Warriors of God

by Nicholas Blanford

  The New “Beyond Haifa” Stage

  Far from being cowed by Israel’s air attacks on Beirut and the south as the Israeli government had anticipated, Hezbollah steadily increased the number of rockets fired into Israel. The rate of fire for the first ten days averaged from 150 to 180 rockets per day, with as many as 47 being fired in a single salvo. The rate peaked at 350 on July 18. As Israel expanded the scope of targets in Lebanon, so Hezbollah’s rockets marched ever deeper inside Israel—Haifa on July 14, Tiberias on July 15, and Nazareth and Afula on July 16. The rate of fire and incremental increase in range were consistent with Hezbollah’s defensive posture during the war. Every time Israel escalated its attacks, Hezbollah reciprocated. The calculated and coordinated rocket fire also demonstrated that Hezbollah’s command and control remained intact despite punishing air raids.

  The deepest penetration into Israel came on August 3 when a 302 mm rocket impacted near Hadera. Curiously, almost none of the Iranian Fajr family of rockets was fired into Israel during the war. The feared Zelzal-2s, with their eleven-hundred-pound warheads and range that brought nearly all Israel’s major population centers within reach, were not used, possibly because they were being held in reserve in case Israel escalated its attacks even further. One suspected Zelzal was spotted tumbling out of the sky on July 17 moments after an Israeli air strike on a suburb of Beirut. The target was a Zelzal launcher inside a shipping container. A motor on one of the rockets apparently ignited in the blast, causing it to shoot into the sky.

  One medium-range launch site was located in a dense orange orchard on the northern edge of Tyre, and it was reportedly from here that Hezbollah fired the 302 mm rocket that struck Hadera on August 3. In the early hours of August 5, I awoke with a start to the appalling din of multiple machine gun fire and the clatter of helicopters that seemed to be hovering a few feet above the hotel. The inky night sky was lit with brilliant white and orange flashes coming from the northern entrance of Tyre. A team of Israeli Shayetet 13 naval commandos was raiding a building where the operators of the nearby rocket launcher were based. The gun battle, which lasted perhaps ten minutes, left an Israeli officer and one soldier severely wounded and another six soldiers with slight wounds. At least one Hezbollah fighter was reported dead. The following afternoon, an Israeli jet bombed the building into rubble. Yet within hours, the rocket launcher was back in action in the orange orchard as if nothing had happened.

  Hezbollah also launched at least three of its Mirsad-1 UAVs. One was shot down on August 7 off the coast of northern Israel. It was reportedly carrying twenty pounds of explosive packed with ball bearings. Another was intercepted by Israeli helicopters on the night of August 13 off the Tyre headland. From the Al-Fanar hotel, we watched the helicopter finish off the drone, blasting it with machine gun fire and missiles after it fell into the sea. A third UAV was launched the same night but crashed near Tyre.

  Hezbollah also claimed to have hit two more vessels with its antiship missiles, one on August 1 and another on August 12. All shipping, whether Israeli navy or commercial vessels, gave the Lebanese coastline a wide berth after the attack on the INS Hanit. However, minutes after Hezbollah aired a claim to have hit a ship off the Tyre coast on August 12, I saw from the town’s promontory a large plume of white smoke on the horizon to the southwest that lasted for about twenty minutes. I could see no vessel, even with my binoculars, and have no explanation for the smoke. The Israelis denied that any more ships were struck by missiles.

  Hezbollah fighters in the frontline area moved on foot at night and generally under cover of thick undergrowth. To travel farther distances, fighters rode off-road rally bikes and all-terrain vehicles with the lights switched off. Inside some villages, fighters disguised themselves as old men and women to move around. Rather than using tunnels dug between houses, holes were knocked through the walls of adjacent buildings so that fighters could traverse the village quickly without exposing themselves on the street.

  The advanced Russian antitank missile systems were usually reserved for Israeli armored vehicles. The Hezbollah tank hunter-killer teams demonstrated impressive accuracy, hitting targets at distances of three miles at the outer edges of the missile’s range. Missiles were often fired in volleys of up to a dozen at a time, a relatively high expenditure. The purpose was to “swarm” armored vehicles with missiles to blast off outer layers of reactive armor and expose the vulnerable steel skin, a continuation of a tactic developed in the mid-1990s. They made effective use of the older wire-guided Sagger systems by firing them against buildings housing IDF troops. In one instance, nine paratroopers were killed and eleven wounded when Sagger missiles smashed through the cinder block walls of the building in which they were sheltering.

