Warriors of God

by Nicholas Blanford

  “We never saw them build anything,” a UNIFIL officer told me. “They must have brought the cement in by the spoonful.”

  Spiders and Claustrophobia

  The sight of the dynamited ruins at Labboune inspired me to find an intact bunker. Although the border district was littered with newly abandoned bunkers, finding them was difficult and hazardous given their remote locations, the presence of unexploded munitions, and the superbly camouflaged entrances, some of them covered by hollow fiberglass “rocks” similar to those used to hide IEDs. After several false leads, I acquired a set of map coordinates marking the locations of Hezbollah bunkers and rocket-firing posts near the village of Alma Shaab. Punching the coordinates into a handheld GPS device, I headed into a former Hezbollah security pocket accompanied by Ghaith Abdul-Ahad, an intrepid war correspondent for The Guardian and a photographer for the Getty agency.

  We had walked along the track at the bottom of the valley for about ten minutes when the arrow on the GPS began to rotate to the right. We left the track and, once beneath the canopy of dense foliage, noticed numerous thin trails made by Hezbollah militants crisscrossing the hillside. Steps of rock-hard sandbags helped overcome the steeper sections. We scanned the footpath carefully, not only for cluster bombs but also for possible booby traps. Hezbollah had rigged some simple IEDs consisting of trip wires attached to blocks of TNT around some of their old positions to deter snoopers.

  After a five-minute climb, my GPS informed us that we had reached our destination. But there was no bunker entrance to be seen, just outcrops of rock, thickets of thorn bushes, scrub oak, and tree roots snaking across the bedrock beneath a carpet of dead leaves and dried twigs. Thinking the GPS must be off by a few feet, I moved away to examine the surrounding area for the entrance. But it was Ghaith who found it. He was tapping the ground with a stick when he struck something metallic and hollow-sounding. Together we brushed away the leaves and twigs to reveal a square matte black metal lid with two handles. Dragging the heavy lid to one side exposed a narrow steel-lined shaft that dropped vertically about fifteen feet into the bedrock. Dank, musty air rose from the gloom. It had taken seven months to finally discover one of Hezbollah’s war bunkers; but any exhilaration was dampened by the dread of claustrophobia. “If we have to crawl when we’re down there, I can’t do it,” Ghaith said.

  Wearing a headlamp and using metal footholds welded onto the side of the shaft, I climbed down into the shadows below and saw with some relief that the tunnel extending into the hillside at the bottom was taller than we had feared. We would have to crouch, but not crawl. It was still a tight squeeze as we inched cautiously along the damp, silent passageway, which ran for about seven yards before turning left and descending in a gradual slant. The rock sides of the tunnel were lined with a mesh of steel bars and girders painted white. Huge motionless brown spiders clung to the walls, watching the human intruders impassively. A side tunnel reinforced with walls and ceiling of glossy white-painted steel plates and girders led into a small steel-lined chamber. The room, which was bare apart from two empty five-gallon water containers, must have been at least ninety feet underground and probably could have withstood a direct hit by one of Israel’s massive aerial bombs—assuming the Israelis had known where to drop it. An electric cable ran along the walls linking several bare bulbs. A black plastic bag hanging from a hook contained the remains of what seven months earlier could have been fresh oranges or apples. A second entrance lower down the hill had been blocked with rocks and cement. It was not a large bunker, probably home to several fighters who manned the Katyusha firing positions nearby.

