Warriors of God

by Nicholas Blanford

  “So, What Do You Think of Our Bunkers?”

  While tolerating UNIFIL’s expanded presence, Hezbollah kept a wary eye on the activities of the peacekeepers. One internal UNIFIL intelligence report from early 2007 claimed that Hezbollah in Bint Jbeil had issued instructions to the residents to avoid talking to the peacekeepers, to speak only Arabic in their presence, not to accept food or handouts from foreign NGOs, to report on UNIFIL’s movements, and to constantly display the party’s symbols, such as flags and posters.

  Hezbollah had reduced its profile in the border district in grudging deference to Resolution 1701. The rural security pockets were abandoned in the days after the August cease-fire, with trucks packed with equipment spotted heading north. Most of the bunker networks and camouflaged rocket firing positions were no longer of use to Hezbollah now that their locations were compromised. But that did not mean Hezbollah welcomed UNIFIL troops rummaging through its former security pockets. Difficulties between Hezbollah and UNIFIL grew increasingly apparent when the Spanish battalion began staking out these abandoned military zones, spending days at a time monitoring movements and hunting for old weapons caches and bunker networks. Shepherds roaming the rural districts with their flocks were handed mobile phones and instructed to contact local Hezbollah officials if UNIFIL or strangers were seen tramping around near their facilities.

  Indeed, while Ghaith Abdul-Ahad and I were wandering through the small Hezbollah bunker near Alma Shaab in March 2007, we both thought we heard the sound of whispered voices coming from above. Ghaith was shooting pictures, so I said I would climb up the vertical steel-lined access shaft and check. In deference to Ghaith’s claustrophobia, I refrained from voicing my paranoid thought that someone might replace the steel cover over the shaft and weigh it down with a large rock, leaving us entombed below. However, there was no one to be seen or heard once I had scrambled up the ladder.

  I suspected Hezbollah would not be happy if they had known that I was prowling their former security pockets, obsessively hunting for one of their bunkers. A few weeks after the article about the bunker appeared on Time magazine’s website, I had an interview with Nawaf Mussawi, then the head of Hezbollah’s international relations department. We had not met before, but I knew that he closely followed foreign media coverage of Hezbollah. We met at a café in the southern suburbs of Beirut. Looking slightly disheveled in a tracksuit with dark, tousled hair and carrying a plastic shopping bag, he shook my hand and sat down opposite me. Then he leaned across the table and said, “So, what do you think of our bunkers?”

  Taken aback, I replied that I had found them impressive. Mussawi chuckled and, turning to his assistant, said, “This guy went to the south, found one of our bunkers, and wrote this beautiful story about it in Time.”

  It occurred to me then that if a foreign journalist could write an article about the ingenuity of the Islamic Resistance in building elaborate bunkers in south Lebanon without anyone’s ever having noticed, then why should Hezbollah complain?

  But special forces units from European countries reconnoitering old Hezbollah security pockets was a different proposition. In early December 2006, Spanish troops accompanied by Lebanese soldiers spent a night encamped near Kfar Shuba village. The next morning they discovered, three hundred yards from where they had slept, that someone overnight had planted several trip-wire-connected IEDs consisting of Claymore antipersonnel mines and an old 81mm mortar shell. An internal UNIFIL memo noted that the IEDs were laid by “experts with a lot of technical experience” and that “this situation suggests a change in the threat that UNIFIL may have to face.”

  It was later learned that the bombs were planted on the orders of a local Hezbollah commander who had grown irritated at the Spanish activities in his area. Hezbollah subsequently informed UNIFIL that the planting of IEDs was unauthorized and that the commander had been replaced.

  “Watching Out for Al-Qaeda”

  The main focus of UNIFIL’s force protection efforts was on the threat posed by al-Qaeda, not Hezbollah. UNIFIL headquarters in Naqoura and the various contingents each day received raw and unverified intelligence data warning of possible attacks against the peacekeepers. Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Qaeda’s deputy leader, several times had called on Lebanese to ignore Resolution 1701 and encouraged attacks on the peacekeeping force.

