Warriors of God

by Nicholas Blanford

  Other than missiles, antiarmor tactics included preparing “explosive pits” dug beneath roads near the border, at intersections, and along main north-south axes. The pits were each packed with three hundred to six hundred pounds of TNT, to be detonated by remote control beneath armored vehicles, especially tanks, such as the Merkava Mark 4, one of the most heavily protected tanks in the world in 2006 but still vulnerable to such a large explosive charge.

  In June 2002, a shepherd accidentally stumbled across one of Hezbollah’s explosive pits while guiding his flock along a lane near the Shebaa gate, scene of the abduction of the three Israeli soldiers in October 2000. Thinking he had found an Israeli bomb, he alerted the local police. Initial reports, encouraged by Hezbollah officials irritated at the discovery of the pit, claimed the bomb consisted of three explosive charges weighing about two pounds each and may have been an Israeli assassination attempt against Sheikh Nabil Qawq, who was hosting an Iranian delegation on a tour of the border district the same day. But a local source who saw the bomb told me that it consisted of four hundred pounds of TNT split into sixteen separate blocks.

  The region north of the Litani River, which included the Nabatiyah district, the southern Bekaa Valley, and the mountains lying between the two, was the domain of the Badr Unit, the operational rear of the Islamic Resistance. The Badr Unit’s principal role was to launch longer-range rockets into Israel, provide reinforcements if necessary to the Nasr Unit, and confront any Israeli penetration north of the Litani.

  A coastal defense command operating alongside the Nasr and Badr units was responsible for maritime surveillance and oversaw the activities of Hezbollah’s amphibious warfare unit. The coastal surveillance included radar-fitted observation posts to monitor for Israeli naval commando infiltrations and shipping movements. The amphibious warfare unit was established in the 1990s, but details of its activities are scarce. Although its cadres fought in south Lebanon during the 1990s as regular combatants, according to Hezbollah sources, the party leadership has never formally mentioned the existence of the unit. Recruits receive training in Iran, probably at the IRGC underwater combat school in Bandar Abbas, as well as learning basic frogman skills in a camp near the Assi River in the northern Bekaa Valley. Training is thought to include beach landings and underwater demolition skills.

  The logistical command was located in the northern Bekaa and was principally responsible for training and the storage of armaments arriving from Syria. Tunnels sunk into the sides of sealed-off valleys near Janta in the jagged and barren limestone peaks close to the Syrian border were the initial repositories for Hezbollah’s smuggled rockets. The logistical unit then organized the transfer of the rockets to arms warehouses and bunkers farther south.

  The command and control center of the Islamic Resistance was based in the “security quarter” in Beirut’s southern suburbs. Before the 2006 war, armed guards wearing black uniforms and berets controlled heavy steel sliding gates that barred access into Hezbollah’s nerve center and home to the leadership, an otherwise nondescript cluster of drab concrete apartment buildings looking much like any other part of the city. Secondary locations, known as “the points,” were selected and equipped for almost all Hezbollah’s offices and facilities in the southern suburbs, including a fully functioning mirror facility for the Al-Manar television channel. In the event of war, if the southern suburbs came under attack, Hezbollah personnel could abandon their normal offices and relocate to the safety of the points, allowing them to continue with their tasks. “We are now highly prepared to face Israel. We are more highly prepared than at any previous time,” Sheikh Naim Qassem told me in August 2004.

  What We Should Do for the Intifada

  While Hezbollah’s main focus between 2000 and 2006 was on building its military capabilities in Lebanon and waging its campaign of brinkmanship along the Blue Line, the organization also played a support role in the Palestinian Al-Aqsa intifada. The destruction of Israel and the liberation of Jerusalem remain core ideological goals for Hezbollah. But the party tempers such ambitions by declaring that although it is willing to lend assistance when possible, the Palestinians must take the lead in securing their own emancipation from Israel.

  As the Al-Aqsa intifada gained momentum, Hezbollah established a unit to expedite assistance to the Palestinians on behalf of Iran. The unit oversaw the creation of cells and networks in the occupied Palestinian territories as well as in Israel, trained Palestinian militants at camps in the Bekaa Valley, or sent them on to Iran for advanced training.