  Weeks later, I had an opportunity to explore a much larger command bunker near Rshaf village in the western sector. I had to crawl over a pile of rocks partially blocking the narrow square access shaft, which was sunk horizontally into the side of a valley. After a couple of yards, the passageway opened up, allowing me to stand. The passage was little more than shoulder-width, and I had to stoop slightly to avoid hitting the ceiling with my head. For the first ten yards, the walls and ceiling were reinforced with steel plates and girders painted matte black to prevent stray reflections of sunlight from giving away the concealed entrance. Around a corner, the steel plates were painted glossy white to better reflect the electric lighting. Electric cables ran through white plastic tubes fixed to the walls leading to switches and glass-encased light sockets. A blue plastic hose running along the top of the wall carried the bunker’s water supply. There was a small bathroom complete with an Arab-style latrine, a shower, a basin with taps, and a hot water boiler. A drainage system had even been constructed beneath the concrete floor. In two places along the main passage—which must have been more than forty yards long—were vertical ventilation shafts covered by metal grilles, ensuring a steady flow of fresh air. There was a kitchen with storage shelves and an aluminum sink with taps, its white metal walls mottled with brown rust. Every ten yards or so along the passage was a heavy steel blast door that could be bolted from the inside. I switched off my headlamp for a minute and the silent chilly subterranean blackness closed in around me. What must it have been like for the fighters living here in the war, waiting for the advancing Israeli troops?

  At the far end of the bunker, the narrow steel-lined passage broadened out into a rock cavern. In a niche to one side were four metal water tanks with “fidai,” Arabic for “sacrifice,” painted across them. A twist of a tap at the bottom of one tank and icy water gushed out. Several steep steps cut into the rock at the end of the cavern led to an access shaft about fifteen feet high with rungs welded onto the lining of black metal plates. This exit emerged into a thicket of stubby oak trees about forty yards from the entrance and farther up the hill.

  The effort that went into building it was extraordinary, and yet it, like the bunkers at Labboune and Alma Shaab, was constructed in complete secrecy, remaining undetected by satellite surveillance, Israeli aerial reconnaissance, intelligence assets on the ground, and UNIFIL peacekeepers, let alone nosy journalists. Every piece of equipment, including the steel plates, girders, and doors, had had to be carried by hand up the side of the valley and fitted into place inside the bunker. The hundreds of tons of quarried rock were removed, also in secrecy, from the site of each tunnel and bunker, presumably to be scattered carefully beneath the trees of the surrounding hillside—the same technique Hezbollah had used when constructing the prototype tunnels in Mlita on the mountainous edge of the Israeli-occupied Jezzine enclave in the mid-1980s. Certainly, there were no fantails or spoil for patrolling Israeli jets and drones to detect.

  This small wadi near Rshaf was home to at least seven other bunkers and rocket-firing positions. A larger valley system a few miles to the east contained more than thirty different positions consisting of at least one command bunker similar to the one I explored near Rshaf, Katyusha-firing positions, one- or two-room huts of cinder block walls draped in camouflage netting, bivouacs, checkpoints at the entrances, observation posts, and expanded natural caves. In all there may have been more than a thousand positions of one type or another covering the southern border district.

  Once again, Hezbollah had absorbed and improved upon the earlier experiences of the Palestinians in south Lebanon. Ahmad Jibril, the head of the PFLP-GC and a onetime military engineer, had built in the late 1970s several tunnels sunk into mountainsides in the southern half of Lebanon, large enough to accommodate trucks and tons of armaments. There was nothing discreet about the construction of the tunnels; everyone knew where they were, and the engineers and laborers who built them were regularly subjected to Israeli air raids. While the tunnels were the PFLP-GC’s trademark, other Palestinian groups had eschewed underground fortifications, believing them vulnerable to Israeli commando assaults and preferring instead the low-signature mobility of guerrilla warfare.

  Hezbollah, however, had developed a tactic that selected the best elements from both schools. It used the bunker-and-tunnel system to strengthen its defensive posture in
the border district in the event of an Israeli ground invasion, while constructing the facilities in total secrecy and limiting their size to retain the element of surprise.