  The threats against UNIFIL led to a paradoxical cooperation between some European contingents and Hezbollah, both viewing Sunni jihadists as a threat. In April 2007, Italian, French, and Spanish intelligence officers secretly met with Hezbollah representatives in Sidon to enlist the organization’s assistance in helping protect the peacekeepers. Afterward, Hezbollah men in civilian clothes occasionally “escorted” Spanish UNIFIL patrols.

  The long-feared attack came on June 24, 2007. Six soldiers from the Spanish battalion, three of them Colombian nationals, were killed when their patrol of two armored personnel carriers was struck by a powerful car bomb between Marjayoun and Khiam. It was the deadliest single attack against UNIFIL since the force first arrived in Lebanon in 1978. Investigators later discovered that the bomb was “extraordinarily sophisticated,” and the attack must have taken months to prepare. According to UNIFIL’s internal investigation, the bomb consisted of an estimated 132 pounds of PETN military-grade explosive packed with aluminum powder to augment the fireball effect and hidden inside a Renault Rapide van parked on the side of the road. The bomb was detonated by an infrared beam and had a shaped-charge configuration directing the blast laterally against the targeted vehicle. The fourteen-ton six-wheeled APC was spun 180 degrees and knocked off the road. Two soldiers standing in the rear hatches were blown clear and survived. There was no claim of responsibility for the attack, although Zawahiri days later released a taped video message in which he praised the bombing as a “blessed operation.”

  Initial suspicions fell on Sunni jihadists, possibly from one of the Palestinian camps. There were a handful of other isolated attacks against UNIFIL in the weeks that followed, all of them by al-Qaeda sympathizers based in the Palestinian camps or in Sunni-populated areas of south Lebanon. But they were amateurish affairs, involving sticks of dynamite and faulty detonators, claiming no victims. They did not even come close to the deadly proficiency of the Spanish bombing.

  The culprit has never been identified, and the separate Lebanese, Spanish, and UNIFIL investigations officially remain open. But I later learned that the Spanish legionnaires were engaged in activities far more sensitive than staking out Hezbollah’s old security pockets in the UNIFIL area of operations. They were also monitoring the hilly terrain north of the Litani River outside the UNIFIL area where Hezbollah was building a new line of defense. According to conversations with numerous UNIFIL officers, the Spaniards had conducted reconnaissance missions from camouflaged observation points on the southern bank of the Litani. They may even have slipped across the narrow, shallow river to infiltrate Hezbollah’s new domain. Several UNIFIL officers said they had seen video footage and still photographs shot by the Spanish soldiers showing the movement of vehicles and Hezbollah personnel and newly built positions north of the Litani. “We are already watching out for al-Qaeda, and the last thing we need is some gung-ho soldiers stirring up problems with Hezbollah,” one UNIFIL officer grumbled to me at the time.

  Did Hezbollah detect the Spanish surveillance and choose to inflict a sharp, painful slap? The potentially provocative reconnaissance of the area north of the Litani, the absence of further sophisticated bomb attacks against the peacekeepers, and the amateurish attacks carried out by known al-Qaeda-inspired jihadists have left more than one observer concluding that they did. If it was a blunt message from Hezbollah, it was received and understood by the Spanish, for the surveillance of the north bank of the Litani came to a halt after the bombing.

  The Shia “Bridge”

  In the immediate months after the war, with Hezbollah having abandoned its old security pockets in the border district, I began hearing vague rumors o
f unusual activity occurring in the mountains between the Litani River—UNIFIL’s northern perimeter—and Jezzine. The area approximated the northern sector of Israel’s former occupation zone, a region of sharp limestone mountains and thick undergrowth, dotted with tiny villages and farms. It was a strategic location, affording sweeping views to the Mediterranean in the west and across the lower reaches of the Bekaa Valley to the east—both traditional axes of advance for armies invading from the south.

