Warriors of God (68 page)

By summer 2010, the ether in the southern Lebanon border district was awash with rival electronic signals that constantly disrupted civilian and military communications and radar coverage. In early 2010, some UNIFIL battalions were picking up rocket launch signals on their ground radars. The radars showed the source of fire inside Lebanon, tracked the trajectory, and marked the impact point in Israel. Only there were no rocket launches. UNIFIL investigators initially pondered whether Hezbollah had found a way to trick radars by transmitting false launch signals to disguise its real rocket launches. Then UNIFIL thought it might be due to Israeli interference; but the peacekeepers were unable to come to a firm conclusion.

On at least one occasion, Israel deliberately jammed radar in Lebanon, including the air traffic control tower at Beirut airport, possibly using a system similar to the U.S. Air Force's Suter program, which can infiltrate and manipulate enemy radars like a computer virus. The Israelis may have used the same technology in September 2007 to neutralize
the Syrian air defense network, allowing Israeli jets to bomb a suspected nuclear reactor under construction on the bank of the Euphrates River near Deir ez-Zor in northern Syria. For two days after the air raid, the entire coastline from Sidon in Lebanon to Ashdod in Israel found itself under an intense radar-jamming blanket. The Israelis blamed a Dutch naval ship then serving with UNIFIL's maritime component. But the peacekeepers denied they were responsible, and the source of the jamming remains unknown.

The Israelis also regularly jam the areas facing their outposts in the Shebaa Farms, a source of continual annoyance to the Lebanese living opposite who cannot use their cell phones. The Lebanese cell phone network was also hampered by UNIFIL's own radio frequency jammers fitted onto their vehicles. The number of jammers increased significantly after the 2007 bomb attack against the Spanish UNIFIL battalion. In late 2009, UNIFIL discovered that a large area east of Khiam was completely jammed. Even the Israelis were having communications difficulties along the border opposite Khiam. Each side blamed the other. But it turned out that the fault lay with UNIFIL. The peacekeepers discovered that when a large number of their vehicles were parked close together, their individual jammers, when switched on, merged electronically to create a single “superjammer” that blocked all communications in the surrounding area.

Other than intercepting and jamming Israeli communications, Hezbollah's SIGINT teams are rumored to be working on a means of cracking the encrypted data feeds from Israeli UAVs. The Israelis reportedly began encrypting the video data from drones following the Ansariyah ambush in 1997. But by 2010, Hezbollah may actually have succeeded in breaking the code after acquiring the computer program to an Israeli UAV that had been sold to another country. It is unclear which country and which drone, but several states are recipients of Israeli-manufactured drones, including Turkey, which operates the Heron UAV built by Israel Aerospace Industries, and Georgia, which possesses Elbit Systems's Hermes 450. Both drones plow the skies above Lebanon.

Additionally, Hezbollah is exploring measures to neutralize UAVs by
jamming the communications link between a UAV and its ground control base, or by electronically interfering with drones that are on autonomous preprogrammed flight missions.

The extent of Hezbollah's acquisition of advanced communications and SIGINT systems is uncertain, although Israeli intelligence reportedly operates on the principle that whatever Iran possesses—both weapons and communications technology—could potentially be in Hezbollah's hands, too. Certainly, Hezbollah does not appear to be lagging very far behind the IDF's own advances in SIGINT and communications, thanks to the assistance of Iran.

The secrecy surrounding Hezbollah's communications and electronic warfare capabilities is indicative of the critical importance technology plays in the organization's ability to wage war against Israel. Hezbollah has advanced enormously in terms of weapons, training, organization, and tactics since its formative stages in the early 1980s, but it is the giant leap in technology that perhaps best illustrates the extent of Hezbollah's military evolution, underlining the essential role that state sponsorship plays in permitting an armed group to possess capabilities normally only found in a conventional national army.