  “Truck[load] After Truckload” of Weapons

  A visitor to the southern border district in those early months of 2000 following Israel’s withdrawal and the onset of Hezbollah’s campaign in the Shebaa Farms would likely have witnessed pastoral routine rather than a war zone. Even as Hezbollah was quietly sealing off tracts of land and drawing up blueprints for its underground bunker networks, farmers continued to plant, nurture, and harvest their fields of bright green tobacco and golden wheat in the stony valleys. In the early fall, families moved slowly through olive groves, picking the fruit and sorting it on wool blankets spread on the ground. Wrinkled old ladies smothered in thick, colorful cotton dresses and headscarves sold seasonal fruit from roadside stalls—shiny strawberries in the spring, green or purple figs bursting with sweetness in the late summer heat, crisp apples and watermelons in the fall. Wiry mahogany-skinned goatherds tossed stones at errant members of their flock while rangy dogs slumbered in the shade of oak trees. In the dusty villages, children played in the potholed lanes that passed for roads in south Lebanon. New villas and mansions built of stone and marble and surrounded by verdant watered lawns—ostentatious flauntings of Africa-generated wealth—sprouted on once-barren hillsides to accommodate long-absent residents during the summer holiday months.

  It was easy to be lulled into a feeling that the military confrontation between Hezbollah and Israel was relatively straightforward and limited. If Israel reacted disproportionately to an attack in the Shebaa Farms, then yes, it could expect Hezbollah to unleash salvos of Katyusha rockets from the olive groves of south Lebanon into Galilee. But there was no obvious reason to assume that the balance was fundamentally different from that of the 1990s.

  But by the second half of 2001, it was dawning on me that out of sight, something of far greater scale and significance was taking place in the remoter wadis and hilltop villages of south Lebanon. One of my sources referred to “truck[load] after truckload” of weapons arriving in the border district between May 2000 and December 2001. Another source told me that Hezbollah had “more weapons now than they know what to do with.” Hezbollah fighters boasted of their psychological readiness to confront Israel and the training that continued despite the Israeli withdrawal. Gradually, the information gleaned from my sources in south Lebanon, observations in the field, interviews with Hezbollah officials, and conversations with fighters left only one conclusion to be drawn—Hezbollah was not contenting itself by simply needling Israel along the Blue Line from time to time, but was engaged in a massive, wide-ranging military buildup in preparation for a possible war with Israel—a war it had every intention of winning.

  The arms floodgate to Hezbollah opened after Bashar al-Assad became president of Syria. His father, Hafez, had imposed controls on the quantity and variety of arms he allowed Iran to send to Hezbollah via Damascus airport. Hafez al-Assad preferred to maintain a tactical alliance with Hezbollah and permitted a sufficient flow of arms to the Shia group to resist the Israelis in south Lebanon, but he drew the line at delivering game-changing weapons that could destabilize the Lebanon-Israel theater, possibly at Syria’s expense. Under Bashar al-Assad, however, the relationship grew more strategic, with greater quantities of weapons and more advanced systems dispatched across the border into Hezbollah’s arms depots. Significantly, Syria for the first time became a major supplier of weaponry to Hezbollah. The Syrians delivered large quantities of 220 mm Uragan rockets, with a forty-two-mile range, and B-302 rockets, which are a Syrian version of a Chinese multiple-launch rocket system. Some of the rockets were fitted with antipersonnel warheads that spray hundreds of ball bearings on detonation. A few rockets were filled with Chinese cluster submunitions.

  Syria also was the chief supplier of Hezbollah’s most advanced antitank missiles after 2000, acquiring from Russia and transferring to its Shia ally the AT-13 Metis-M, which has a tandem warhead and a range of just under a mile, and the third generation AT-14 Kornet-E, which has a laser-beam-riding guidance system and a range of more than three miles. The AT-14, one of the most advanced missiles in the world, can be fitted with antiarmor or bunker-busting thermobaric warheads and includes thermal-imaging capability for use at night. Hezbollah’s acquisition of the AT-14 significantly raised the level of threat to Israel’s fleet of tanks and armored vehicles.

  Hezbollah was thought to have acquired a handful of 240 mm artillery rockets in the late 1990s, although the largest-caliber Katyusha ever fired into Israel before the IDF withdrawal was the standard 122 mm with a range of twelve miles. But from 2000 on, in addition to the Syrian rockets, Hezbollah received the Iranian Fajr family of rockets, with ranges from twenty-five to fifty miles, and the Falaq system of large-caliber but short-range rockets. Around 2002, Iran began delivering 610 mm Zelzal-1 and Zelzal-2 sub-ballistic rockets, which can carry an eleven-hundred-pound payload and travel up to 75 miles and 126 miles respectively.