  Local residents told me in hushed tones that “the boys” had increased their presence in the area, sealing off remote hills and valleys and preventing anyone from entering, mimicking the security pockets Hezbollah established in the border area starting in 2000. Mysterious new dirt tracks materialized, snaking across hillsides before abruptly terminating in thickets of oak and umbrella pines. As the months passed, some of the tracks were hardened with asphalt. An Iran-funded NGO, the Iranian Organization for Sharing the Building of Lebanon, which was contracted to repair war-damaged roads in the south, turned a little-used, potholed lane that crossed the mountains between Jezzine and the southern Bekaa Valley into a gleaming asphalt highway. I began hearing stories of vast tracts of land in the area being snapped up by Ali Tajieddine, a Shia businessman who had made a fortune in Africa and whose alleged connections to Hezbollah in December 2010 earned him a designation on the U.S. Treasury Department’s list of terrorist financiers. In the tiny Druze hamlet of Sraireh, squeezed onto the side of a narrow valley above the Litani, a resident told me that Tajieddine was paying between $2 and $4 per square meter of land, often accepting the seller’s initial asking price and paying in cash.

  Houses and shops decorated with posters of Nasrallah and yellow Hezbollah flags were built beside the “Iranian road” at the southern end of Qotrani, a Christian-populated hamlet just west of Sraireh. On a barren, windswept hillside overlooking the Litani River, a new village was constructed from scratch on land purchased by Tajieddine from Druze owners. The new village was called Ahmadiyah, and laborers there told me that it would be populated by Shias from the Tyre area as well as neighboring Shia villages in the southern Bekaa.

  Inevitably, the land purchases aroused the sectarian suspicions of local Christian and Druze politicians, especially Walid Jumblatt, the paramount leader of the Druze and in 2007, the archcritic of Hezbollah. The area in which Hezbollah was consolidating its presence lay at the confluence of several Shia, Christian, and Druze villages, hamlets, and farms. Tajieddine’s land purchases appeared to Hezbollah’s opponents to be a blatant attempt to build a demographic bridge to connect Shia-populated Nabatiyah in the west to the Shia villages of the southern Bekaa Valley in the east. Such a belt, inhabited by Hezbollah supporters, would improve communications between the two strongholds and allow the Islamic Resistance to consolidate its new front line in a more secure environment.

  When a hill near the mixed Shia-Christian village of Kfar Houne caught Tajieddine’s attention, Jumblatt tried to enlist the financial support of Carlos Slim, the Mexican business tycoon listed by Forbes magazine in 2010 as the richest man in the world. Slim, whose father was born in Kfar Houne, told the Druze leader he was uninterested in outbidding Tajieddine and purchasing the hill. “I may have to fly to Mexico and persuade him face-to-face,” Jumblatt mused.

  Sheikh Naim Qassem dismissed Jumblatt’s allegations that Hezbollah was building a Shia state in the south as unfounded, saying that the Druze leader “likes to stir calm waters.”

  I interviewed Ali Tajieddine one Saturday morning in his bustling office on the outskirts of Tyre. A short, dapper man, Tajieddine calmly explained that he was simply a businessman who had sensed that money could be made quarrying the limestone mountains for construction material and cement production. The houses in Ahmadiyah were intended to mask the quarry and “enhance the appearance of the area.” The homes would be inhabited by his employees, he said. “I have employees who are Shias, Druze, Sunnis, and Christians,” he told me. “The people who are making these allegations know better. They are just spreading rumors.”

  “Access to This Area Is Forbidden”

  I wanted to see for myself if there were Hezbollah fighters operating in the hills and valleys north of the Litani. But hiking up a mountainside with a notebook and camera in search of the Islamic Resistance was not advisable. However, a clue to their possible whereabouts lay in the maps produced after 2000 by the UN demining agency showing the mined areas of south Lebanon. The maps had been updated since the 2006 war with the locations of cluster bomb strikes, which were marked with a rash of red circles across much of the UNIFIL-patrolled border district. There were fewer cluster bomb strikes north of the Litani River, but one valley in the heart of Hezbollah’s new frontline area had been hit by as many as nine separate bombardments. The concentration of hits suggested it had been a source of Hezbollah rocket fire during the war. Perhaps Hezbollah’s fighters were still there.