  Hezbollah also facilitated the smuggling of arms and ammunition by sea directly to Gaza or Egypt and then by tunnels dug under the Gaza-Egypt border. The most ambitious known smuggling operation was the fifty tons of Iranian-supplied weapons worth $15 million carried on board the Karine-A cargo ship, which was intercepted by Israeli commandos in January 2002 in the Red Sea about three hundred miles south of Eilat. Following the seizure of the Karine-A, Hezbollah abandoned attempts to smuggle weapons into the Palestinian territories, finding it more expedient to provide funds with which the Palestinians could procure arms themselves. “In principle, we don’t have anything against assisting them in arms, but for practical and technical reasons providing money is easier. When they get the money they can obtain the weapons they want from within occupied Palestine,” Nasrallah told me in 2003.

  The Internet was used to send instructions and transfer funds into accounts held with Arab banks that had branches in the West Bank and Gaza. Technical data, such as bomb-building techniques and rocket design, was passed on by couriers or cell phone text messages. That expertise was manifested in dramatic fashion in February 2002 when Fatah militants blew up a Merkava Mark 3 in the Gaza Strip with a 110-pound “belly charge,” killing three of its four-man crew. Not even Hezbollah had totally destroyed a Merkava tank before.

  Hezbollah also mobilized its media resources to aid the intifada, particularly Al-Manar television, which devoted about 70 percent of its air-time to the Palestinian struggle and became the leading weapon in the propaganda war against Israel. By the beginning of 2001, it was broadcasting via satellite 24 hours a day, covering the globe except for Australia and Southeast Asia. “President Bush can watch Al-Manar in the White House if he wants,” joked Nayyaf Krayyem, the station’s chairman. By 2001, Al-Manar’s budget had risen to $10 million a year, a tenfold increase since its inception a decade earlier.

  Transmission antennae were set up along the border to beam Al-Manar into Israel. Through propaganda clips, nonstop updated news developments relayed by Palestinian reporters on the ground, interviews, and discussion panels, Hezbollah relentlessly hammered home its message that resistance was the only path for the Palestinians to regain their homeland. And the Palestinians were listening.

  By the first anniversary of the Al-Aqsa intifada in September 2001, Hezbollah’s yellow flag, with its distinctive emblem of a fist clutching a Kalashnikov rifle, fluttered alongside banners of mainstream Palestinian groups at funerals and demonstrations in the occupied territories. Cassette tapes of Nasrallah’s speeches were listened to avidly. Occasionally, the Hezbollah leader addressed Palestinian audiences from Beirut, more than 130 miles to the north, his words relayed to the crowd by cell phone and loudspeaker.

  A “Terrible Deed”

  Hezbollah had just begun implementing its military plans in south Lebanon and the Palestinian territories when nineteen young Arab men hijacked four airliners and flew three of them into the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. The scale of the devastating attacks and the horrifying, mesmerizing images of the Twin Towers crumbling into dust stunned Hezbollah as much as the rest of the world. Until then, Hezbollah had stood accused of killing more Americans than any other militant group. Now, the party found itself elbowed off the top of the list by al-Qaeda, but still very much in the crosshairs of President George W. Bush’s newly declared “war on terrorism.” With smoke still rising from the rubble of the Twin Tow
ers, Bush warned that the war would begin with al-Qaeda, “but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group with global reach has been found, stopped, and defeated.”

  Syria, recognizing that it, too, was uncomfortably close to being listed among Washington’s enemies, opted initially to cooperate with the United States, sharing intelligence with the CIA and allowing FBI investigators to question Islamist nationals suspected of having contacts with al-Qaeda.

  Sayyed Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, the leading Shia cleric in Lebanon, was swift to condemn 9/11, describing it as a “terrible deed” and “impermissible and disapproved by all religions.” Nasrallah struck a more confrontational tone in his first public comments on the attacks, saying that while Hezbollah condemned “all killings of innocent civilians all over the world,” the party would remain true to its agenda regardless of the U.S. war on terrorism. “September 11 might change the whole world, but it will not change our way at all,” he said.

