Warriors of God

by Nicholas Blanford

  In early July, Terje Roed Larsen, the UN peace coordinator, negotiated a written agreement with President Lahoud in which Lebanon would accept and honor the Blue Line, “with reservations.” The Israelis provided a similar document, and on July 24, two months to the day after the last Israeli tank crossed the border, UNIFIL finally was able to confirm that Israel had departed Lebanon in conformity with Resolution 425.

  In early August 2000, UNIFIL began moving to new positions along the Blue Line, followed days later by the first Lebanese troops to deploy in the border district in a quarter century. The soldiers were met with tears and handfuls of thrown rice in Qlaya and Marjayoun. Lebanese politicians and UN officials spoke of a new dawn for southern Lebanon, a “welcome exercise of sovereignty,” and the restoration of state control in compliance with Resolution 425. However, the deployment was a chimera. Only a thousand personnel moved into the former occupation zone, a joint task force of five hundred military police and five hundred paramilitary Internal Security officers. Ghazi Zeaiter, the Lebanese defense minister, said that the force would not deploy along the Blue Line as “border guards” for Israel.

  During that long, hot summer, a cautious calm settled over southern Lebanon as all parties adjusted to the new realities on the ground. Within days of the withdrawal, Hezbollah began to quietly deploy militarily along the Blue Line. Fighters took over several former Israeli outposts close to the border. The former SLA training camp at Majidiyah at the foot of the Shebaa Farms hills became Hezbollah’s logistical headquarters for the eastern sector. Small observation positions were established along the Blue Line, initially consisting of a little more than a tent or hut, some camouflage netting, and seats. One observation post was located beside the Israeli security fence near an outpost on the edge of the Shebaa Farms. Unknown to the hospitable Hezbollah men who offered us small glasses of tea freshly brewed over an open fire, they had crossed the unmarked Blue Line and were about two hundred yards into the Israeli-controlled Farms. The militants were unarmed, wearing civilian clothes and carrying only walkie-talkies and binoculars. The daily clashes may have ended, ran the unspoken message, but Hezbollah is still here.

  Although Hezbollah refrained from direct military action against Israel, it quietly encouraged the phenomenon of stone throwing at some key locations along the border, chiefly the Fatima Gate crossing in Kfar Kila and on the summit of Sheikh Abbad Hill. On weekends, large crowds congregated to lob stones and other missiles across the border fence at Israeli soldiers hidden in fortified observation posts fitted with bulletproof glass. While stones may have been preferable to bullets, the Israelis leveled constant complaints to the UN that UNIFIL was not doing enough to prevent disturbances along the border. By late August, Israel had lodged 348 complaints with the UN over Lebanese civilians hurling stones, metal rods, bottles of boiling oil, fireworks, and firebombs across the border fence at Israeli soldier and civilians. Sheikh Naim Qassem described the stone throwing as a “form of freedom”; UNIFIL refused to become involved in what it said was a policing duty.

  Despite the tensions generated by the stone-throwing, Fatima Gate and Sheikh Abbad Hill often exuded a carnival-like atmosphere, especially on weekends when hundreds of sightseers flocked to the border. Visitors could take a break from lobbing stones over the fence and buy Hezbollah kitsch at a stall beside the crossing, such as flags, bumper stickers, T-shirts, key chains, watches with portraits of Nasrallah on the face, tapes of martial songs, propaganda videos, and books. Other stalls sold grilled corn on the cob or Arabic coffee.

  On Sheikh Abbad Hill, Lebanese civilians could stand as close as three feet from stern-faced Israeli soldiers, separated only by the tomb of the sheikh (or rabbi). One day a group of grinning Lebanese men stood on the tomb, arms locked, and danced the dabke, Lebanon’s national dance, before two very unhappy-looking Israeli soldiers. After that incident, the Israelis placed a stiff wire fence lengthwise along the tomb. Undaunted by the new obstacle, a Lebanese youth one morning taunted Israeli soldiers by dangling a yellow Hezbollah flag on the end of a stick over the top of the fence. The youth’s friends laughed as the flag bobbed just inches above the head of a visibly irritated soldier. Losing his patience, the soldier made a grab for the flag, but the Lebanese youth was too quick and flicked it out of reach. The soldier scowled and stroked the trigger of his rifle as the Lebanese mocked him with raucous laughter.

