapons including rifles, heavy machine guns, and rocket-propelled grenades and were being taught how to fire them at the SLA’s training camp in Majidiyah at the foot of the Shebaa Farms and in woods near the Druze town of Hasbaya.

  “We have relied on our brothers, fathers, uncles, and cousins in the SLA to defend us, but now the time has come where we have to defend ourselves,” said Bassam, a civilian from Qlaya in his midthirties. Displaying his recent purchases on the floor of his small home, Bassam said that he had spent $430 on an M-16 fitted with an M-203 grenade launcher and another $220 on ammunition for the rifle, flares, a helmet, and a backpack with magazine pouches. “I asked myself, should I spend the money on toys for my children, food for my family, or to buy guns?” he said. “I decided to buy guns so that I can defend my family.”

  The contradictory fear and defiance of the militiamen underlined the stark fact that as this vicious little war finally drew to a close, the real losers were the SLA. True, the Israelis would suffer a certain amount of humiliation at being chased out of Lebanon by the Shia warriors of Hezbollah; but the prospects facing the SLA were bleak. They could escape Lebanon for an uncertain future of exile in Israel or elsewhere, banished from their homeland possibly forever; die fighting Hezbollah in a futile and bloody last gesture of defiance; or surrender themselves to the authorities in Beirut and pray for leniency.

  Through necessity rather than design, they had entered an uneasy alliance with Israel a quarter century earlier to confront the menace of the Palestinian militants then threatening their villages. But as the years passed, they had found themselves sucked ever deeper into a vortex of collaboration, their fate becoming shackled to Israel’s fortunes in Lebanon. They were the unwitting victims of tragic circumstance, but now they were about to pay the inevitable price.

  The Collapse

  The end came just three days after my last trip into the zone. A small crowd of mourners had gathered in the frontline village of Ghandouriyah to mark the seventh day since the death of an elderly woman. The woman and the mourners were exiled residents of Qantara, a small hilltop village lying just inside the occupation zone a mile east of Ghandouriyah. Despite the solemn ocassion, the crowd was bubbling with excitement. Days earlier, the SLA had pulled out of its position in Qantara and withdrawn closer to the border, a move that effectively left a large swath of the zone’s central sector no longer under the control of the Israelis. Two men had sneaked into Qantara for a look and then had used their cell phones to pass the message that the village was free of the SLA and it was safe for people to enter. Suddenly the only obstacle preventing the crowd from returning to their former homes in Qantara was a swing gate manned by some increasingly uneasy Finnish UNIFIL soldiers. The peacekeepers tried to warn the crowd that it was dangerous to proceed, but to no avail. They stood back as the swing gate was forced open and the crowd surged down the narrow, potholed lane that descended into Wadi Hojeir before climbing the steep eastern slopes of the valley into Qantara.

  Nazih Mansour, an MP with Hezbollah, was among the first to enter the village. He stopped at one of the first homes. “I entered the house and saw an old man and a woman,” Mansour recalled. “I recognized the man as Abdo Saghir. He used to take me to school. He was scared and didn’t recognize me. I told him who I was and he yelled and burst into tears. I began crying, too, and we hugged each other.”

  Mansour and the crowd pressed on, driven by the momentum of the hundreds of people converging on Qantara as news of its liberation rapidly spread throughout the south. They pushed through another Finnish-manned gate and surged through the villages of Qsair and Deir Sirian before entering the outskirts of Taibe, the largest village in the area. “The scene in Taibe was indescribable,” Mansour said. “People were running out of their houses barefoot to greet us. It was truly a historic moment.”

  The SLA militiamen in a large fortified outpost on a hill above the village fired a few desultory warning shots but were unable to quell the triumphant advance. Using a bullhorn, Mansour called on the militiamen to surrender. Around sixteen of them did so. The others began abandoning the p
osition and streaming eastward toward Addaysah village, a little over a mile to the east of Taibe and adjacent to the border itself.

  By early evening, the Israelis were scrambling to check the headlong civilian advance. A bulldozed earth barricade blocked the entrance to Addaysah on the Taibe road, and tanks maneuvered into position on the outskirts of the village.

