Warriors of God

by Nicholas Blanford

  In response to Israel’s near-daily breaches of Lebanese airspace with jets and UAVs, Hezbollah in January 2002 began firing 57 mm antiaircraft shells across the border. The foot-long shells were not aimed at the jets; instead, they exploded with a loud bang high above Israeli border settlements, spattering whatever lay below with light shrapnel. The new tactic had been in development for some months as Hezbollah mulled a way of confronting Israel’s aerial reconnaissance flights. Initially, Hezbollah considered firing modified RPG-7 rocket-propelled grenades or small-caliber Katyusha rockets across the border, as “noisemakers” rather than to score casualties or damage. But after test-firing them in a deep valley near the border and launching them out to sea, they soon found that the RPGs lacked range and the Katyushas were unsuitable, so they settled on the 57 mm cannons.

  Hezbollah eventually installed up to twenty antiaircraft cannons covering the length of the border, some close to the Blue Line. I stumbled across the location of one by chance in 2002. Driving along a back road near the border early one afternoon, I pulled over for a moment to have a look at an old SLA outpost near the village of Talloussa. As I parked, a bearded man dressed in a camouflage uniform emerged from the entrance riding a small scooter. His jaw dropped as he saw a foreigner climb out of the car. The fighter spoke into his walkie-talkie to summon his comrades, and they, too, emerged from the compound. They searched my car and took my bag with my notebook and camera along with my wristwatch and wallet. They allowed me to call Hezbollah’s press office in Beirut on my mobile phone. I handed the phone to one of the Hezbollah men, and the press assistant Hussein Naboulsi vouched for me. But it would be some time before I was released.

  The Hezbollah men told me to drive to nearby Markaba and park beside the mosque, where someone would meet me. When I arrived at the mosque a few minutes later, a bearded and demure young man ushered me into an empty room at the back and offered me tea. It took three hours for the requisite checks to be made; the local military commanders had apparently been in a lengthy meeting and could not be disturbed until it was over. A Hezbollah man eventually arrived at the mosque, carrying my belongings in a plastic bag. He insisted that I check that everything was there before leaving. As I stepped outside, the early evening stillness was broken by the thump of antiaircraft rounds. Looking to the southeast I could just make out the tip of the barrel of the gun in the old Talloussa outpost and see dust and smoke rising from the position. The 57 mm rounds exploded over the border in white cotton-ball puffs of smoke against a Prussian-blue evening sky.

  As the months ticked by, Hezbollah began to lower its aim, sending the shells deeper into Israel and increasing the risk of civilian casualties. In August 2003, a sixteen-year-old boy was killed by falling shrapnel in the border settlement of Shelomi, the first Israeli civilian to die since the withdrawal from Lebanon three years earlier. Israel ended its restraint and sent jets into Lebanon to bomb the antiaircraft battery that had fired the fatal rounds. In the following months, Israel struck twice more against Hezbollah positions in response to bursts of cross-border antiaircraft fire. The Israelis had called Hezbollah’s bluff, and the tactic came to an end.

  But Hezbollah soon came up with another trick. At the end of October 2004, Nasrallah said that Hezbollah was planning “a new equation” to confront the aerial violations. That “new equation” was unveiled eight days later when Hezbollah launched a UAV fitted with a video camera (dubbed Mirsad-1, Arabic for “observer”) and sent it on a short reconnaissance flight over northern Israel. Hezbollah claimed to have manufactured the UAV itself, but according to Israel, Mirsad-1 was Hezbollah’s name for the Iranian Ababil-T, a pneumatically launched attack and reconnaissance drone. The Mirsad-1 flew a second mission six months later.

  Dispatching UAVs across the border was a crafty response to Israel’s continued overflights. Not only did it embarrass the IDF, which failed to detect the UAV intrusions, it exposed the vulnerability of Israel’s northern border to airborne attack (the drone could have been fitted with a bomb weighing dozens of pounds). Furthermore, it frustrated Israel’s retaliatory options. Under the rules of the game, Israel would have been hard-pressed to justify bombing more Hezbollah positions, given that flying the drone over northern Israel was a benign response to Israel’s repeated overflights in Lebanese airspace.