  Dreaming of Hezbollah

  Yet the Israeli army had more troubling concerns about the future stability of the Lebanon-Israel border than the odd stone flying over the fence. Since the withdrawal in May, there had been a near-ceaseless barrage of warnings from Israeli military officials that Hezbollah was preparing for a renewed military struggle. Specifically, the Israelis expected Hezbollah to carry out kidnappings of soldiers or civilians, in Israel or abroad, and also to exploit the Shebaa Farms as a new theater of military operations.

  Hezbollah took every opportunity to flex its military muscles rhetorically and remind Israel that there was unfinished business between the two of them, namely, the occupation of the Shebaa Farms and the continued detention of Lebanese prisoners in Israel. In July, Israel extended the administrative detention of Sheikh Abdel-Karim Obeid and Mustafa Dirani, prolonging their indefinite incarceration as bargaining chips for the return of missing Israeli servicemen. Dirani, the onetime leader of the Believers’ Resistance, had just begun his seventh year behind bars in Israel, and Obeid had been a detainee for eleven years. Hezbollah vowed to secure the release of Obeid, Dirani, and the remaining Lebanese prisoners. “We will never rest until we see them free; we will work with all means to secure the release of Sheikh Obeid, Dirani, and all the hostages,” a statement from the party said.

  The pledge was not mere rhetoric. Nasrallah had warned Kofi Annan when the two met in Beirut in June that he would allow only a few months for diplomacy to secure the release of the detainees. If diplomacy failed, Nasrallah told the UN chief, he would seek more drastic methods to bring the detainees home. And by late summer, despite the semblance of calm along the border, Israel’s gloomy predictions had proved entirely accurate: Hezbollah was preparing the next stage in its military campaign against Israel.

  Ideologically, Hezbollah’s conflict with Israel had always been much bigger than simply ending the occupation of south Lebanon. There was a moral and religious obligation to confront the Zionist state all the way to the liberation of Jerusalem. Yet that ideological objective was necessarily tempered by the realities of the political environment within which Hezbollah operated. In the months before the collapse of the Israel-Syria peace talks at Geneva in March 2000, when expectations of a breakthrough were high, Hezbollah was forced to digest the possibility that the armed struggle against Israel might soon come to an end. But the failure of Geneva, and the subsequent abandoning of the Syria track by Israel and the United States, forestalled any further need for internal mulling of the party’s future options if a regional peace deal had been concluded.

  The end of the peace process provided the opportunity, while Israel’s occupation of the Shebaa Farms and its refusal to release the last Lebanese detainees granted Hezbollah and the Lebanese government public justification, endorsed by the new leadership in Damascus.

  Hafez al-Assad had died on June 10, just seventeen days after the last Israeli soldier had departed from Lebanon. His son Bashar, who had been groomed to inherit the presidency since the death of his older brother, Basil, six years earlier, was elected head of state the following month. Hafez al-Assad had always viewed Hezbollah as a useful tool that not only helped cement Syria’s relationship with Iran but also could be exploited to extract concessions from Israel during peace negotiations. Bashar al-Assad, however, did not share his father’s cold realism, and viewed Hezbollah’s martial accomplishments with admiration. Unlike his father, who only met with Nasrallah twice, Bashar was well acquainted with the Hezbollah chief and appeared to hold him in high regard.

  While the collapse of the
peace process was greeted with satisfaction by Iran and Hezbollah, it made for an inopportune moment to become the new leader of Syria. The Americans and Ehud Barak had abandoned Syria to pursue a last-minute deal with the Palestinians before President Clinton’s term in office expired. Israel had withdrawn from south Lebanon, removing Syria’s main means of leverage against the Jewish state as well as principal justification for maintaining its military presence in Lebanon. For Syria, a new limited conflict on the Shebaa Farms front would serve the dual purpose of renewing pressure on Israel and reminding the United States that Damascus could not be ignored if stability was to be maintained between Lebanon and Israel.

  The Return of Ramzi Nohra

  Hezbollah’s military leadership settled on a kidnapping operation as the best means of launching its new campaign against Israel and the most effective option to secure the release of the detainees. The Shebaa Farms was selected as the venue for the abduction operation, rather than the Lebanon-Israel border, in order to confirm the occupied mountainside as the new theater of conflict and bolster the notion of legitimacy, at least in the eyes of the Arab and Islamic worlds if not the West.

