Warriors of God (7 page)

Not only Shias were inspired by the Islamic revolution. Khomeini's ideas of an Islamic state were not rooted in exclusivist Shia dogma, but were a pan-Islamic concept to be embraced by all Muslims. Anis Naqqash, the Fatah guerilla commander who helped train Imad Mughniyah,
was a Sunni but became an early convert to the Islamic revolution, which he hoped would help him construct a Lebanese anti-Israel resistance.

“After the Islamic revolution, we changed all our articles and speeches to support Khomeini,” Naqqash recalls. He left Fatah following the 1978 Israeli invasion and established a small militant group called Harakat al-Lubnan al-Arabi, the Arab Lebanese Movement. The ALM consisted of some 150 recruits drawn from Fatah's Student Battalions as well as other factions.

The Lebanese Dawa activists also formed a network of secret armed cells, dubbed Qassam, that was based mainly in Beirut and clashed regularly with fighters from the Iraqi Baath Party, particularly after war broke out between Iran and Iraq in 1980. The Qassam militants also served as bodyguards to senior figures in the Lebanese Dawa, and its cadres would later play an important role in the Islamic Resistance, Hezbollah's military wing.

The success of the Islamic revolution inevitably aggravated the divergent viewpoints within Amal, distancing even further the besuited secularists of Nabih Berri from the turbaned Islamists such as Hassan Nasrallah. It was evident to the Iranians that Amal was not a suitable vehicle to carry the Islamic revolution into Lebanon. Khomeini was profoundly sympathetic to the Palestinian cause and lent support to PLO factions in Lebanon. But Amal's relations with the Palestinians deteriorated steadily from 1979 on, clashes between the two erupting with increasing regularity and ferocity. Furthermore, Iran enjoyed warm relations with Colonel Moammar Qaddafi of Libya, whom Amal's leadership continued to blame for Musa Sadr's disappearance. The Iranians effectively ignored Amal's entreaties to use their ties with Libya to discover Sadr's fate.

But Iran's disregard for Amal did not translate into immediate financial and logistical support for the pro-Khomeini Islamist elements in Lebanon. For the first two years after the revolution, Khomeini and his Islamic radicals were locked in competition with the Iranian leftist revolutionaries for control of the republic. Then, starting in 1980, Iran was embroiled in a debilitating war with neighboring Iraq. Both priorities
sidetracked Iran from mobilizing the state's resources to promote the Islamic revolution in Lebanon. Sheikh Sobhi Tufayli, a gruff, dark-skinned cleric with piercing coal-black eyes from the Bekaa village of Brital, remembers that many discussions were held between Lebanese Islamists and the new leadership in Iran about the “ideas of Imam Khomeini on liberating Jerusalem from Lebanon.”

“The only thing we lacked was financial support to lay the foundation of our resistance,” he says.

In April 1979, Saad Haddad irrevocably split from the Lebanese state and confirmed his alliance with Israel by proclaiming his narrow border strip as “Independent Free Lebanon” and his militia as the “Army of Free Lebanon.” The pugnacious major marked the announcement by bombarding the UNIFIL headquarters in the coastal village of Naqoura, which actually lay inside Haddad's area, using rockets, artillery, and heavy machine guns. Eight peacekeepers were wounded in the exchange and three UN helicopters damaged. The next day, the Lebanese government condemned Haddad as a traitor and officially dismissed him from the Lebanese army. Haddad and his Army of Free Lebanon militia were now wholly dependent on Israeli support.

The AFL was still essentially a Christian militia, but some Israeli commanders believed that recruitment should be broadened to other communities, especially the Shia, now that the border “security belt” had expanded. There had been some attempts before the 1978 invasion to win over those Shia villages adjacent to the Christian enclaves. Six villages were approached by the Israelis in early 1978 with promises of jobs in Israel and protection from the PLO if the residents agreed to be linked to the IDF Northern Command headquarters by radio and telephones. All six villages declined the offer.
¹²

Further attempts to recruit Shias into Haddad's militia followed the 1978 invasion. “We organized Ashoura celebrations for them and allowed them to come into Israel to work,” recalls Ephraim Sneh, the commander
of the IDF's Lebanon Liaison Unit before 1982. On one occasion, he arranged for five thousand Shias to enter Israel to pray at the shrine of Nabi Yusha, which had been a popular place of pilgrimage before 1948. “It was risky,” he says. “If just five of the five thousand had decided to stay in Israel and cause trouble, my head would have been chopped off.”

In June 1981, the Likud government of Prime Minister Menachem Begin was reelected and Ariel Sharon was appointed defense minister. Sharon was a war hero in Israel, a barrel-chested warrior of the old school, a brilliant tactician who had played important roles in Israel's earlier conflicts. But he was also compulsive and politically ambitious, a bulldozing character who brooked no dissension.

A month after the Israeli election, the most serious fighting in years erupted between the Palestinians and Israel. The PLO's restraint against repeated Israeli air strikes in the spring of 1981 finally ended in early July, when it launched a sustained and unprecedented rocket barrage against northern Israel. Thousands of Israeli civilians fled Kiryat Shemona and other towns in the north, the first time rocket fire from Lebanon had spurred such an exodus. The Israelis hit back by bombing PLO centers in the densely populated Fakhani district in Beirut, killing scores of civilians. But the Israelis had no answer for the Katyusha rocket barrages, and after two weeks of fighting, they agreed to a U.S.-brokered cease-fire deal.

With the guns on both sides falling silent, Sharon concluded that the only solution to the Katyusha problem was to drive the PLO out of Lebanon altogether. In the following months, he devised a grand scheme that he believed not only would end the PLO scourge but would change the very shape of the region. Israel would mount an all-out invasion of Lebanon to oust the PLO and remove Syrian forces. The IDF would link up with its Christian militia allies, and Bashir Gemayel, the head of the Kataeb, the most powerful faction, would be installed as Lebanese president. Israel and Lebanon would then sign a peace treaty, and all would be well.