  A Carefully Planned Setup

  As this complex game of mild attrition was played out along the Blue Line, it was easy to imagine seasoned Hezbollah veterans sitting around a table, brows furrowed in concentration as they brainstormed ever more elaborate and cunning ploys to alarm and infuriate the Israelis. One tactic used between November 2003 and May 2004 was the planting of several IED clusters along the length of the Blue Line. The bombs were generally hidden beneath hollow fiberglass “rocks” but not so well disguised that they could not be spotted by vigilant Israeli soldiers patrolling the border fence. The intention was to keep the Israeli troops on edge, never quite sure whether one of the bombs would suddenly explode as they drove by in a Humvee. Although the bombs were planted on the Lebanese side of Israel’s security fence, they were often on the Israeli side of the Blue Line. Israel’s border fence does not exactly follow the Blue Line but deviates by as much as a hundred yards or more into Israeli territory, depending on the topography and security requirements. The anomaly allowed the Israelis to cut through the fence and remove the bomb clusters without transgressing the Lebanese side of the Blue Line.

  One January morning in 2004, an Israeli D-9 armored bulldozer crossed the fence to clear several IEDs planted just inside Israeli territory. Unknown to the Israeli troops monitoring the operation, the bulldozer was under close observation by Hezbollah. At some point, the bulldozer accidentally strayed across the Blue Line while removing the bombs. It was the moment the watching Hezbollah men had been waiting for. Later the same day, the bulldozer was struck by an antitank missile and the driver killed. Hezbollah defended its action, saying that the bulldozer had transgressed the Blue Line, in just one of sixty-five land, sea, and air violations of Lebanese territory recorded that month alone.8 It was a disingenuous excuse—the missile was fired several hours after the bulldozer edged over the Blue Line—but Hezbollah was playing by the same uncompromising rules as the Israelis. Three months earlier, Egoz soldiers on ambush duty on the border had shot dead two Lebanese hunters who had accidentally strayed over the Blue Line by a few yards. Israeli troops were under standing orders to shoot any armed person who crossed the line, even a hunter carrying only a shotgun. Hezbollah was ruthlessly applying the same measure.

  Four months later, Hezbollah took the tactic one step further. At dawn one May morning, Israeli soldiers in a compound on the Shebaa Farms front line spotted a group of five Hezbollah fighters carrying equipment through the rocky terrain on the Lebanese side of the Blue Line. The Israelis opened fire, and the Hezbollah men vanished from sight. Puzzled at the unusual sighting of Islamic Resistance fighters close to an Israeli outpost, IDF commanders dispatched a unit of Egoz commandos to scout the area early the next morning. In the course of the patrol, the Egoz squad crossed the Blue Line and discovered hidden among rocks a roadside bomb inside a backpack, sleeping bags, warm weather clothing, a stretcher, and a camouflage net. The patrol concluded that it had foiled an attempt to kidnap Israeli troops and returned to base. However, as the commandos reached the entrance of their compound, several IEDs exploded beside them, as Hezbollah fire support teams simultaneously shelled Israeli positions throughout the Shebaa Farms. One soldier was killed and another five wounded. Again, Hezbollah publicly billed the ambush as a successful effort to thwart an IDF incursion onto Lebanese territory. In fact, it was a carefully planned setup. The unusual sighting of fighters was intended to lure Israeli troops across the Blue Line as a pretext for launching a deadly assault with roadside bombs. It came as an unpleasant surprise to the Israelis that for all their defensive measures in the Shebaa Farms, Hezbollah fighters had still been able to infiltrate undetected right up
to the entrance of an outpost to plant the IEDs, echoing similar feats in the occupation zone in the late 1990s.

  “Respond to Any Israeli Violation”

  Besides initiating various ploys to needle the Israelis, Hezbollah also used the Blue Line as a locus of retaliation in which eye-for-an-eye tactics were developed as a response to Israeli actions in Lebanon and further afield.

  When Ramzi Nohra was killed by an IED in December 2002, Hezbollah responded with a roadside bomb attack that wounded two Israeli soldiers.

  In August 2003, Ali Saleh, a top Hezbollah operative, was killed in a car bomb blast in the southern suburbs of Beirut in what appeared to be a rare penetration by Israel of Hezbollah’s usually airtight security. Six days later, Hezbollah pounded outposts in the Shebaa Farms in an attack dedicated to the slain militant.

  The Shebaa Farms was shelled again in March 2004 in honor of Sheikh Ahmad Yassin, the blind, paraplegic spiritual leader of Hamas, less than twelve hours after missile-firing Israeli helicopters killed him as he was wheeled out of a prayer session in Gaza.

