Warriors of God

by Nicholas Blanford

  “We left immediately when we heard the warning, not stopping to pack or even bring money,” Ali said. “We saw people in Bint Jbeil and other places pleading at us to stop and take them, but we had no room. There was nothing we could do for them.”

  Three loud blasts close to the Rest House sent panicked refugees scurrying for cover, ducking behind chairs and shoving one another to get away from the vulnerable plate glass windows. The blasts were not Israeli bombs but Hezbollah’s latest salvo of rockets, fired from hidden launchers among the orange groves outside Tyre, thin wavy trails of smoke marking their southbound trajectory. Shortly afterward, the refugees in the hotel watched the Arabic satellite television channels report that Haifa, thirty-seven miles south of Tyre, had been hit by rockets again.

  “Let them suffer as we are suffering,” said one man to mutters of agreement from his companions.

  In the Jabal Amil hospital, Walid Abu Zeidi, thirteen, trembling with shock, writhed on his hospital bed, his small body daubed with bright red iodine and his arm wrapped in a bandage. He and his friends had been swimming in a culvert beside the Litani River five miles north of Tyre when a missile dropped by a jet exploded nearby. “I saw the flash of the missile, then I was thrown down,” he said.

  The corridor in the basement of the hospital was filled with people sitting on the floor, wide-eyed with shock and apprehension. Children sat with their mothers and sisters on foam mattresses as doctors, nurses, and relatives of the wounded hurried past. “This is Israeli terror,” a headscarfed teenage girl whispered, “but we will resist.”

  In the hush of the intensive care unit lay Alia Alieddine, a thirty-year-old woman, one of only two casualties to make it to the hospital from the hill village of Srifa, ten miles east of Tyre. Israeli aircraft had flattened several neighborhoods in the village the previous night. Ten bodies had been recovered, but it was feared that many more remained under the rubble. Connected to breathing tubes and drips, her head heavily bandaged, Alieddine’s bruised, half-closed eyes stared sightlessly at the ceiling. “She suffered major wounds, her arm is broken, and she has lost a lot of blood,” Dr. Abdullah Abbas said quietly. “Her chances are not good. It is in God’s hands.”

  A steady stream of casualties trickled into the hospital, ferried from outlying villages by the exceptionally brave young men and women volunteers of the Lebanese Red Cross. By the end of the second week of the war, the medics were reporting that starving dogs had begun to eat the dead. The unrelenting pressure to bring aid to the stranded villagers was beginning to take a psychological toll on the fifty medics in Tyre. Terrified civilians constantly called in to the Red Cross center begging for help, but there was little the medics could do. Even the distinctive white ambulances emblazoned with the Red Cross symbol and lit up at night with rotating blue lights and spotlights were coming under attack, with bombs dropped perilously close to them, apparently on purpose. “I don’t know what the Israelis are thinking when they do this. They certainly can see us,” said Sami Yazbek, the Red Cross chief in Tyre.

  “Half of Them Have No Heads, No Hands”

  Some 80 percent of Tyre’s population of a hundred thousand had fled by the end of the first week. Even the twenty thousand refugees who had descended on Tyre from neighboring villages had mostly departed, either evacuated by sea or driven to the Litani River, where they waded across the shallow river to be picked up by relatives or taxis charging exorbitant fees for the perilous drive to Sidon and Beirut.

  Television journalists replaced the refugees at the Rest House hotel. The hotel had panoramic views to the south and east, and a bank of cameras was set up beside the swimming pool to capture images of explosions and rocket launches. The print media took over the Al-Fanar hotel on the seafront in the picturesque Christian quarter on Tyre’s promontory. We began eating communal meals in the evening, simple dishes of rice, lentils, and salads as the hotel’s food stocks began to run out. There were always mountains of fresh fish, sold to the hotel by enterprising youths who tossed hand grenades into the sea outside the Fanar. The hotel regularly shook to the reverberations of these underwater explosions.

  The hotel’s proprietor, the silver-haired and baggy-eyed Raymond, was a permanent lugubrious presence, sitting at a small table in the reception area smoking a water pipe and flicking through piles of bills and receipts. At least someone was making money from this disaster.

