Warriors of God (10 page)

The day would begin with fitness training, usually repeated runs up the steep, rocky slopes of the surrounding hills. After a breakfast of tea, bread, and yogurt, the recruits had half an hour to wash themselves in the small river running through Janta before beginning religious instruction, each class lasting around ninety minutes.

The recruits sat cross-legged on the earth floor of derelict, roofless farm buildings to listen to lectures given by Lebanese clerics, such as Tufayli and Abbas Mussawi, who wore military uniforms beneath their cloaks and turbans. The young Hassan Nasrallah, his face framed by a light beard, also taught classes; one volunteer at the time remembers the future Hezbollah leader as “skinny and shy,” clearly knowledgeable about religion “but wouldn't look you in the eye when he talked.”

The military training included learning how to operate basic weapons such as the AK-47 rifle, light machine guns, and rocket-propelled grenades. Recruits were given one hour of firing practice each week. They learned hand-to-hand combat, how to handle and plant land mines, the art of camouflage, and how to move stealthily through rugged terrain.

Iranian instructors ran the first two courses, but by the time of the third intake, Lebanese trainers oversaw the basic fitness work, leaving
the Iranians in charge of teaching the more advanced skills. In the early stages, each training program lasted forty-five days, but the duration was later reduced to a month. Recruits who showed promise and a will to continue with the training were sent to Iran for three-month advanced courses.

Ariel Sharon's plan to install Bashir Gemayel as president of an Israel-friendly Lebanon collapsed on September 14, 1982, when the Christian militia commander was killed in a bomb blast in Beirut days after being elected head of state but before he formally took office. With Gemayel's death, Israel needed to find a new arrangement fast, especially as resistance operations were beginning to intensify in the Beirut area.

That sense of urgency was soon shared by the Americans. U.S. marines were deployed in southern Beirut by the airport as part of a four-nation multinational force (MNF) that had overseen the departure of the PLO in August 1982 and returned after the subsequent massacre of thousands of Palestinians in the Sabra/Shatila refugee camps by Israeli-allied Christian militiamen in the wake of Gemayel's assassination. By March 1983, the U.S. marines and other contingents in the MNF were facing shooting attacks from suspected Shia militants. Then, on April 18, a suicide bomber drove an explosives-laden pickup truck into the U.S. embassy on the seafront corniche in Beirut. The explosion flattened the center of the seven-story building, killing sixty-three people, including seventeen Americans. Of the seventeen, six were CIA officers, including the local chief and his deputy and Bob Ames, the top CIA officer for the Near East, who was attending a meeting in the embassy at the time.

American diplomats accelerated efforts to conclude a Lebanese-Israeli peace deal. In early May, the Israelis agreed to a U.S.-engineered treaty with Lebanon, which was formally signed on May 17. But Assad instructed his Lebanese allies to derail the treaty by stepping up attacks against the U.S.-supported regime of President Amine Gemayel, Bashir's
brother, who was elected in his stead. Fighting erupted in the Chouf Mountains above southern Beirut between Druze militiamen and the Lebanese army and Christian militias with the Israelis caught uncomfortably in between. In early September 1983, the Israelis cut their losses and withdrew from the Chouf, leaving the Christians and Druze to slaughter each other in the vacuum.

The new Israeli front line ran some sixty miles, from the mouth of the Awali River just north of Sidon, eastward along yawning ravines of limestone cliffs up into the barren, snow-capped heights of the Barouk Mountains. The line was supposed to be strong enough to rebuff a conventional attack by Syrian forces and tight enough to prevent guerrillas from the north from slipping through to launch attacks. But the Israelis still failed to fully appreciate that their main enemy lay to the south, inside the occupied area, not to the north.

The public face of resistance in south Lebanon was Sheikh Ragheb Harb, the young imam of Jibsheet who had accompanied Sheikh Sobhi Tufayli to Tehran in June 1982. Harb's unflinching support for resistance challenged the prevailing orthodoxy of most Shia clerics in south Lebanon at the time, who hesitated to provoke the wrath of the powerful Israeli army. “Harb was very charismatic and well respected in the south,” recalls Timur Goksel, the UNIFIL spokesman. “He was mobilizing cells of five or six young kids each. The cells were very tight and impossible to penetrate.”