  “The operation in Shebaa had a double meaning,” Nasrallah said later.4 “One, to remind that Shebaa is Lebanese-occupied land and it is only our natural right to fight to recover it. Second, the operation has a humanitarian goal, that of releasing the Lebanese hostages and prisoners held in Israel. I think choosing this place will enjoy national consent since we fought on occupied land and took Israeli soldiers from occupied Lebanese land.”

  Imad Mughniyah was placed in overall charge of the planning, and he enlisted some of Hezbollah’s top combat commanders to head the operation on the ground. They settled on a gate in the border fence, about a mile south of Shebaa village, for the location of the kidnapping. It was the obvious choice, as the gate lay beside a road that allowed the abduction team swift egress either to Shebaa or to Kfar Shuba. Although Israeli troops routinely inspected the padlock on the gate, the Hezbollah planners needed to find a way to guarantee the presence of soldiers at a prearranged time to ensure the success of an operation that required split-second timing and coordination between multiple units. They turned once again to Ramzi Nohra.

  Following the Israeli withdrawal, Nohra had returned to his home in Ibl es-Saqi and reestablished his cross-border links to Israeli drug smugglers. Hezbollah harnessed Nohra’s access to Israel for intelligence purposes. Despite its opposition to drugs on moral and religious grounds, Hezbollah was not averse to using narcotics as a weapon of war against Israel. According to Lebanese sources with intimate knowledge of the operation, Nohra told his Israeli contacts that he had a package of drugs for them and could arrange a transaction across the Blue Line in the rugged Shebaa Farms area. His Israeli interlocutors approached relatives in the Israeli army who were deployed on the Shebaa Farms front to pick up the package.

  In the weeks leading to the abduction, Indian peacekeepers saw Israeli soldiers and what they took to be Hezbollah men talking to one another through the fence at the Shebaa pond gate.5

  By the end of September, preparations for the abduction were in place; all that remained to be decided was the timing. Ironically, the person who started the countdown for the kidnapping was none other than Ariel Sharon. On September 28, Sharon, the opposition leader, escorted by a thousand policemen and bodyguards, went for an early morning stroll around the Temple Mount compound in Jerusalem, which houses the Al-Aqsa mosque, the third-holiest shrine in Islam. Sharon claimed he was simply making the point that Israel was in charge of the compound and that Jews had the right to visit the Temple Mount. But the hundreds of Palestinians who were praying at the site that morning saw Sharon’s visit as a deliberate act of provocation. The worshippers rioted and threw stones at the police and Sharon’s entourage. The Al-Aqsa intifada had begun.

  The Abduction

  Nine days later, on Saturday, October 7, four UN observers from the Observer Group Lebanon (OGL), call sign “Team Sierra,” departed their post at the southern end of Khiam in their white UN-marked SUV for a routine patrol of the Blue Line in their sector of southeast Lebanon. The route took them past a Hezbollah observation post on a small hill overlooking the divided village of Ghajar. They noticed that the position was empty. Driving down the hill into Wazzani, a small village on the western bank of the Hasbani River opposite Ghajar, the observers were surprised to see that the Hezbollah position there was also vacant.

  Team Sierra drove on to the Majidiyah estate, since May, Hezbollah’s logistical base for the eastern sector sitting at the foot of the Shebaa Farms hills. But that morning, the base was empty. All the Hezbollah personnel had gone. Team Sierra contacted the OGL headquarters in Naqoura and informed them of the abandoned Hezbollah positions, concluding that “something was up.”

  Around midmorning, several busloads of Palestinians from refugee camps in Beirut arrived near Marwahine, a Sunni border village in the western sector. They had been mobilized by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine–General Command (PFLP–GC) an ally of Hezbollah, and transported to the border to stage a demonstration in support of the intifada. On their arrival, waiting Hezbollah operatives marshaled the few hundred Palestinians toward an old crossing point facing the Israeli town of Zarit. Several ambulances were already parked at the scene. The Palestinians unfurled flags and banners and began throwing stones across the fence. Israeli troops materialized and fanned out on the opposite side of the fence, warily watching the crowd of protesters.

  At around 11:30 A.M., Team Sierra swung by an Indian UNIFIL position on a hillock overlooking the Shebaa gate. From the observation tower, the UN team could see the Hezbollah post four hundred yards away at the bottom of the hill. Unlike the other Hezbollah positions they had passed that morning, this one was still occupied by unarmed plainclothes fighters. At least three vehicles were parked nearby. Three or four Hezbollah men were busy erecting a wooden sign displaying the party logo, a rifle clutched in a fist, on a steep slope about forty yards from the gate.