  Our Christian neighbors left en masse one afternoon after Israeli aircraft dropped warning leaflets over Tyre, a plastic barrel bursting open in the air and the yellow paper fluttering in a cloud of confetti onto the narrow streets and small stone houses of the quarter.

  Lebanese troops, loaded with webbing and ammunition, deployed along Tyre’s streets, preparing to repel a possible Israeli invasion. One soldier, a stocky Maronite Christian from Bsharre in north Lebanon, lounged in the shade of the Rest House hotel, ruminating on what was to come. He would do his duty, he said, if Israel invaded, but then after a moment’s pause he asked, “Do you see any signs of hope? I have only been married two weeks.”

  After many years driving around south Lebanon, I knew my way around well. But I found that my geographical knowledge of the south was almost meaningless during the war because the roads were so heavily bombed we had to find alternative routes, tiny back lanes and even farm tracks through orange groves and banana plantations.

  On my initial trip out of Tyre, I followed a Red Cross ambulance that wove around the first gaping crater on the outskirts of the town then detoured around the second by following a track through an orange orchard. Houses and shops destroyed in air strikes spilled untidily onto the road. The burned-out wrecks of vehicles littered the sides of the road, some having slammed into metal telegraph poles or into buildings, driven perhaps by motorists who lost control in their panic to escape the area. Some vehicles clearly had been struck by missiles, transforming the cars into twisted heaps of fire-scorched metal.

  Siddiqine was under shell fire. We had to take back lanes through the village as the main road was blocked by the rubble of bombed buildings. We could hear the shells ripping through the air above us and see them exploding in dirty gray puffs of smoke and dust some three hundred yards away. I gritted my teeth as the tires of my rented BMW crunched over the jagged glass shards and shattered cinder blocks that carpeted the road. This was not a place to change a flat tire. We later learned that Layal Najib, a twenty-three-year-old photographer for Agence France Presse, was killed in Siddiqine that morning during the same artillery bombardment.

  By the end of the first full week of the war, the morgue in Tyre’s government hospital was full. A refrigerator truck that had been driven to Tyre from Tripoli in north Lebanon on the first day of the conflict in anticipation of a heavy toll of dead had carried the overspill. But the truck was filled to capacity, and the feeble generator that blew cold air over the corpses could not compete with the blistering summer heat. Local residents were beginning to complain about the smell, and a decision was made to bury the victims in a mass grave.

  Stacked inside on shelves of wooden slats, wrapped in sheets and plastic bags, were the remains of 115 people, most of them children. “Half of them have no heads, no hands. There’s a baby inside that was burned like a piece of coal,” said Hala Hijazi, a nurse at the government hospital, her tired eyes and haggard expression momentarily betraying the horror of what she had witnessed in the past week.

  The bodies were lowered from the back of the truck into simple pine coffins doused with chemical spray to mask, with little success, the cloying odor of putrefaction. A carpenter continued to hammer together planks of wood for another coffin to join the pile of more than a hundred already assembled and ready to receive bodies.

  A crowd of wide-eyed Palestinian children from the surrounding refugee camp scrambled up a wall beside the hospital to stare in morbid fascination at the gruesome scene in the courtyard. Grieving relatives of the dead sat on plastic chairs in a row, sobbing quietly and holding one
another’s hands. Some of the bags placed in coffins were pitifully small; other coffins were filled with more than one bag, grim evidence of the destructive firepower Israel had unleashed on south Lebanon. By the time the third body had been lifted from the truck, the green canvas stretcher on which they were carried to the coffins was streaked with black blood that had oozed from the plastic and cloth bindings. Each body was inscribed with the victim’s name, which someone would read out to a soldier who would tick a list on a clipboard. I recognized the name of one victim whose wrapped corpse was squeezed into a narrow coffin: Alia Alieddine, the same woman I had seen struggling to live in the intensive care unit of Jabal Amil hospital just two days earlier.

