Warriors of God (62 page)

“Are you going to Tyre? Please take us with you,” pleaded one woman clutching two plastic bags filled with clothing and personal effects. Another old man leaning on a walking stick insisted to the French soldiers that he must ride with them in an APC. He was told that it was impossible, that there was no room. “But I'm the mayor,” he said with helpless indignation.

Israeli troops were present two hundred yards up the road in the northern half of the village, which prevented the UNIFIL convoy from proceeding to Teir Harfa, the last village on the itinerary lying just beyond Jibbayn.

Warrant Officer Martin Lionel, the French convoy commander, studied his map spread out on the hood of a car, looking for alternative routes. There was only one: a narrow stone track that dropped in a series of hairpin bends into a steep valley just to the west of Jibbayn. Lionel pursed his lips as he pondered whether the trucks could make the journey. But there were other perils in the valley besides bad roads. I was familiar with the valley from before the war. It was a Hezbollah “security pocket” and bound to be crawling with fighters firing rockets into Israel and preparing to confront IDF troops. Lionel absorbed this information and then decided against the trip.

“We don't even know if there's anyone left in Teir Harfa,” he said, and ordered the convoy back to Naqoura.

In early August, the IDF began firing cluster munitions into south Lebanon, blanketing huge swaths of terrain with millions of bomblets. Although the Israelis claimed to be attempting to neutralize Hezbollah's rocket-firing positions, the submunitions saturated remote valleys,
farmland, villages, and towns alike. Human Rights Watch subsequently estimated that 4.6 million submunitions were fired into Lebanon, the bulk of them in the last sixty hours of the war. UN ordnance officers told me that the figure was probably lower, but as the IDF refused to hand over its targeting data to deminers, it was impossible to determine. Many of the bomblets scattered over south Lebanon dated from the Vietnam War and should have been destroyed at the end of the 1970s. One air-dropped container carrying tennis-ball-sized U.S.-made BLU-63 cluster munitions failed to open properly in the air and struck the ground near Nabatiyah with its full consignment of dozens of unexploded munitions. The stamp on the side of the container registered the expiration date for the cluster bomb as July 1974.
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The UN estimated that 40 percent of the bomblets failed to explode and were left strewn in gardens, houses, and streets and hanging from the branches of trees. On the first day of the cease-fire, I saw unexploded U.S.-made M-77 bomblets lying on the main road outside Tibnine hospital. Hezbollah men had placed plastic crates over each one and directed traffic around them. The UN subsequently pinpointed more than a thousand separate cluster bomb strikes in south Lebanon. Chris Clark, a former British army officer who headed UN mine-clearing efforts in south Lebanon, told me the cluster bomb situation was “unprecedented and unbelievable” and the worst he had ever seen.

On August 7, the IDF announced that plans had been finalized for a ground invasion up to the Litani River and that the operation could proceed in two days time. The diplomatic clock was ticking, however. The UN Security Council was drawing close to reaching an agreement on a cease-fire, which suggested there would be only a small window for a final military move.

Olmert hesitated for two days, torn between ordering the invasion to go ahead and awaiting the outcome of the cease-fire negotiations. The Americans were promising him that a deal favorable to Israel was within reach. But IDF commanders grew increasingly exasperated with each postponement. “The men are fed up, they're asking if this is or isn't a war. Either [we fight] or we leave,” Major General Udi Adam, the head of the Northern Command, told Halutz.
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On August 11, Olmert studied the draft of UN Security Council Resolution 1701 outlining a cease-fire, which in part called for the deployment of a strengthened UNIFIL numbering fifteen thousand troops and an arms embargo on Lebanon intended to prevent weapons from being smuggled to Hezbollah. There was no demand for the release of the two kidnapped Israeli soldiers, and the international force fell far short of Israeli expectations. The proposal was a disappointment for the Israeli government, and even though it was formally accepted the next day, Olmert finally ordered the ground invasion to proceed.