  When Israeli jets bombed a Palestinian training camp near Damascus in October 2003, the retaliation came not from the Syrians or Palestinians, but from a Hezbollah sniper who the following day shot and killed a Golani Brigade soldier on ambush duty beside the border fence.

  On July 20, 2004, two Israeli soldiers clambered onto the roof of a border compound opposite Aitta Shaab village in the western sector to fix an antenna. They had just begun their work when both were shot dead by a Hezbollah sniper in a camouflaged observation post in dense brush about five hundred yards to the east. The sniper achieved two head shots and one to the chest. Israeli tank fire blasted the sniper’s location, killing him, while helicopter gunships fired missiles into a nearby Hezbollah outpost. The shooting had come hours after another top Hezbollah operative, Ghaleb Awali, was killed in a car bomb explosion in the southern suburbs, an attack that, for Hezbollah, bore alarming similarities to the assassination of Saleh almost a year earlier.

  Months before, Hezbollah’s leadership had instructed its cadres in the south to automatically retaliate to breaches of the Blue Line, whether by ground, air, or sea, including assassinations. “[W]e have given an authorization to the brother mujahideen on the front lines to act. We told them: respond to any Israeli violation of the border with Lebanon by opening fire directly without referring to the political leadership,” Nasrallah said in October 2004.

  With Awali’s death in Beirut, the Islamic Resistance went on alert along the Blue Line looking for targets of opportunity. The retaliation could have come in the form of a roadside bomb detonated beside the fence or an antitank missile strike. The Israeli army imposed a security alert along the northern border with troop movements severely restricted. But an officer in the outpost opposite Aitta Shaab made a mistake in ordering the two soldiers onto the roof of the compound to fix a broken antenna. The soldiers were not even wearing body armor. The Hezbollah sniper on watch in his observation post saw the two soldiers climb onto the roof and immediately took advantage of the Israeli error and shot them dead.

  “The resistance movement will always be ready and on alert in order to consolidate the equation: security for security and economy for economy and aggression for aggression.… In other words, deterrence for the enemy,” said Sayyed Hisham Safieddine, the head of Hezbollah’s Executive Council, a week after Awali’s assassination.

  The Israeli media in the two days following the killing of the soldiers was filled with quotes from anonymous army officers warning that “the region is a powder keg,” stressing the importance of sending a “tough warning,” and asserting that the sniping had “definitely crossed a red line.” But other than the retaliatory air strikes in the south, Israel settled for a muscle-flexing low-level sonic boom sortie over Beirut, a response that the Lebanese had long ago learned to associate with Israeli frustration.

  “The deterrence is in the other direction,” said an editorial in Israel’s Hatzofe newspaper. “The IDF and the Israeli government fear Hezbollah’s response, and therefore, after every murder or attempt at murder by the Hezbollah bums, the IDF carries out some sort of tepid act for show in order not to annoy, God forbid, Sheikh Nasrallah.”9

  NINE

  Spoonfuls of Cement

  We are confident enough in our capabilities to make any Israeli adventure very expensive, so high that they cannot tolerate the burden.

  —SHEIKH NABIL QAWQ,

  June 14, 2006

  MARCH 25, 2007

  ALMA SHAAB, south Lebanon—The dirt track wound through blossom-scented orange orchards before entering a narrow valley flanked by an impenetrable-looking mantle of bushes and small trees. Lizards and snakes slithered from under our feet, but we kept a wary eye open for unexploded cluster bombs left over from repeated Israeli artillery strikes on the western end of the valley during the monthlong war between Hezbollah and Israel seven months earlier.

  Every few seconds I glanced at the electronic arrow on my handheld global-positioning system that was directing us toward what I hoped would be the entrance to one of Hezbollah’s secret wartime underground bunkers. Since the end of the war, finding and exploring a Hezbollah bunker had become a near obsession, ever since I had been given a tantalizing hint shortly after the August cease-fire at what Hezbollah had covertly and skillfully constructed between 2000 and 2006.