In May 2008, Nasrallah acknowledged that Hezbollah's communications network was “the most important weapon in the resistance.” His statement came at a climactic moment in the confrontation between the Hezbollah-led parliamentary opposition and Fouad Siniora's government. For more than sixteen months, the country had remained in political gridlock. The opposition was still encamped in downtown Beirut, although most of the tents were empty, with skeleton crews of activists rotated in and out to maintain the semblance of a sit-in. Sunni-Shia tensions had worsened amid street skirmishes in mixed neighborhoods and endless mutual accusations that political factions were arming themselves and forming private militias. The price of weapons soared
on the black market—always the best indicator of the level of tensions in Lebanon. A good quality AK-47 rifle was worth around $1,000 by early 2008, double the price in 2006.

In early May 2008, the government concluded an official inquiry into Hezbollah's telecoms system, finding that “hundreds of thousands” of lines had been installed linking all Shia areas of the country and connecting with Syrian telecommunications lines. The inquiry also found that Hezbollah had built solar-powered communications towers in the mountains flanking the border with Syria. Marwan Hamadeh, the minister of telecommunications, said that Hezbollah's phone network was “no longer an issue concerning the security of the resistance, but rather the security of Lebanon and the toppling of its regime.”

Following a lengthy cabinet meeting on May 5, the government announced it intended to shut down Hezbollah's communications network, to launch an inquiry into Hezbollah's alleged surveillance of Beirut's Rafik Hariri Airport, and to dismiss a security chief at the airport who was deemed too close to the party.

The Hezbollah-led opposition immediately took to the streets under the guise of a national union strike, blocking main roads with barriers of dumped earth and burning tires. Three days after the cabinet decision, in a news conference in Beirut's southern suburbs, Nasrallah warned that the government decision was “tantamount to a declaration of war … on the resistance and its weapons in the interests of America and Israel.”

“We have a right to defend our existence from whoever declares and begins a war on us, even if they are our brothers,” he said. “Whoever is going to target us will be targeted by us. Whoever is going to shoot at us will be shot by us.”

At the end of the news conference, I approached Ibrahim al-Amine, the chairman of the
Al-Akhbar
newspaper, who has unrivaled access to Hezbollah among journalists. I asked him what he thought was going to happen next.

“You may find out tonight,” he said with a knowing smile.

The crackle of small arms fire and the pop of rocket-propelled grenades
had begun even before I had reached home. That night fighters from numerous opposition factions—Amal, the Syrian Social Nationalists, Baathists—under Hezbollah's direction overran the western half of Beirut in a preplanned and coordinated assault. The homes of top March 14 leaders, including Saad Hariri, the son and political heir of the slain Rafik, and Walid Jumblatt, were surrounded; the offices of the Hariri-owned Future TV and
Al-Mustaqbal
newspaper were ransacked and burned. Sunni gunmen loosed a few rocket-propelled grenades, then fled. The Lebanese army stood on the sidelines, unwilling to challenge Hezbollah on the streets.

By dawn the next morning, Hezbollah and its allies controlled the western half of the city. I found one Hezbollah unit commander, a short, stocky former Amal militiaman, resting with his squad in a Sunni quarter not far from Hariri's home. He leaned against a doorway, his olive-green webbing stuffed with hand grenades, ammunition clips, and a walkie-talkie. “The people here went to sleep last night with Omar and woke up this morning with Ali,” he joked, referring to typical Sunni and Shia names respectively.

Tired but clearly triumphant, he gave a dismissive wave of the hand when asked about the opposition he had faced from Sunni gunmen the previous night. “They ran away like rabbits,” he said.

I found Walid Jumblatt at his home in the Clemenceau district. Tired and unshaven, he sat quietly in a garden chair in the courtyard, his frame hunched, his legs crossed, staring pensively at the ground. The Druze leader had been the driving force behind persuading the government to crack down on Hezbollah's communications network. He had gambled and lost, and now he had to ponder his next move. “We wanted the army to provide security for us, but what can the army do when this militia, called Hezbollah, is stronger than the army?” Jumblatt grumbled.

Under Hezbollah's orders, the opposition gunmen melted away after a few hours, allowing the army to take control of the streets. But fighting continued over the next few days, with bloody clashes in north Lebanon and particularly in the Chouf Mountains, where Jumblatt's Druze loyalists
fought fiercely against the Shia interlopers of Hezbollah. But Jumblatt knew this was a battle he could not win, and he sued for peace after Hezbollah fighters deployed onto the windswept heights of the Barouk Mountains and aimed Katyusha rockets at the Druze leader's ancestral home in Mukhtara in the shadowed valleys far below.