  The civilian push into the northern part of the central sector came close to severing the zone in half. By nightfall, only a narrow strip of territory at Addaysah, between the dizzying depths of the Litani River gorge and the border with Israel, linked the eastern sector to the central and western sectors.

  It was a remarkable development that threatened to upset Israel’s plans for an orderly withdrawal. Hezbollah’s leadership was as surprised as everyone else at the day’s turn of events. “Hezbollah had plans for the withdrawal and we were almost ready,” Mansour said. “But no one expected it to end like this. The popular movement changed all our programs.”

  Instead of mounting a final offensive against the departing Israelis, Hezbollah decided to take advantage of the momentum created by the civilian marches. As night fell, Hezbollah fighters went on full alert throughout the south as local commanders turned their attention to another occupied village lying some five miles south of Qantara: Houla.

  SEVEN

  The “Spider’s Web”

  I tell you: the Israel that owns nuclear weapons and has the strongest air force in the region is weaker than the spider’s web.

  —SAYYED HASSAN NASRALLAH

  May 26, 2000

  MAY 22, 2000

  SHAQRA, south Lebanon—A densely packed convoy of cars, motorcycles, minibuses, and pickup trucks jammed the narrow, potholed lane snaking down the steep western slope of Wadi Salouqi, a valley that a few hours earlier had marked the front line of Israel’s occupation zone. Now the front line was on the move, retreating almost by the minute toward the Israeli frontier three miles to the east, as thousands of civilians streamed into the zone through this narrow breach.

  Hezbollah had moved quickly to capitalize on the extraordinary events of the day before, selecting Shaqra village as the rallying point for a march on occupied Houla, lying on the eastern side of Wadi Salouqi. If the civilians could seize Houla, there was nothing to stop them from reaching the border with Israel itself, effectively severing the occupation zone in two.

  Hezbollah commanders contacted some former residents of Houla and urged them to spread the word to assemble beside the Irish UNIFIL checkpoint on the eastern outskirts of Shaqra, ready for a dawn march across Wadi Salouqi. The exiled villagers needed little encouragement. Many of them had not set foot in their home village for at least fifteen years.

  By the time the dawn sun inched over the eastern skyline, several hundred people had gathered in Shaqra beside a swing gate, guarded by Irish UNIFIL soldiers, that barred access to Wadi Salouqi and a road that no civilian had driven along since 1985. The Irish soldiers vainly tried to persuade the crowd not to proceed, but they had no more luck than their Finnish colleagues a day earlier. Israeli artillery guns shelled the tinder-dry slopes of Wadi Salouqi, starting small brush fires, in an attempt to intimidate the crowd from proceeding toward Houla. But the crowd was not to be put off, neither by Israeli shelling nor by the entreaties of Irish peacekeepers. At 9:00 A.M., Hezbollah men, dressed in civilian clothes, made the decision to force open the gate. The helpless Irish soldiers stood back as the gate swung open and the crowd surged through.

  In a final attempt to stop the crowd from reaching Houla, an Israeli jet dropped an aerial bomb onto the road two hundred yards short of the village. The blast sent a towering column of gray smoke and dust into the air. But the bomb cratered only two thirds of the road, leaving enough space for cars to inch past and enter Houla. There was nothing more the Israelis could do but watch in frustration and alarm. “We discussed whether to stop them, but that would have meant killing civilians. And we were leaving the area anyway,” recalls Major General Moshe Kaplinsky, then commander of the Galilee Division, part of the IDF’s Northern Command.

  Residents of Houla came running down the road to greet the motorcade, withered old women hurling handfuls of rice in welcome and stooped old men wearing keffiyahs hobbling along with the support of walking sticks. The traffic ground to a halt as entire families burst out of their vehicles on seeing loved ones or reaching their original homes.

  Sixty-five-year-old Sikni Said hugged a bearded man in his thirties who had a huge grin on his face. “My son, my son,” she said softly as tears coursed down her wrinkled cheeks.

  “I have not seen my parents for thirteen years,” sobbed Abdullah Mustafa as he greeted his elderly mother and father. “I am feeling a great happiness that cannot be described. This is our land and we have come back.”