  Before the war, no one had imagined that Hezbollah was installing such an extravagant military infrastructure in the border district. Their visible activities generally consisted of establishing between twenty-five and thirty observation posts along the Blue Line, stretching from the chalk cliffs of Ras Naqoura on the coast in the west to the lofty limestone mountains of the Shebaa Farms in the east. Hezbollah also placed off-limits several stretches of rugged hills and valleys in the border district. The entrances were guarded by armed and uniformed fighters. Local farmers and even UNIFIL peacekeepers were denied access to some of these “security pockets.” One valley, a deep ravine of limestone cliffs and caves that slashed through the western sector like a giant ax stroke, was marked as a no-fly zone on the maps used by UNIFIL’s Italian air wing.

  In August 2002, Hezbollah took over a hillside overlooking the coast outside Naqoura, the location of UNIFIL’s headquarters. A narrow lane wound up the hill, ending at a small UNIFIL observation post at the long-disappeared farmstead of Labboune. It was a popular spot for tourists, as the ridge granted a grandstand view of western Galilee down the coast to Haifa and Mount Carmel, twenty-five miles to the south. After Hezbollah seized the Labboune hillside for its own purposes, only UNIFIL was allowed to use the lane to reach its observation post. Shortly after the hillside was sealed off, I drove up the lane to see what would happen. About halfway up I spotted several fighters in the dense brush crouched beside a large object smothered in camouflage netting, possibly an antiaircraft gun. They scowled at me as I passed by and evidently alerted some of their colleagues by radio, as there was a small reception committee waiting for me beside the road as I returned to Naqoura. “This is a military zone. You can’t come here anymore,” one of them chided me.

  Two months later, a convoy of American diplomats from the U.S. embassy in Beirut ran into a similar problem when they were intercepted by armed Hezbollah men while en route to the Labboune viewing point, unaware that the hillside was no longer accessible. With the Hezbollah men refusing to allow the diplomatic convoy to proceed, the embassy’s security team called off the planned tour of the Blue Line and headed back to Beirut. As the motorcade drove north out of Naqoura along the coastal road, they were joined by two carloads of armed Hezbollah men, who wove between the convoy vehicles. The U.S. embassy and the State Department lodged formal complaints with the Lebanese government, but it was the last time diplomats attempted to peer into Israel from Labboune.

  It was unclear to us exactly what Hezbollah was up to inside these security pockets, although clues hinting at clandestine activity emerged from
time to time. In early June 2002, residents of two small villages at the foot of the Shebaa Farms hills were kept awake at night by the sound of dynamite explosions emanating from a remote wadi near an abandoned farmstead. The peak of Hezbollah’s construction activities appears to have been in 2003, when UNIFIL was recording “sustained explosions” numbering as many as twenty-five at a time, all in remote wadis and hillsides.

  But it was only following the August 14 cease-fire ending the monthlong war in 2006 that the astonishing scale of Hezbollah’s underground network of bunkers and firing positions in the southern border district came to light.

  For example, the Labboune hillside, which was covered in thick brush and small evergreen oaks, was the source of almost constant rocket fire by Hezbollah throughout the war, from the first day until shortly before the 8:00 A.M. cease-fire on August 14. The Israeli military attempted to stanch the flow of rockets with air strikes, cluster bombs, and artillery shells packed with phosphorus, but the Katyusha fire was relentless. After the cease-fire, Israeli soldiers deployed onto the hill and discovered an elaborate bunker and artillery-firing system sunk into solid rock some 120 feet deep and spread over an area three-quarters of a square mile. The bunkers included firing positions, ammunition storage facilities, operations rooms, dormitories, medical facilities, lighting and ventilation, and kitchens and bathrooms with latrines and hot and cold running water—sufficient to allow dozens of fighters to live underground for weeks without need for resupply. A day after the bunker was dynamited by the Israelis, I visited the site with Lorenzo Cremonesi, a correspondent for Italy’s Corriere della Sera newspaper. We gingerly followed a caterpillar track into the old minefield running on the Lebanese side of the border fence. All that remained of the bunker was a field of churned earth and slabs of yard-thick reinforced concrete poking out of the ground like broken teeth. Yet the most extraordinary discovery was not that Hezbollah had built the bunker beneath a minefield, but that the bunker began just a hundred yards from, and within full view of, the UNIFIL observation post on the border. It was only fifty yards from the lane used by UNIFIL traffic each day. The bunker was also in full view of an Israeli border position some four hundred yards to the west on the other side of the fence. How was it possible for Hezbollah to construct such a large facility with neither UNIFIL nor the Israelis having any idea of its existence?