Lebanon's bickering leaders were flown to Doha in Qatar, where a reconciliation agreement was hammered out. The agreement led to the election as president of Michel Suleiman, the commander of the Lebanese army, and ushered in a period of relative political stability. As part of the deal, the government canceled its decision to shut down Hezbollah's telecommunications network.

The outcome of the May 2008 “events,” as they are euphemistically referred to by the Lebanese, broke the back of the political deadlock that had paralyzed Lebanon since the 2006 war and confirmed Hezbollah as the dominant force on the Lebanese “street.” But it came at a price. For Hezbollah, in dispatching its fighters against the Sunni supporters of Saad Hariri and the Druze partisans of Walid Jumblatt, had broken an until-then sacred taboo. How many times had Nasrallah and other Hezbollah leaders insisted that the arms of the Islamic Resistance were aimed only at Israel and would never be used against fellow Lebanese? Hezbollah justified its takeover of west Beirut as an act of defense against an American-Israeli plot to rob the “resistance” of its vital communications weapon. But it was an excuse that rang hollow in the ears of those Lebanese who had previously given Hezbollah the benefit of the doubt over its relentless determination to keep its weapons. Furthermore, Hezbollah and its allies had humiliated Beirut's Sunnis in their own neighborhoods, streets, and homes. The Sunnis may have acknowledged that there was little they could do to challenge Hezbollah's seizure of the western half of the city, but that failed to dampen their sense of humiliation and deep resentment toward their Shia antagonists. Hezbollah, which has always championed unity between the two main sects of Islam, now faced the question of how to reconcile with the Sunnis and prevent the intra-Muslim schism from deepening.

Hezbollah was not alone in readying itself for a new war with Israel. Since the trauma of Israel's poor performance in the 2006 war, the IDF switched its attention from the asymmetrical confrontation with the Palestinians to the conventional threat on the northern front posed by Hezbollah and Syria.

“The military had adopted [before 2006] a training and operational concept related to the Palestinian theater,” said Gabriel Siboni, a reservist IDF colonel and a military strategist at the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv. “The war against the [Palestinian] suicide bombers worked. We won that war in 2005. Then Hezbollah came in and that was quite a surprise.”

Since 2006, Israel has improved its military preparedness by increasing the quality of training for reservist brigades and the frequency of drills and exercises, improving operational planning, bringing new weapons systems online, and tightening coordination between the IDF, the Israeli Air Force, and the intelligence community.

At the Elyakim training base at the southern end of Mount Carmel near Haifa, a terrain of woods and hills that resemble south Lebanon, the IDF built a series of Hezbollah-style bunkers and rocket-firing positions and littered the area with fake roadside bombs.
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Troops practice maneuvering through the rugged terrain, learning how to seek out and destroy rocket positions. Given the expectation that much of the next war will be fought in villages and towns in south Lebanon, the IDF plans to increase the number of urban warfare training centers from around fifteen in summer 2010 to about twenty-two by the end of 2011.
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Two of the centers were expected to include tunnel-and-bunker complexes similar to those constructed by Hezbollah.

Barely a week passes without a new defensive system being unveiled in the Israeli media, most of them connected to the asymmetrical conflict with Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in the Gaza Strip. By summer 2010, Israel was close to fielding a multitier antirocket umbrella. It includes the Iron Dome interceptor to counter rockets with ranges of
between three and forty-three miles, the David's Sling weapons system to defeat cruise missiles and large-caliber rockets such as the M-600, and the Arrow system, under development since the mid-1990s, which is intended to intercept ballistic missiles such as Iran's Shahab-3.

On the ground, Israel has developed armor defense systems to neutralize the advanced antitank missiles wielded by Hezbollah. They include the Trophy system, which fires a projectile from a targeted tank toward the incoming missile, destroying it in the air. From 2010, Trophy was fitted as standard to all new tanks coming off the production line.