The full details of the plan Sharon kept to himself and his key lieutenants, but by the beginning of 1982 it was common knowledge that
Israel was looking to stage a second, larger incursion into Lebanon. As the months passed, Ariel Sharon was like a tethered pit bull terrier straining at the leash and desperately looking for an excuse to launch his grand plan. But the Palestinians knew what was coming and ignored Israel's repeated provocations in the spring of 1982, which included IDF troop surges in the Haddad enclave, jets flying over Syrian positions, and an air strike against PLO positions after an Israeli soldier was killed when he stepped on an old land mine in south Lebanon. Although an invasion was clearly imminent, the PLO was ill prepared to confront the Israelis. By 1982, the fighting strength of the PLO was around five thousand full-time Palestinian fighters and another eight or nine thousand part-timers and Lebanese volunteers marshaled into regular military structures from platoons to companies, battalions, and brigades.
¹³
But most units were well below strength, the fighters insufficiently trained, poorly organized, and lacking a military doctrine to successfully make the switch from small-unit guerrilla tactics with which most cadres were familiar. Furthermore, the PLO failed to draw up contingency plans in which the semi-organized military structure could be broken down into autonomous guerrilla units to harass the Israeli supply lines and attack troops to the rear. Indeed, General Rafael Eitan, the IDF chief of staff in 1982, had expressed satisfaction at the sight of the PLO “going regular,” knowing that it would be easier to smash them as a weak conventional force than as bands of lightly armed and mobile guerrillas.
¹⁴

In the end, the catalyst for the invasion did not occur along the Lebanon-Israel border, nor indeed in the Middle East, but four thousand miles away, in London. On June 3, Shlomo Argov, the Israeli ambassador, was shot and badly wounded by members of the radical Revolutionary Fatah Council of Abu Nidal, a sworn enemy of Yasser Arafat.

Although the assassination attempt was clearly the act of an agent provocateur, Israel launched retaliatory air raids against PLO offices and facilities in Beirut, killing more than two hundred people. General Eitan, who had recommended the option of air strikes to the Israeli cabinet, knew that the PLO had standing orders to automatically shell settlements
in northern Israel in response to raids on its headquarters in Beirut, a fact he omitted to mention to the ministers.
¹⁵

As Eitan expected, two hours after the air raids, the Palestinians opened fire on northern Israel for the first time since the July 1981 cease-fire.

Ariel Sharon at last had his excuse for war.

TWO
 

DAMASCUS, Syria
—Sheikh Sobhi Tufayli was told the news while waiting at Damascus airport for a flight to Tehran: Israel was bombing PLO bases in Beirut and south Lebanon. Columns of Israeli troops and tanks were massed along the border, and it was evident that the long-anticipated invasion of Lebanon was about to begin. Tufayli and his young colleague, Sheikh Ragheb Harb, the imam of Jibsheet village in south Lebanon, were traveling to the Iranian capital to attend a conference of Islamic liberation movements. But Israel's imminent invasion was bound to overshadow the event. Normally dour and severe, Tufayli felt a tremor of excitement as he contemplated what this would mean for the goal of building an Islamic resistance against Israel. Although Tufayli and other Lebanese Shia leaders had held many discussions with top Iranian officials about how to build an anti-Israel resistance, nothing concrete had emerged. But now, surely, with the Israelis poised to charge into Lebanon, it would change everything, Tufayli thought.
¹

At nine o'clock that same Sunday morning, General William Callaghan, commander of UNIFIL, received a phone call from General
Eitan, the IDF chief of staff, requesting an urgent meeting. The border was only a five-minute drive from Callaghan's headquarters in Naqoura. The Irish general assumed the meeting was in connection with the impending invasion, which looked set to occur at any moment.

The meeting with Eitan was brief, and once it was over, Callaghan, seething at the short notice given him by the Israelis, telephoned UNIFIL headquarters from Israel and said tersely, “Rubicon”—the peacekeepers' code word that the invasion was on.

The first tanks crossed the border at 10:00
A.M.
, entering Lebanon at five main points along the frontier. The UNIFIL troops were impotent in the face of Israel's armored juggernaut. A unit of Dutch soldiers manning a checkpoint on the coast two miles north of Naqoura threw obstacles onto the road to block the advance. The lead tank, a British-built Centurion, struck the steel obstacles and was disabled, and the second Israeli tank lost a caterpillar track. After that, the six Dutch soldiers ran out of tank traps and stood by helplessly. One soldier fetched a camera and took pictures as the armored column rumbled past.

In Naqoura, Timur Goksel, a Turkish UNIFIL press officer who had joined the peacekeeping force three years earlier, watched the seemingly endless armored vehicles trundle by. “They were facing so little opposition that they did not bother with a combat formation,” he recalled. “In Naqoura alone, we counted twelve hundred tanks and four thousand armored personnel carriers. God knows what else was pouring in. If a tank braked in Tyre, they were backed up all the way to Nahariya in Israel.”

UNIFIL's helplessness irked Yasser Arafat, who had forlornly hoped that the moral authority of the UN might slow the advance. “At least you could have shot in the air, like when our people approach you,” he later grumbled to a UN official.
²
But the PLO had done itself few favors in its lack of adequate defensive preparations to confront an invasion that had been expected for months. The main roads were unmined and the bridges left intact, the latter contrary to the expectations of even Israeli military commanders. With many PLO commanders fleeing north, the fighters simply dropped their weapons, shed their uniforms, and tried to escape the approaching Israelis.