Invisible Armies: An Epic History of Guerrilla Warfare From Ancient Times to the Present

by Max Boot

  In all 241 marines and sailors had been killed—the corps’ greatest single-day loss since the Battle of Iwo Jima in 1945. At almost the same time, another truck bomb hit a building housing French paratroopers two miles away, killing 58 of them. Both attacks were claimed by a shadowy group calling itself Islamic Jihad. This was an ultra-radical breakaway faction of the Shiite Amal movement that would soon become known as Hezbollah. Its initial acts showed that this new movement was willing and able to operate on a more ambitious scale than previous terrorist groups, from the Ku Klux Klan and the Socialist Revolutionary Combat Organization to the PLO and the Baader-Meinhof Gang, which had been limited by either a lack of resources or a lack of will from killing too many people. Most of these past groups had calculated that if they went beyond a certain point they would spark a self-defeating backlash. From the outset, Hezbollah displayed fewer such compunctions—although more than Al Qaeda and its offshoots subsequently were to evince.22

  THE BIRTHPLACE OF this effective and remorseless new organization was Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley, where 1,500 members of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps had been dispatched with Syrian cooperation to train militants who would fight the Israeli invaders. The Iranians found many volunteers eager to fight the “Zionists” and “infidels” from among the Lebanese Shia, a disenfranchised group that had been increasingly organized and radicalized since the early 1970s. Among the most prominent volunteers were a pair of young Shiite clerics, thirty-four-year-old Subhi Tufeili and thirty-year-old Abbas Musawi, both educated in the seminaries of Najaf, Iraq, where Ayatollah Khomeini had lived in exile until 1978. They would become Hezbollah’s first two secretaries-general.23

  Even more important to the organization’s early development was its de facto director of military operations, Imad Mughniyeh. A terrorist prodigy born in south Lebanon and raised in the slums of Beirut, he was only twenty years old in 1982 but had already served in the PLO’s elite Force 17. After the Israel Defense Forces evicted the PLO from Lebanon, he joined Hezbollah. Over the following two decades, he would work closely with Iranian operatives to carry out virtually all of Hezbollah’s high-profile attacks, from suicide bombings to hostage takings. One of his Israeli adversaries called him “one of the most creative and brilliant minds I have ever come across.” Prior to Osama bin Laden’s emergence, Mughniyeh was the world’s most wanted terrorist, but unlike Bin Laden he shunned the media spotlight. He even underwent plastic surgery to disguise his appearance. Marines saw him in 1982–83 directing attacks on their positions, but they did not know his name; they called him “Castro” because of his bushy beard. Hezbollah disclaimed any knowledge of his existence until his death in 2008, when he was celebrated as one of its revered shaheeds (martyrs) and honored with his own museum.24

  This was symptomatic of the secretiveness that surrounded the entire organization; it would not admit its existence until the release in 1985 of a manifesto denouncing the “aggression and humiliation” inflicted by “America and its allies and the Zionist entity.”25 Hezbollah preferred to make its mark with spectacular attacks, especially suicide attacks, rather than bombastic statements. The very first target struck by suicide bombers in Lebanon was the Iraqi embassy; a 1981 attack killed 27 people. (Iraq was then at war with Iran, whose proxies were behind the blast.) The next year it was Israel’s turn: in November 1982, a Peugeot full of 1,300 pounds of explosives rammed the Israeli headquarters in Tyre, Lebanon’s southernmost city, killing 75 Israelis and perhaps 27 Lebanese prisoners. This was the first suicide attack on an Israeli target but far from the last. Almost exactly a year later, another Israeli headquarters in Tyre was struck by an explosives-packed Chevrolet pickup, killing 28 Israelis and 35 prisoners. The U.S. embassy in Beirut was another repeat target. It was first hit in April 1983 by a GMC pickup truck, killing 63 people. The following year, in September 1984, an attack on the U.S. embassy annex in a Beirut suburb, this time by a Chevrolet van, killed 24 more.