  “We Expected a Tent and Three Kalashnikovs”

  By the end of the first week of fighting, Ehud Olmert was brimming with confidence, buoyed by 78 percent approval ratings and glowing coverage in the Israeli press.

  A UN delegation appeared to have won some concessions from the Lebanese government regarding a possible cease-fire, including Hezbollah potentially agreeing to hand over the captured Israeli soldiers to the jurisdiction of the state. But Olmert was uninterested in mulling an exit strategy when he believed he had Hezbollah on the ropes. General Halutz, the IDF chief of staff, was confident that Hezbollah could be smashed using airpower alone with some limited ground incursions along the border.

  Israel had prepared two contingency plans in the event of a conflict with Hezbollah. The first was an air-only bombing campaign lasting 48 to 72 hours. The second was a ground invasion to push Hezbollah north of the Litani River.2 Both operations were intended to run in tandem. However, Halutz abandoned the ground invasion plan and instead chose an expanded version of the air campaign. He recommended a gradual escalation of air attacks, including against major Lebanese infrastructure facilities. The Americans worried that bombing infrastructure could undermine the Siniora government and leaned on Olmert to concentrate on Hezbollah targets instead.

  After five days of fighting, Israel could have secured a favorable cease-fire deal, but instead, on July 17, Olmert addressed the Israeli Knesset and delivered a set of wholly unrealistic conditions to end the conflict. They included the return of the hostages, a complete cease-fire, deployment of the Lebanese army throughout south Lebanon up to the Blue Line, the expulsion of Hezbollah from the border district, and the party’s disarming under UN Security Council Resolution 1559. “We will continue to operate in full force until we achieve this,” he thundered.

  Olmert’s maximalist position quashed any chance of achieving a swift and favorable cease-fire deal for Israel and inadvertently played into Hezbollah’s hands. Hezbollah may have been surprised by the initial onslaught, but its fighting capabilities remained essentially intact, and, contrary to Halutz’s assessment, it knew it could withstand many more weeks of Israeli aerial punishment.

  The same day that Olmert delivered his ultimatums, units of IDF special forces troops staged the first serious incursion into Lebanon, advancing on the village of Maroun er-Ras, a mile north of the border. Capturing the hilltop village would grant the Israelis a toehold inside Lebanon with dominating views overlooking Bint Jbeil to the northwest. But the IDF troops found themselves ambushed by Hezbollah men fighting from well-prepared defensive positions. Far from hitting the Israelis and then disappearing in the usual guerrilla fashion, the Hezbollah fighters held their ground and within hours the soldiers had taken casualties and were surrounded. The IDF threw more forces into the battle. But the Hezbollah men refused to yield the ground and fought with a determination that stunned the Israelis. Soldiers spoke of Hezbollah men popping out of the ground to loose a rocket-propelled grenade before disappearing again. “We expected a tent and three Kalashnikovs—that was the intelligence we were given,” a special forces soldier later said. “Instead, we found a hydraulic steel door leading to a well-equipped network of tunnels.”3

  Several Israeli soldiers were killed and more than a dozen and a half wounded in fierce close-quarters battles before Israel declared on July 23, after seven days of fighting, that it had captured Maroun er-Ras. Yet the Israeli forces in the village continued to come under attack in the following days and took more casualties.

  “We Never Received Orders to Fire the SAMs”

  With Maroun er-Ras more or less under Israeli control, IDF commanders turned their attention to Bint Jbeil, which sprawled across the hilly landscape directly below the new IDF positions.

  Nasrallah had chosen Bint Jbeil to deliver his victory speech in May 2000, two days after the Israelis pulled out of Lebanon, in which he described Israel as weak as a “spider’s web.” Mindful of that insult, Israeli commanders dubbed the operation to attack Bint Jbeil “Web of Steel.” Yet the decision to strike at Hezbollah’s presence in the town was informed by hubris rather than tactical need. The center of Bint Jbeil was a warrenlike network of narrow lanes and alleyways, too tight to use armor effectively and well prepared in advance by Hezbollah. Hezbollah commanders could see the IDF Merkava tanks sliding into position on the Maroun er-Ras hill and knew that Bint Jbeil would be next. The attack on Bint Jbeil began on July 24, following two days of softening up with artillery and air strikes. But it was a scrappy, unconvincing assault, muddled by bickering IDF generals who could not agree on how to proceed and consisting of a series of hard-fought skirmishes between separate Israeli units and Hezbollah fighters. After four days, the Israelis pulled back, leaving the ruined town in Hezbollah’s hands.