Harb's mosque and
husseiniyah
in Jibsheet, decorated with pictures of Khomeini and black flags and banners inscribed with Koranic quotations, became a hub of resistance activities. He refused to meet Israeli officers who asked to see him and famously declared that shaking hands with the enemy was an act of collaboration, while rebuffing them was an act of resistance. With his thick beard and strong dark eyebrows, white turban and gray cloak, Harb was a popular figure in Jibsheet and the surrounding villages. On March 18, 1983, Harb was arrested by the Israelis shortly before he was due to deliver a fatwa in his Friday sermon forbidding all contact with the Israeli occupiers. The Israelis had hoped to forestall the fatwa, but all they did was stir up a hornet's nest of protest. For the next two weeks, strikes and demonstrations were held and
roads repeatedly blocked with burning tires. The Israelis gave in, and in early April, Harb returned to Jibsheet, where he unabashedly continued to encourage resistance. A few months later, he was summoned to Tehran, where he told the Iranians that his home in Lebanon was “the embassy of the Islamic Republic of Iran.” Having impressed the Iranians with his commitment, Harb returned to Jibsheet to continue his mobilization efforts, knowing that he was unlikely to live much longer. Indeed, he frequently forecast his own death to his followers, predicting that the Israelis would “shed my blood.”

Opposition against the Israelis had been building for months in south Lebanon, but the catalyst that turned hostility into rebellion came on October 16, 1983, during the Ashoura commemoration marking the martyrdom of Imam Hussein. As many as sixty thousand Shias had converged upon the southern market town of Nabatiyah for the ceremony when an Israeli patrol of jeeps and trucks made the mistake of barging through the throng. The Israeli soldiers probably had no idea of the significance of their blunder, although the patrol commander had been warned by his superiors to stay away from the town that day. But the enraged celebrants saw the Israeli intrusion on their holiest of days as sacrilege and reacted with fury. The crowd mobbed the vehicles and threw stones. Shots were fired at the patrol, and someone tossed a hand grenade at a jeep, the explosion setting it alight. The frightened Israelis opened fire on the crowd, killing one man and wounding up to ten.

IDF commanders realized immediately the seriousness of the incident and arrested the patrol commander. But the gesture was undermined when the next day Haddad's militiamen stormed Nabatiyah and conducted house-to-house searches for those who had attacked the Israeli convoy. The Shia clerics came off the fence and issued calls for confrontation and fatwas forbidding cooperation with the Israelis. The Shia recruits to the Israeli-controlled National Guard deserted and the militia collapsed.

Worse was to follow for the Israelis. On November 4, a green Chevrolet truck crashed through the main gate of an IDF headquarters housed in a school building on the coastal road south of Tyre. The Israeli guards fired a few shots, at least one round hitting the youthful-looking driver, but the truck continued moving and had almost reached the main building when it exploded. The blast, caused by an estimated 440 pounds of explosive, demolished the building, killing twenty-nine Israelis, mainly border security guards, as well as thirty-two Lebanese and Palestinian detainees.

The deadly attack not only echoed that of Ahmad Qassir against the previous IDF headquarters in Tyre almost a year before, but also mirrored a devastating simultaneous suicide truck bombing less than two weeks earlier against the U.S. marine barracks at Beirut airport and the French paratroop headquarters in southern Beirut on October 23 that killed 241 American servicemen and 58 French soldiers. The marine casualties were the highest in a single day for the corps since Iwo Jima in World War II. Once again, the mysterious Islamic Jihad claimed responsibility for both attacks as well as the latest bombing of the Tyre headquarters.

Hezbollah has always officially denied involvement in the bombing of the U.S. marine barracks and French paratroop headquarters, although its leaders publicly supported the attacks at the time. Hezbollah later described them as the “first punishment” of “our people” against the “imams of infidelity of America, France and Israel.”
⁵

Nearly a quarter of a century later, Tufayli, now no longer a member of the party he helped to found, admitted to me that Hezbollah was responsible for the U.S. marine barracks bombing.

“The marines were not civilians. I considered the Americans as an occupying force and I fought them,” he said. While he remained “proud” of the attack, he confessed that he was not personally involved in the planning of the operation. “If I had anything to do with it I would say so because my relations with the Americans are not so good,” he said with a chuckle.