  By midday, the Palestinian protest at Marwahine had grown more heated. Tires were set ablaze, and the crowd hurled Molotov cocktails over the fence. When several youths attempted to scramble over the fence, Israeli soldiers opened fire with live ammunition. Three Palestinians were shot dead and another fifteen were wounded. Despite Team Sierra’s radioed observation about the empty Hezbollah positions in the eastern sector, it was the Palestinian demonstration in the western sector that held UNIFIL’s attention. Then, shortly after the shooting at Marwahine, UNIFIL headquarters began receiving reports that Hezbollah men were leaving their posts all along the Blue Line.

  At 12:40 P.M., the Hezbollah abduction team caught sight of the target vehicle coming around the bend to the south and heading down the hill toward the Shebaa gate. The vehicle was a soft-skinned military jeep carrying three soldiers. All armored jeeps had been withdrawn from the Shebaa Farms sector just a week earlier and sent to the West Bank and Gaza, where the intifada was raging.

  The jeep drove slowly past the gate, then made a U-turn and pulled off the road. Two soldiers climbed out of the car and approached the gate. As they did so, two roadside bombs exploded simultaneously on the dirt bank forty yards away where, a little over an hour earlier, the Hezbollah men had planted the wooden sign.

  As the blast echoed from the surrounding hills and the gate itself was shrouded in a dense fog of dust and smoke, the exultant Hezbollah fighters cried out “Ya sahib as-zamen!”—a triumphant exhortation to the Hidden Imam.

  The brief five-month interlude of calm in south Lebanon was over; the new phase in Hezbollah’s struggle against Israel had begun.

  Hezbollah fire support teams laid down a swift and heavy mortar and rocket barrage against Israeli outposts in the Shebaa Farms. Hidden in a rocky bluff behind the Hezbollah post, the first of eight AT-3 Sagger antitank missiles was fired toward an IDF position, barely visible a mile and a half to the southwest. A dark blue
Range Rover bounced along the dirt track toward the gate, the passenger door held open. Before it reached the gate, two Hezbollah fighters burst out of the vehicle. One of them sprinted to the gate and fitted a small explosive charge to the heavy padlock. The second fighter provided covering fire from a few paces behind, his bullets kicking up dust near the Israeli jeep. The fighter by the gate turned and ran back toward some large concrete blocks nearby, ducking behind one as the charge blew the padlock off. Several Hezbollah men, wearing plain clothes and black bulletproof vests, raced through the gate, followed by the Range Rover. The three Israeli soldiers were bundled into the rear of the Hezbollah vehicle, which then accelerated back through the gate with the rest of the team running behind. It was the most sophisticated military operation ever undertaken by the Islamic Resistance; and it was over in less than three and a half minutes.

  “The Silence Has Been Driving Me Crazy!”

  As the abduction squad raced away to the north, the fire support teams continued pounding the Israeli outposts for another forty minutes, firing a total of 313 mortar rounds, missiles, and rockets, by UNIFIL’s count. Several soldiers were wounded by the shelling, and, amid the chaos and shock, it was at least thirty minutes before the Israelis realized that three of their men were unaccounted for. By the time Israeli soldiers reached the scene of the kidnapping, the Hezbollah team and their hostages were long gone. Bloodstains from all three soldiers were discovered at the site, but the extent of their injuries was unknown.

  I was later able to piece together what had happened during the kidnapping from the equipment abandoned by the Hezbollah squad. Hidden among rocks about 150 yards from the gate was a small white canvas tent containing clothes, sleeping bags, pots, pans, even a radio set. A table and chair stood in front of the tent. On the table were a telephone and two remote control units, the triggers for the roadside bombs. Thick cables ran from the units toward the Blue Line and ended among a pile of fractured rock and burned earth where the roadside bombs had been placed. The wooden screen, set up by the Hezbollah men and noticed by the OGL observers from the nearby UNIFIL position an hour before the kidnapping, was used to mask the planting of the two bombs. Barely visible on the ground were numerous trails of fine wire, all running in roughly the same direction. They were the guidance wires for the Sagger antitank missiles fired at the IDF outpost. The wires were draped over the border fence, but following the thin strands in the opposite direction revealed the launching site of the missiles. Eight launchers in two separate batteries lurked in a rocky outcrop above the Hezbollah camp. The Soviet-era missiles were launched electronically from collapsible runners attached to the weapons’ packing cases.