  Despite the invisible Hezbollah air defense during the war, one antiarmor team showed some initiative in shooting down an Israeli helicopter with an antitank missile. A CH-53 Yasur troop transport helicopter momentarily touched down on a hillside near Yater village to drop off a platoon of soldiers. A quick-thinking Hezbollah team fired a missile at the CH-53 as it took off, knocking it out of the sky and killing all five crew members.

  Abu Khalil, who had deployed to the Marjayoun area in the opening hours of the war, spent the first fifteen days assisting antitank units. He and two colleagues carried missiles packed inside wooden crates to preselected locations where they could be collected by the antitank teams. One fighter would walk a few paces ahead to reconnoiter the route through the thick undergrowth while the other two carried the case containing the missiles on their shoulders. Abu Khalil was told nothing about the systems he was carrying, and he concluded that they must be antitank missiles from the length of the wooden boxes (much too short to be 120 mm Katyusha rockets) and the Russian lettering on the sides. He and his comrades labored throughout the day, pausing every few hours to glug down orange energy tablets dissolved in canteens of water. Despite the heat, they were careful not to drink too much liquid. They had been warned that if they urinated, their scent could be detected by Israeli trackers with sniffer dogs. Such was the level of caution they adopted.

  There were no significant reinforcements dispatched to the south to bolster Hezbollah’s numbers, simply because they were not needed. Other than the south-based fighters like Abu Khalil, who were deployed immediately after the kidnapping operation on July 12, Hezbollah had sufficient numbers of tabbiyya reservists to defend the villages against IDF encroachments. They were supported by some of the regular forces who could plug gaps where needed. Other regular units north of the Litani River or tabbiyya reservist fighters in villages just outside the combat areas stayed where they were, ready to confront IDF troops should they move farther north.

  “Victory Is Coming, Coming, Coming”

  Two of those reservists patiently awaiting their turn to fight were Abu Mohammed and Hajj Rabieh, the Hezbollah veterans from Srifa village whom I encountered two weeks into the fighting.

  More than a mile to the east, the neighboring village of Froun was shrouded in a haze of dust and smoke. High above the village, a pair of Israeli jets glinted like silver specks in the deep blue sky as they wheeled and swooped, releasing bombs that exploded in great bursts of dirty brown dust and gray smoke among the houses. Above us, invisible in the brilliant blue sky, whined a reconnaissance drone, an unnerving presence as we paced through the empty village. Srifa’s deserted streets and bombed homes reminded me of one of those dummy towns the U.S. army built in the 1950s in the deserts of New Mexico to test weapons and atomic bombs. A twisted sheet of metal banged occasionally in the hot breeze, adding to the sense of apocalyptic desolation. Two scrawny horses stood in the shade of a gas station while a pack of mangy dogs padded silently down the road. Inside one lightly damaged single-story home, the front door left wide open by its fleeing owners, were several family pictures showing happier times. One portrayed a smiling little girl dressed in traditional Lebanese costume.

  My two colleagues—Charles Levinson, then a correspon
dent for Agence France Presse, and Rania Abouzeid, a Lebanese journalist—and I had been in Srifa for about twenty minutes when we were approached by a thin, wiry man with a scraggly beard. He wore plain clothes and his trousers were tucked into socks. But the walkie-talkie he held in his right hand identified him as a Hezbollah man. He was clearly surprised to see foreigners in the village, but we told him we were there to have a look around. The Hezbollah man thought for a moment, then spoke into his walkie-talkie. Making up his mind, he beckoned us to follow him. He said we could call him Abu Mohammed, and he offered to give us a tour of the bombed quarters of the village. We were joined minutes later by a short, stocky Hezbollah fighter with a thick beard and a baseball cap. He called himself Hajj Rabieh. The two men kept to the shadows on the side of the street but otherwise seemed unperturbed by the drone that continued to linger overhead and was making me feel distinctly uneasy. “We take our chances, and we take our precautions, too,” Abu Mohammed said with a grin.