  But the United States was determined to apply pressure on Syria and Lebanon to curb Hezbollah’s activities. The Bush administration’s ideologues, the so-called neoconservatives, saw the war on terrorism as an opportunity to mold the Middle East to benefit the strategic interests of the United States, which would include the elimination of Hezbollah as an enduring threat. Some U.S. officials who had served in the earlier administrations of Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush had personal grudges against Hezbollah, associating the organization with the traumas and bloody setbacks of Washington’s Lebanon policies in the 1980s. In 2002, Richard Armitage, the deputy secretary of state who had served at the Pentagon at the time of the U.S. marine barracks bombing in 1983, famously described Hezbollah as the “A-team of terrorists,” relegating the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks to the B-team.

  Still, there were at least two alleged attempts by the United States to buy off Hezbollah with hundreds of millions of dollars in exchange for the party’s renouncing its struggle against Israel and dismantling the Islamic Resistance. The proposals were rejected by Nasrallah, who described one of the offers as a “political hand grenade intended to finish us off.”3

  The 9/11 attacks inevitably reawakened interest in the whereabouts and activities of the ever-elusive Imad Mughniyah, of whom little had been heard in the previous decade. The only pictures of Mughniyah publicly available were a few grainy black-and-white snapshots from the 1980s, portraying a serious, sallow-faced young man with a pointed black beard.

  Mughniyah, Nasrallah, Fadlallah, and Sheikh Sobhi Tufayli were listed by the U.S. Treasury Department as Specially Designated Terrorists. A month after 9/11, Mughniyah appeared on an FBI list of the top twenty-two most wanted terrorists, alongside Ali Atwi and Hassan Ezzieddine, both of whom were also wanted, along with Mughniyah, for the hijacking of TWA Flight 847 in June 1985.

  Weeks after 9/11, a rumor surfaced in Lebanon that Jawad Noureddine, the unknown but newly elected head of Hezbollah’s military council in the seven-man Shura Council, was none other than Mughniyah himself.

  For Hezbollah officials, Mughniyah became a tiresome subject brought up by journalists during interviews. Some denied he had anything to do with Hezbollah; most simply declined to talk about him at all.

  Two weeks after 9/11, I interviewed Anis Naqqash, the former Fatah member who had overseen Mughniyah’s initial military training in the 1970s. With the rubble of the Twin Towers still smoking, Naqqash chose to deny ever having known Mughniyah.

  I once asked Sheikh Sobhi Tufayli if Mughniyah was responsible for the U.S. marine barracks bombing. Tufayli scowled at the floor and said, “He had nothing to do with it.” Then, lifting his head and fixing me with a stern gaze, he added in his typically gruff manner, “Besides, if he did, do you think I would tell you?”

  “The Kid,” the former Hezbollah assassin and unit commander from the 1980s, smiled and shook his head pityingly when I brought up the subject of Mughniyah over a cup of coffee one morning. “Who is Imad Mughniyah?” he asked rhetorically. “No one in Hezbollah knows who is Imad Mughniyah. Seriously. In Hezbollah, there are different names for different people. Anyone can give themselves a different name. I know people in the Hezbollah leadership who have different names. Some people know him by one name and somebody else by another. You would think they are two different people, but they are the same person. You get me? No one at all in Hezbollah can tell you who is Imad Mughniyah.”

  The most candid comment I received on Mughniyah was from Nasrallah himself. When I asked if Jawad Noureddine was the nom de guerre of Imad Mughniyah, Nasrallah said, “No. I heard the rumor and I laughed at it.… [Noureddine] is a real person, and he has worked in the ranks of the resistance and has assumed many responsibilities in the resistance. The officials in the resistance are not media personalities.… When the battle is over, or these people become old men, then it is possible that we could present them through the media.”

  But does Mughniyah have any connections with Hezbollah?

  “Hajj Imad Mughniyah is among the best freedom fighters in the Lebanese arena,” Nasrallah replied. “He had an important role in resisting the occupation, but [as for] his relations with Hezbollah, or whether he has a position in Hezbollah, we observe the tradition of not providing lists of names of cadres or those that cooperate with us.”