When the United States declined to retaliate for the attack on the marines, Israel on November 16 struck the IRGC training camp at Janta,
the first time it had staged an air raid against its new Shia foes. The jets swooped low over the valley dropping bombs for thirty minutes, killing nearly three dozen Hezbollah recruits and Iranian instructors, among them the youthful-looking Farhan Ali Ismael, who is buried in the “martyrs' cemetery” in nearby Brital.

For the Israelis, there was no escaping the fact that they had, as Yitzhak Rabin later put it, “let the Shia genie out of the bottle.” Israel could have taken advantage of the early goodwill shown by the Shias of southern Lebanon to cultivate an amicable and mutually beneficial cross-border relationship. Instead, through a combination of ignorance, negligence, recklessness, and bad luck, Israel had created a ferocious and resolutely determined new enemy.

The Israeli author of a study on the post-1982 Israeli experience in Lebanon wrote, “The quick change in the south of Lebanon from a relatively hospitable territory to an extremely hostile one was among the greatest failures of national intelligence estimates that Israel had ever known. No one, not even the most persistent opponents of the war, had ever raised this possibility.”
⁶

After the Nabatiyah incident, Amal could no longer ignore the sentiment of its constituents in the south, and at last they came off the fence and endorsed a campaign of active resistance. In the months ahead, the focus of the Amal resistance campaign centered on Marakeh and six other villages lying in the hills to the east of Tyre. Known as the “arc of resistance” or the “seven villages resistance,” it was led by the unlikely figure of Mohammed Saad, an electronics teacher at the Jabal Amil Institute in Bourj Shemali and a prominent activist within the local Amal movement. With his narrow shoulders and skinny “childlike” physique, Saad hardly looked the part of an influential underground military leader. His thick mane of wavy black hair, thin mustache, and scraggly tuft of beard on his lower chin gave him the appearance of an American
beat poet from the early 1960s instead of a charismatic guerrilla commander—Bob Dylan rather than Che Guevara.

Although the Amal leadership had instructed the cadres not to confront the Israeli invasion, Saad and his comrades around Tyre were certain that an active resistance was only a matter of time, and they began making preparations. They shaved off their beards, destroyed any documentation linking them to Amal, and collected and hid any weapons left by the Palestinians.

One of the main cell leaders in Tyre was Mohammed Zaghloul, then a lean, bespectacled twenty-nine-year-old who had joined Amal in 1978 and was close to Mohammed Saad. “Mohammed was very clever, a military genius, and he put the idea of resistance into people's heads, convincing those who thought it was hopeless to fight the Israelis,” he recalls. “As young men at the time, we saw something special in him and we decided to follow him.”

Saad's key lieutenant in Marakeh was Khalil Jerardi, a charismatic theology teacher at the Jabal Amil Institute. As Saad became more involved in directing resistance attacks, he disappeared from public view, and it was Jerardi, with his languid eyes and his beard, which grew longer and more pointed as the resistance progressed, who became the public face of the Amal resistance.

The first attacks consisted of roadside bombings and assassinations of collaborators. The Israeli military headquarters in Tyre was constantly monitored for Lebanese collaborators entering and leaving. “They would follow the suspects on motorcycles from the Israeli headquarters and then put on a hood and shoot them in the head, often in public, in a café in Tyre in front of everybody. Then they would drop leaflets saying ‘This is the fate of all collaborators,' ” recalls Hassan Siklawi, at the time a UNIFIL liaison officer with local Lebanese groups.

Cut off initially from a regular supply of weapons, ammunition, and funds in Beirut, the Amal fighters were forced to improvise. They constructed homemade bombs by mixing fertilizer, sugar, and sawdust in kitchen sinks and packing the explosive with nails into empty powdered milk tins. Gas cylinders were also turned into crude incendiary bombs.
The IEDs were usually planted along the coastal road near Tyre, the main route used by the IDF traveling between Israel and the front lines farther north. Initially, traditional lit fuses were used to detonate the charges. The resistance fighters learned through trial and error when to light the fuse so that the bomb would explode just as the IDF target passed by. Later they acquired electrical fuses and detonated the bombs using command wires that they would disguise by stringing them along telegraph pylons beside real telephone cables.