  We followed them along a twisting alleyway. Part of the alley was strewn with delicate white jasmine petals blown from an overhanging tree by the force of the explosions. For a brief moment the air was filled with the fragrant scent of the flower. At the end of the alley was a small stone house, and inside, seated on thin mattresses on the floor, were four old women. One of them grabbed a white sheet and pulled it over her head in a gesture of Islamic modesty at the sudden presence of men. The women were among the handful of residents who had not left the village and were being cared for by the Hezbollah men and a young woman. “We are trying our best to help the local people. This is the directive of the secretary general,” Abu Mohammed said, referring to Nasrallah.

  Mariam Faeen, who we were told was a hundred years old, sat upright, long, bony fingers clasped over her thin knees. Her cheeks were sunken and her face furrowed with age. She was deaf, but her bright eyes darted from face to face, following the conversation. Mariam had narrowly survived the second night of bombing in Srifa. One bomb destroyed her house, but she had crawled out of the rubble unharmed. She took shelter in another house, only to have that one blown up over her head less than an hour later. “She came out of the building black with dust and we brought her here,” Hajj Rabieh said.

  The two Hezbollah men were schoolteachers, but they were also veteran fighters in the Islamic Resistance. Hajj Rabieh was forty years old and had joined the resistance in 1982. His colleague, five years older, had fought with Hezbollah since 1985. They both seemed remarkably relaxed, exuded self-confidence, and appeared to enjoy our unexpected company. We sat on the floor as they showed us how they communicated by walkie-talkie using their ad hoc verbal codes, as described in the previous chapter.

  When asked how many fighters were present in the area, Abu Mohammed answered rhetorically, “How many angels are there? We are present in the same numbers.”

  Neither of them felt a need to rush into combat in the villages a little farther south. They knew their mission was to defend Srifa should the Israelis advance deeper into Lebanon.

  “We are anxiously waiting for it. We are ready to do whatever we are asked to do,” Hajj Rabieh said. “Their [the Israelis] experience in Maroun er-Ras and Bint Jbeil show they paid a high price. They will be paying the same price in every town and village they try to invade. Now they are beginning to admit that they can’t achieve their objective of destroying us.”

  Abu Mohammed smiled and said, “Victory is coming, coming, coming.”

  “The New Middle East”

  The Israelis were running out of targets. Each day, the jets returned over Lebanon, but by the end of the second week of fighting they were attacking targets that already had been pounded into dust during earlier strikes. The momentum was being lost. Ground forces were engaged in a series of limited incursions along the length of the border, but they were making little progress, and Hezbollah’s rockets kept slamming into Israel.

  By now it was dawning on the Bush administration that Israel was badly bungling the job of crushing Hezbollah. The IDF was supposed to be the most powerful military force in the Middle East. Had it not bulldozed its way to Beirut in just nine days in June 1982? Why was it struggling to crush a few hundred Hezbollah “terrorists” in south Lebanon?

  When the war broke out on July 12, it had appeared an opportune moment to deliver a mortal blow to Hezbollah’s military capabilities. With leading Lebanese figures in the March 14 parliamentary bloc quietly urging the Americans to finish off Hezbollah, no wonder Condoleezza Rice, the secretary of state, saw little urgency in heading to the Middle East to begin cease-fire talks. On July 21, the same day that the government hospital in Tyre was preparing to bury the decomposing victims of Israeli attacks packed inside the refrigerator truck, Rice glibly described the war in Lebanon as “the birth pangs of the new Middle East.”

  Three days later, Rice flew to Beirut to begin assessing proposals for an end to the conflict, one that would ensure that Hezbollah could no longer threaten Israel or the Lebanese government. Fouad Siniora had drawn up a seven-point plan to end the fighting, which included recommendations for a beefed-up UNIFIL, the deployment of Lebanese troops up to the border with Israel, the restoration of the 1949 Armistice Agreement, and the transfer of the Shebaa Farms to UN custody.

  Olmert categorically rejected handing the Shebaa Farms over to the UN, but the Israelis, Americans, and Siniora government were in tacit agreement that Hezbollah had to emerge from the war weakened.