  I attempted to reach the valley by following a potholed lane that wound past a ruined stone farmhouse that before 2000 was used for target practice by Israeli tank gunners. The lane petered out and turned into a rough track that disappeared into a small olive grove. As I was hesitating about proceeding farther, two men in camouflage uniforms, wearing floppy bush hats and carrying AK-47 rifles, silently emerged from behind the trees and walked up to my car. They were polite and seemed more bemused than suspicious at meeting a foreigner in this remote corner of Lebanon. They told me I was in a military zone and jotted down my license plate number before letting me go.

  Later the same day, I followed another track that curved around the top of the valley. On turning a corner, I noticed the track was blocked by a chain suspended between two concrete posts. Hanging from the chain was a metal sign with the stenciled Arabic words “Warning. Access to this area is forbidden. Hezbollah.” Beside the entrance to this security pocket stood a small sentry box. A burly Hezbollah man in a camouflage uniform and wearing an incongruous pair of green rubber boots emerged from the sentry box and inquired what I was doing. I explained I was working on a story on cluster bombs and knew that the valley had been hit heavily. Could I pass through and have a look? Taken aback by my sudden appearance and unexpected request, he hurried into his sentry hut and spoke into a field telephone. For a fleeting moment, I wondered if they would actually let me enter the security pocket. I could see more uniformed Hezbollah fighters moving around on a nearby hill studded with pine trees. The green-rubber-booted fighter returned. Access was denied. I had to leave at once.

  Over the following months, Hezbollah increased its presence in these hills, placing further tracts of land off-limits. Demining and cluster bomb removal teams contracted by the UN were required to coordinate with Hezbollah all clearance operations north of the Litani River. When a demining team requested to enter a certain sector, Hezbollah typically either gave permission immediately, granted it after a few days, or denied access outright. The restricted areas were dubbed “orange” zones by the deminers. As the months progressed, access was increasingly tightened until by early 2008, the entire area was classified as an orange zone. One deminer told me that the hills were “crawling with armed and uniformed Hezbollah fighters” and the sound of explosions and automatic weapons fire was a near-daily occurrence.

  Steep, wooded valleys west of the Jezzine salient were also placed off-limits, even on the edges of Christian-populated villages. The number of sealed-off areas expanded farther northward along the sharp mountain peaks until nudging the Druze-populated Chouf Mountains. In April 2010, I learned that a group of hikers had stumbled across a Hezbollah outpost on a windswept ridge at the southern end of the Chouf. The outpost had been inadvertently positioned alongside the Lebanon Mountain Trail, a newly established 275-mile hiker’s path from the forested mountains of north Lebanon to Marjayoun in the south. I decided to see the outpost for myself and clambered up the mountain with two friends on a damp, cloudy day. The Hezbollah position was in a small depression surrounded by limes
tone outcrops and had been used by the Israelis before 1985, judging from the old bulldozed emplacements where Israeli tanks and armored personnel carriers once rested. A fire-blackened cooking pot and a plastic bag of potatoes lay beside a fireplace containing cold, rain-dampened ashes. We could see the concrete entrance of a bunker sunk into the side of the valley. One of my companions said she saw a head momentarily bob out of the entrance before disappearing inside again. But there was no one else to be seen. As we were about to move on, there came a startled shout from the rocks above us. A lithe young man with greasy, lanky hair wearing a camouflage jacket and jeans and carrying an AK-47 rifle bounded down the side of the valley. As he approached, he cocked the rifle with a dramatic flourish. “What are you doing here?” he asked, his face a mix of anger and astonishment. “This is a military zone. You should not be here.”

  We explained to him that we were hiking across the mountain and that we were following an established trail. I showed him the map marking the path running through his position. He stared at it without comment, then checked the contents of our backpacks before instructing us to move off the mountain. We headed north on the old Israeli dirt track running along the crest. The outpost behind us swiftly disappeared in the mist shrouding the mountaintop. Minutes later, the fighter came running up behind us clutching a walkie-talkie along with his rifle. We had to get off the mountain at once, he said. We were not permitted to continue following the trail. Clearly, he had received instructions from his superiors. There was no sense arguing. We headed east down the mountainside, the fighter watching us from a rocky outcrop until we were swallowed up by the dense thickets of scrub oak.