  In 2003, Israeli military intelligence learned that Hezbollah might have acquired a weapons system previously unseen in the south Lebanon theater: a shore-to-ship cruise missile. A warning was passed on to the Israeli navy, but when nothing more was heard, the initial reports were no longer taken seriously—an oversight that would have deadly consequences three years later during the July 2006 war. As was subsequently learned, Hezbollah had received a consignment of Iranian Noor antiship missiles, a reverse-engineered version of the Chinese C-802, a fifteen-hundred-pound radar-guided cruise missile with a range of seventy-two miles.

  The acquisition of new longer-range rocket systems did not go unnoticed by the Israelis. Even before the Israeli withdrawal in 2000, Israeli officials, military and civilian, regularly fed the media with assessments of Hezbollah’s arms buildup. The number of rockets in Hezbollah’s arsenal was estimated at eight thousand in 2000, a figure that two years later had risen to ten thousand. In May 2006, Major General Amos Gilad, a senior defense ministry official, claimed that Hezbollah had acquired thirteen to fourteen thousand rockets.

  Typically, Hezbollah would deflect repeated inquiries about its rocket arsenal, maintaining its preference for ambiguity. But Hezbollah’s leaders often alluded in speeches to the existence of long-range rockets, teasing the Israelis with vague hints rather than hard facts. “We have the power to destroy important and sensitive targets in northern occupied Palestine,” Nasrallah said in a May 2006 speech marking the sixth anniversary of the Israeli troop withdrawal from south Lebanon. “The resistance now has over thirteen thousand rockets. All of north occupied Palestine is within our firing range. This is the minimum range. As for the range beyond the north … it is best to be silent.”

  “The Launcher Rose Out of the Ground”

  The same level of creativity that went into the bunker networks could also be found in the construction and deployment of Hezbollah’s fixed firing platforms for its arsenal of 122 mm Katyusha rockets. The rocket posts were placed in dense undergrowth on reverse (north-facing) slopes of valleys to make them more difficult targets for Israeli artillery guns firing from the south. The 122 mm rockets, standard and upgraded, which between them have ranges of twelve to thirty miles, covered a belt adjacent to Israel to a depth of about six miles from the border. Some positions were simple shelters of cinder block walls and concrete roof open at opposite ends, protected by sandbags and rock-filled Hesco blast protection barriers and disguised by camouflage netting and foliage. Thermal blankets were thrown over the launchers immediately after firing to mask the heat signature from patrolling Israeli aircraft overhead. One typical position I found was a firing pit about four meters deep, the walls lined with concrete. The top of the southern wall was angled 45 degrees to facilitate the launching of the rocket. At the back of the pit was a short tunnel that doglegged into a small chamber where the rockets were kept. In the one I explored, a house-proud Hezbollah militant
had decorated the walls of the chamber with panels from the wooden crates in which the rockets were packed.

  Some rocket launchers were fixed to platforms that could be raised or lowered electronically from holes in the ground. Abu Mahdi, a veteran Hezbollah fighter, told me after the 2006 war that a comrade of his was taken to a mountaintop and told that that he was in charge of a Katyusha rocket launcher. “My friend looked around him and asked, ‘Where is it?’ The other man pressed a button and the launcher rose out of the ground next to him,” he said.

  Residents of a village in south Lebanon, about thirteen miles north of the border, remember on July 28, 2006, midway through the war, a group of Hezbollah men arriving in the village carrying laptop computers. The men entered an orchard and began tapping at a keyboard. A launcher emerged from the ground among the trees and a single large-caliber rocket was fired. The rocket, carrying a 220-pound warhead, hit the Israeli town of Afula in what was then the deepest strike into Israel of the war.