  On July 26, key Middle East actors and UN officials gathered in Rome to hammer out an agreement to end the war. But the meeting failed to reach consensus on a cease-fire proposal. Most countries attending, including those of the European Union and Russia as well as the UN, sought an immediate cease-fire before finding a lasting political settlement. But the United States insisted that a cessation of hostilities was inadequate—“We cannot,” Rice said, “return to the status quo ante.”

  “They Suffocated Under the Dirt”

  I woke slowly, tired, craving more sleep, and irritated at the beep of an incoming SMS on my mobile phone. For a moment, I stared stupidly at the message. It told me there had been a massacre in Qana with more than two dozen dead. Qana? Again? Surely not.

  Yet the terse message was correct. Just over ten years since the slaughter of more than a hundred civilians in the UNIFIL Fijian battalion headquarters in Qana, violent death had visited this hill village once again. Two families, the Hashems and Shalhoubs, numbering around sixty people, were sheltering in the basement of a three-story home on the edge of Qana when it was struck in the early hours of July 30 by a precision-guided bomb. Five minutes later, the other side of the home was hit by a second bomb. Twenty-seven people died, sixteen of them under the age of twenty.

  It was with a sobering sense of déjà vu and a hollow, sick feeling in my stomach that I drove along the winding road from Tyre to Qana. Had I not taken this same route ten years earlier, back then a novice war reporter, mentally preparing myself to see bodies torn apart by artillery shells? That I could be repeating this same trip a decade later seemed inconceivable, yet also oddly typical of the callous coincidences one finds in war and of the bitter twists of fate that seem to blight south Lebanon with merciless regularity.

  The Hashem home lay among a cluster of buildings at the end of a road on the edge of a small steep valley filled with olive trees and patches of tobacco. The house, a typical Lebanese construction of reinforced concrete frame and cinder block walls, leaned at a drunken angle, threatening to topple at any moment. Civil defense workers gingerly stooped beneath a collapsed floor to access the bowels of the home where the dead lay. The bomb had buried itself deep underground before exploding. The blast had lifted a huge pile of dirt that had smothered the sleeping families in the basement. It was soon apparent that most of the victims were children.

  The bodies emerged into daylight one by one, all gray-skinned with dust, one small boy’s mouth stuffed with dirt, a stiff arm pointing accusingly at the sky. Wa
sps and flies buzzed with greedy excitement around his face and blood-sodden hair. “It’s Ali Shalhoub,” whispered an onlooker as the child was placed on a stretcher and carried away.

  The 1996 Qana massacre was a Goyaesque spectacle of visceral horror, of dismembered and carbonized bodies and the reek of freshly spilled blood. But the victims of this second Qana massacre looked almost as though they could still be sleeping, as each limp body was carried in the arms of the rescue workers from the house. The dead were coated in dust, some with their mouths, ears, and noses clogged with dirt; yet few showed any signs of physical injury.

  “They suffocated under the dirt,” muttered Sami Yazbek, Tyre’s Red Cross chief.

  Most of the residents of Qana had escaped the village earlier in the war, but the Hashem and Shalhoub families had been trapped in their homes. “We couldn’t get out of our neighborhood because there are only two roads leading out and the Israelis bombed them both several days ago,” said Mohammed Shalhoub, a disabled forty-one-year-old who was recovering in a hospital in Tyre. As he was unable to walk, his wife, Rabab, had hauled him from beneath the rubble and dirt and had also rescued their son, Hassan, four. But their six-year-old daughter, Zeinab, had died.

  Mohammed’s mobile phone rang continually as friends and family asked after him and his relatives. One woman, her voice tinny but audible over the phone’s speaker, introduced herself to Mohammed as a friend of Tayseer.

  “I am his brother,” Mohammed told her.

  “How is he?” she asked.

  “May God have mercy on him,” Mohammed replied gently. The woman began to sob. “No, no!”

  Another phone call, and Shalhoub reeled off a list of names of people who died or survived. “Najwa was injured, Zeinab was martyred,” he said. On mentioning his daughter’s name, he choked and began weeping. A woman placed a comforting arm across his shoulder.