  Mughniyah was rumored to have had plastic surgery—twice—to alter his appearance. He was supposed to be living in Tehran and traveling under an Iranian diplomatic passport on unscheduled flights. In fact, Mughniyah spent most of his time in Beirut, playing soccer with children in the southern suburbs or shopping in the western half of the city with his wife. As chief of staff of the Islamic Resistance, he often visited his fighters in their frontline positions, traveling alone along the highway between Beirut and the south, his bulky frame perched on a tiny Vespa scooter. The Kid’s explanation, as it later turned out, was entirely correct. Mughniyah never had plastic surgery. He simply operated under many different names, and almost no one knew his real identity.

  “He didn’t believe in bodyguards,” recalls one of Mughniyah’s friends. “He didn’t need them. Sometimes he would arrive for a meeting with resistance people and the guard at the entrance wouldn’t know him and would refuse to let him enter. Most Lebanese politicians would get upset and say something like ‘Don’t you know who I am?’ But Imad would say nothing, and then someone would tell the guard, ‘No, it’s okay. He’s with me. He can come in.’ ”

  “Some May Not Sit Idly By”

  In the context of the war on terrorism, the United States perceived Hezbollah as a terrorist organization with global reach. It was Hezbollah’s potential to attack U.S. interests worldwide, rather than the threat it posed to Israel from south Lebanon, that earned it such a high ranking on the Bush administration’s hit list.

  Hezbollah’s influence extends to wherever there are sizable communities of the Lebanese Shia diaspora, which includes most regions of the world: the Arab Gulf, West and Central Africa, Latin America, Australia, the Far East, Europe, Canada, and the United States. The diaspora represents a fertile source of fundraising, which appears to be the principal purpose driving the establishment of Hezbollah’s global network. The fundraising apparatus is extensive and ranges from legitimate commercial enterprises in which the profits are delivered to Hezbollah and religious donations, known as zakat, to illegal transnational activities such as bank frauds, currency counterfeiting, drug trafficking, the manufacture and sale of fake goods, intellectual property piracy, and the trade in African “blood diamonds.”

  Still, illicit activities aside, Hezbollah’s reputation for piety and financial integrity has encouraged expatriate Shia bourgeoisie to send religious tithes to the party. These donations alone evidently constitute a substantial source of income. In December 2003, a Union Transport Africaine flight bound for Beirut from Cotonou in the West African state of Benin crashed on takeoff. According to Lebanese press reports, among the dead was a Hezbollah courier carrying $2 mil
lion in cash contributions from wealthy supporters in West Africa.

  Since the end of Lebanon’s civil war in 1990, allegations of Hezbollah involvement in anti-American attacks around the world have declined. The last major anti-American attack in which Hezbollah is alleged to have participated was in June 1996, when a militant from the Shia “Saudi Hezbollah” group suicide-car-bombed the Khobar Towers U.S. air force dormitory in Saudi Arabia, leaving nineteen American servicemen dead. According to the indictment, Hezbollah is alleged to have provided the car bomb.

  From 2003, a number of Hezbollah operatives are alleged to have assisted the Quds Force unit of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps in helping train Iraqi Shia insurgents, members of the so-called Special Groups, which include small but potent factions such as the Hezbollah Brigades and the League of the Righteous. According to U.S. defense officials and transcripts of interrogations from captured Iraqi fighters, Hezbollah personnel train insurgents mainly at Quds Force–run camps in Iran, although a few recruits receive training at Hezbollah facilities in Lebanon.4

  Hezbollah also is alleged to have played an organizational and logistical role in Iraq itself under the direction of the Iranians, helping form and direct cells within the Special Groups. In March 2007, U.S. troops in Iraq captured Ali Musa Daqduq, a Hezbollah operative since 1983 who was responsible for liaison between the Special Groups and the Quds Force. Daqduq pretended to be a deaf-mute for several weeks to not betray his Lebanese accent to interrogators.

  Hezbollah’s external operations—such as assisting the Palestinians during the Al-Aqsa intifada and helping organize and train Shia militants in Iraq—are carried out under the direction and coordination of Iran rather than being unilateral decisions of the party leadership. These moonlighting activities away from the main Lebanon-Israel front add grist to Hezbollah’s critics who charge that the organization is a tool of Iranian foreign policy—the Lebanese branch of the IRGC, if you will.