  The Israelis were discovering the hard way Hezbollah’s new military doctrine of “defensive resistance.” Not only were the Hezbollah combatants tenaciously defending the ground from their fortified positions, they were also maneuvering across ground, or under it, to fill gaps, encircle Israeli troops, or confront additional IDF thrusts. “It’s not a huge force,” one UNIFIL officer told me, estimating Hezbollah’s frontline combat strength at around eight hundred to a thousand fighters, “but they are mobile, very well prepared, and devoted. They’re willing to act. There’s heavy shelling and air strikes, but they are not sitting scared in their bunkers.”

  The Hezbollah men knew what they had to do: hold ground to protect the rocket launchers and kill as many Israeli soldiers as possible to weaken their morale and embarrass the Israeli military and political leadership. But within that general strategy, there was much tactical flexibility given to commanders on the ground. Hezbollah sometimes allowed the Israelis to enter Lebanon unopposed, especially in open terrain, choosing to attack them once they had advanced into urban areas where the Israeli advantage of air and armored power was diminished.

  “It is beneficial for us to allow them to advance to the entrances of the villages. This is our goal,” Nasrallah explained in a televised statement on August 3. “Our goal is to inflict maximum casualties and damage to the capabilities of the enemy, and we are succeeding.”

  The Hezbollah units maintained contact with command bases as much as possible using the fiber optic landline network. Intelligence picked up by Hezbollah’s Hebrew-speaking electronic warfare technicians was dispatched to commanders who could then relay instructions to the cadres on the ground. But once squads were on the move, they had to rely on walkie-talkies to communicate, which carried risks of jamming or detection. Hezbollah’s technicians working their spectrum analyzers could inform fighters which frequencies were jammed, allowing communications to continue using unblocked frequencies. Sometimes the fighters intercepted Israeli radio traffic and listened to the chatter between combat units. “We used to play mind games with them. We would interrupt them and say things like ‘we’re waiting for you’ or ‘we’re just around the corner,’ ” one Hezbollah veteran of the war recalled.

  Another fighter who was deployed on the edges of Bint Jbeil said his unit broke in to radio communications of Israeli troops who had just been ambushed and were calling for backup.

  “One of the brothers spoke to them in Hebrew on the radio, saying that we knew where they were and we we
re about to drop a bomb on their heads. The Israeli cursed Sayyed Nasrallah and the Prophet Mohammed,” he said, chuckling at the memory.

  It soon became evident that unlike other Israeli military campaigns in Lebanon since the early 1990s, the Israelis for the first time were limiting the use of their helicopter gunships in Lebanese airspace, relying instead on low-signature missile-firing pilotless drones. The only helicopters I saw during the war were off the coast of Tyre, usually flying far out to sea and at high altitude. The Israelis believed Hezbollah had acquired SA-18 “Grouse” shoulder-fired surface-to-air missiles, even though none were known to have been fired during the war and the only antiaircraft missiles recovered by Israeli troops were the older SA-7 and SA-14 models.

  Nonetheless, a former senior Israeli military intelligence official insisted to me in 2008 that the Israeli Air Force was not acting with excessive caution in reducing the number of helicopters above Lebanon. “We knew they had the missiles, so we adjusted our tactics,” the official said. That assertion is supported by the comments of some Hezbollah fighters who told me that the SAMs were deliberately held in reserve as an additional “surprise” if necessary. “We never received orders to fire the SAMs because there were no helicopters to threaten us, and the bombing by jets didn’t have much impact on us. If the jets had been a problem, we would have used the SAMs,” recalls one Hezbollah recruit who fought on the front lines.