  The chaotic scenes of jubilation and greeting on the streets of the village were tempered by the throng of stern-looking Hezbollah and Amal men who also entered the village. One suspected collaborator was pushed into the back of a Mercedes by a group of men carrying automatic pistols. Some residents tried to intervene, insisting he was a civilian. An aggrieved resident snatched a pistol and fired several shots into the air before being calmed by friends. The Mercedes with the suspected collaborator inside sped out of the village on a side road as scuffles broke out between the rival Hezbollah and Amal men.

  “This Is Palestine!”

  The crowd, buoyed by their success in “liberating” Houla, turned their attention to Markaba, the neighboring village just to the north. A long burst of heavy machine gun fire erupted from the SLA’s outpost in Markaba as the last defenders loosed off warning rounds before fleeing.

  The vanguard of the motorcade inched through Houla’s tight, winding streets. On reaching the border road, some vehicles turned south toward the village of Meiss al-Jabal, others north toward Markaba and Addaysah.

  It was an extraordinary moment. Enthusiastic Hezbollah supporters carrying yellow party flags surged up the road just a few yards from the border fence and in full view of Israeli army positions. The road followed a two-thousand-foot ridge that afforded impressive views to the east—the flat irrigated farmland of northern Galilee lying far below, and beyond that the gently rising grassy slopes of the Golan Heights, and to the north the imposing massif of Mount Hermon barely visible through the early summer haze.

  “This is Palestine,” said an awestruck man to his friend, gesturing expansively at the sight before them.

  With Hezbollah flags fluttering from car windows, the first vehicles passed directly beneath Israeli troops in their border outposts and entered Markaba to receive another rapturous welcome from the residents hurling fistfuls of rice that stung our faces, caught in our hair, and beat against car windshields like tiny hail. A group of Hezbollah fighters raced into the SLA’s now-abandoned outpost on the edge of the village, reappearing minutes later with a victor’s booty of grenades, helmets, flak jackets, and belts of ammunition which they packed into their car.

  The occupation zone was now split in two, the civilian marchers having established a narrow bridgehead on the border between Markaba and Houla. Israeli commanders knew that it was impossible to reverse the situation, but they agreed that it must be contained as long as possible to prevent a general collapse of the SLA and give time for the Israeli troops to retreat across the border. For there would be no waiting until the self-imposed July deadline for the final pullout. The IDF knew that this was the end; the only concern now was to withdraw their soldiers as swiftly and as safely as possible.

  The SLA regrouped in Addaysah, two miles north of Markaba. Addaysah lay in a narrow bottleneck between the Litani River and the border with Israel with only one road cutting through. It was a natural choke point, and the SLA, backed by Israeli firepower, seemed determined to make a stand there.

  Five Apache helicopter gunships hovered with undisguised menace high above the jubilant civilian crowds racing up and down the short stretch of border road.
Two teenagers on scooters shot past me, heading north. One of the Apaches opened fire at the road just ahead of them, its 30 mm chain gun flaying the asphalt, whipping up small fountains of dust and stones as the rotor blades spun the gun smoke into spirals. Both teenagers fell off their scooters in surprise, then hurriedly remounted and raced back to Houla. A pair of Merkava tanks emerged on the edge of the Israeli outpost at Misgav Am on a hill overlooking Addaysah, their barrels pointed ominously at the border road. Another tank sidled into position beside the large Israeli compound on Sheikh Abbad Hill. Israeli artillery units began a widespread bombardment of areas facing the western and central sectors, the dirty gray puffs of smoke visible from the border road striking the outskirts of what were just a day earlier the frontline villages of Majdal Silm and Shaqra. The Taibe outpost, abandoned by the SLA the previous day, was destroyed in a large explosion that sent a huge column of smoke and dust rising into the air. Like the mainsail of a vast Spanish galleon, the cloud of dust drifted on the breeze eastward across the border into Israel before gradually dissipating. Hezbollah men had set charges around the old position and blown it up, as they would other abandoned Israeli and SLA outposts in the coming days.