The dash to the Litani River focused on the villages of Ghandouriyah and Froun on the western lip of Wadi Hojeir, a deep valley lying at the northern end of Wadi Salouqi. Paratroops from the Nahal Brigade were air-dropped into Ghandouriyah, which they took unopposed. An armored assault followed, with two dozen tanks descending westbound into the depths of Wadi Hojeir intending to join the paratroops holding the high ground in Ghandouriyah. But the valley, with its steep, brush-covered slopes, was a natural tank trap. And Hezbollah's tank hunter-killer teams were waiting for the approaching Israelis. As the column began climbing up the western side of the valley it came under a withering fusillade of Kornet missiles. The missiles slammed into the tanks, setting several ablaze as the desperate crews scrambled out the hatches. The company commander cried over the radio, “My tanks are getting mauled,” then the radio went dead.
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The beleaguered column received little support from the Nahal soldiers on the heights above. The paratroopers, discovering to their surprise that Ghandouriyah was not secured after all, found themselves pinned down by missile and mortar fire from Hezbollah men who had been hiding in the bombed ruins.

By the time the fighting in Wadi Hojeir was over, eleven Israeli officers and soldiers were dead and more than fifty were wounded. Eleven of the twenty-four Merkava Mark 4 tanks had been hit. In all, thirty-three soldiers were killed, about a quarter of the war's total IDF fatalities, in the final sixty-hour push to the Litani before the 8:00
A.M.
cease-fire took effect on August 14.

In a final gesture of its undiminished resolve, Hezbollah fired a total of 217 rockets into Israel on the last full day of the war.

The black Toyota Land Cruiser, its windows blown out, a rear tire flat, lurched to a halt beside the Saleh Ghandour hospital at the entrance to Bint Jbeil. Five Hezbollah men tumbled out. They said they were from Aitta Shaab a few miles to the west and had been in the thick of the fighting in the village for the past thirty-four days. Bint Jbeil and Aitta Shaab were in the middle of the area that was supposed to be under Israeli control. Had they not seen any Israeli soldiers on the drive from Aitta Shaab?

“If you want to find Israeli soldiers in Aitta Shaab, look under the rubble,” said one of them with a grin. The fighters were bubbling with triumph and exhausted emotion. The fighter, who called himself “the Hajj” wore a grubby sweatshirt and khaki-colored trousers. Some of his companions wore combat trousers and boots, lending them a paramilitary appearance. One man's head and upper left arm were bandaged. “Israel used all kinds of weapons against the resistance men,” the Hajj said. “Despite this, Hezbollah stood strong. I fired my weapon for the last time at eight
A.M.
”

The southern half of Aitta Shaab facing the Israeli border was heavily damaged. Small houses of two or three floors each had pancaked into pathetic heaps of rubble. Walls were scored by bullets or punctured by tank rounds and missiles. Jagged shards of steel shrapnel and twisted sheets of missile casings littered the rubble-strewn street. Exhausted fighters, some in uniform, sat on the side of the road in contemplative silence. Two Hezbollah men walked out of a small shell-scarred mosque just as a loudspeaker in the minaret began blaring out a Koranic verse. “That's the first time we have heard the Koran from the mosque in fifteen days,” one of the men said.

Most of the residents had fled the village in the early days of the war, seeking refuge with their Christian neighbors in Rmeish a couple of
miles away. Now they were returning, small groups of women, elderly men, and children walking along the shell-pocked road and gaping in awe at what had become of their village. It was evident that rebuilding the village would take months, if not years. But for the stoic residents, the massive destruction was a badge of honor for having confronted and triumphed against the vaunted Israeli army.

“Yes, it looks like Leningrad,” conceded Sameeh Srour, a fifty-three-year-old policeman, “but we brought the Israelis to their knees.”

The thirty-four-day war between Hezbollah and Israel is one of the most closely studied conflicts in recent history. The ability of a relatively small group of nonstate combatants to fight to a standstill the most powerful army in the Middle East has lessons applicable to future theaters of conflict. One influential study concluded that Hezbollah more closely resembled a conventional army in 2006 than a traditional guerrilla force through its emphasis on holding ground, using terrain rather than the population for concealment, and by concentrating its forces.
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“Hezbollah's position on the guerrilla-conventional continuum in 2006 was much closer to the conventional end of the scale than non-state actors are normally expected to be. In fact, Hezbollah was in many ways as ‘conventional' as some state actors have been in major interstate warfare,” the study said.

Nasrallah himself recognized this critical distinction in the evolution of the Islamic Resistance, saying days after the end of the war, “I never made the commitment that we could prevent an invasion, but we managed to do so. The resistance withstood the attack and it fought back. It did not wage a guerrilla war, either. I want to clarify this point: it was not a regular army, but [it] was not a guerrilla [army] in the traditional sense, either. It was something in between.”

With the help of its state sponsors, principally Iran, but also to an extent Syria, the Islamic Resistance was transformed in the six years between the Israeli withdrawal in 2000 and the outbreak of the thirty-four-day war into what military analysts today describe as a “hybrid”
force—a nonstate militant group employing both irregular and conventional weapons and tactics in a single battlespace. The United States, in particular, has shown great interest in the 2006 war, suspecting that Hezbollah-style hybrid forces will provide a persistent threat to its military in the years ahead, requiring deep thought on future defense planning and force structure.

“The conflict … that intrigues me most, and I think speaks more toward what we can expect in the decades ahead, is the one that happened in Lebanon in the summer of 2006,” said General George Casey, the U.S. army chief of staff, in May 2009. Referring to Hezbollah's exploitation of rockets, antiship and antiarmor missiles, and sophisticated communications capabilities, Casey added that hybrid warfare opponents offer a conventional force like the U.S. military “a fundamentally more complex and difficult challenge than the challenges of fighting large tank armies on the plains of Europe.”

Nonetheless, Hezbollah's stalwart performance against the IDF in 2006 owes much to Israel's poor handling of the war—from the unrealistic expectations and ill-considered decisions of the Israeli civilian and military leadership to the tactical shortcomings and lack of preparedness and coordination among the ground forces. In response to the public outcry over the humiliating outcome of the war, the Olmert government convened a commission of inquiry to examine what had happened and issue recommendations to prevent a recurrence. The commission, headed by retired judge Eliyahu Winograd, issued its final report in January 2008. Olmert, Peretz, and Halutz were harshly criticized, and the latter two subsequently resigned.

There was no Winograd-style commission of inquiry in Lebanon, although Hezbollah's critics, who had remained quiet during the war, certainly felt the party should be held accountable for triggering a conflict that had left around twelve hundred Lebanese dead and caused several billion dollars' worth of damage.

Nasrallah acknowledged that sentiment with an unusual mea culpa in a television interview two weeks after the cease-fire. He said that if Hezbollah's leadership had thought there was a “one percent” chance that Israel would respond in the fashion it did following the abduction
of the two soldiers, they would not have approved the operation in the first place.

But Nasrallah also began a carefully constructed narrative that turned Hezbollah's mistake in triggering the war into a stroke of luck in that it had prematurely forced Israel into a conflict it planned to wage anyway. If not in July, then September or October. Israel, he said, had made plans for a massive strike on Lebanon involving a ground invasion of the south, amphibious landings at the mouth of the Litani River, and bombing campaigns against southern Beirut and the Bekaa Valley. “This was the plan. What took place on July 12 cost the Israelis the element of surprise after the capturing, and after there were deaths and injuries.… We were ready for the war when it started. The element of surprise was therefore lost,” he said.

It was natural that the IDF would have devised a series of war plans to take into account future contingencies, yet there was no public evidence to suggest that Israel was planning to unilaterally launch a massive strike against Hezbollah in the fall of 2006. Since 2000, Israel had followed a policy of containment along its northern border. Though unhappy with Hezbollah's arms buildup, Israel had little desire to risk upsetting what was proving to be the longest period of calm along its northern border since the late 1960s.

But Nasrallah's explanation was accepted by the Hezbollah support base. Furthermore, Nasrallah asserted that it was “divine will” that had forced the Israelis into a war prematurely. The war, Hezbollah proclaimed, was nothing less than a “victory from God,” which, by happy coincidence, was also the meaning of the Hezbollah leader's family name.