  Such attacks made Hezbollah synonymous with suicide bombing—a tactic that had not been used by Palestinian terrorists of the 1970s or even by the Afghan mujahideen. Although employed sporadically by some terrorists of the past such as the turn-of-the-century Russian socialists and the medieval Assassins, suicide attacks had been associated most prominently with the Japanese kamikazes. Their use in the waning days of World War II highlights the fact that this is the weapon of the weak—and the fanatical. That made it a natural tactic for Hezbollah since the Shiites have always been weak by comparison with the Sunnis, who comprise 90 percent of the Muslim world. The very foundation of the Shiite faith is veneration of a shaheed, Muhammad’s grandson, Hussein, slain in AD 680 by a caliph who rejected his claim to be the rightful heir to the Prophet. In the 1980s Iran made ample use of suicidal volunteers, the Basij, to fight the better-equipped Iraqi army. Tens of thousands of boys, some as young as ten, were given plastic keys to heaven and sent to run through minefields in human-wave attacks.26

  Hezbollah brought the same ethos of martyrdom to its operations, even though the Koran expressly forbids suicide and the killing of innocents. “Every man, young and old, loves to blow himself up to tear apart the bodies of the invading, occupying Jews,” Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, declared in 1998. The willingness of its members to forfeit their own lives, Hezbollah proclaimed, could allow it to vanquish better-armed but supposedly softer foes such as the “fearful and cowardly” Israelis—a refrain that would be echoed in later years by many other Islamist groups. Unlike many of its successors, however, Hezbollah limited its suicide attacks to military targets.27

  Suicide attacks were only one weapon in Hezbollah’s arsenal and became progressively less important as the group developed other capabilities. Indeed, as of 2011, Hezbollah had not mounted a single suicide operation since 1999. It also flirted early on with airplane hijacking before abandoning this tactic too. Its most famous skyjacking was the seizure of TWA flight 847 in Beirut in June 1985 which led to the murder of an American sailor, whose body was dumped on the tarmac.

  A third tactic, popular with Hezbollah during its infancy but since discarded, was hostage taking. It began with the seizure in 1982 of David Dodge, acting president of the American University in Beirut. He was released 366 days later after having been smuggled in a crate to Tehran. Almost a hundred other Western hostages were seized in Lebanon in the following decade. The longest-held was the reporter Terry Anderson, who spent almost seven years in captivity (1985–91). He was luckier than two other hostages—CIA Station Chief William Buckley and Marine Lieutenant Colonel William “Rich” Higgins, who was part of a United Nations peacekeeping mission. Both were tortured and murdered.

  These attacks were not simply the result of cruelty or blood lust. They were part of a calculated strategy designed to drive Israel, the United States, and other Western influences out of Lebanon, leaving Iran and its allies predominant. That strategy worked. Less than four months after the attack on their headquarters in Beirut, Ronald Reagan “redeployed” the marines out of Lebanon. To Colonel Geraghty’s disgust, the United States never mounted any retaliation, refusing to join in French and Israeli air strikes on Iranian and Hezbollah positions in the Bekaa Valley. The hostage taking that followed exposed “the greatest Satan of all”28—the United States—to further humiliation when Reagan’s aides secretly contrived to sell arms to Iran in return for their release. Three hostages were let go but more were taken, and meanwhile the administration was almost brought down by the Iran-contra scandal. Iran and its proxies finally gave up on hostage taking in 1992 following the death of Ayatollah Khomeini and the advent of a slightly more moderate regime in Tehran.29

  HEZBOLLAH’S ATTACKS ON Israel (“a cancerous growth that needs to be eradicated”)30 were even more pervasive and just as effective. The Shia had at first welcomed the Israeli invasion of Lebanon as a reprieve from the PLO’s oppressive rule, but the Israelis overstayed their welcome in an unsuccessful attempt to establish a friendly, Christian-led
government in Beirut. Hezbollah undoubtedly would have been formed even if the invasion had never occurred, but Israel’s presence accelerated the militarization of the Shia. Hezbollah’s 1982 suicide bombing of the Israeli headquarters in Tyre was just the start of a guerrilla campaign to drive the invaders out.

  Israeli security forces responded by setting up roadblocks, rounding up and harshly interrogating suspects, destroying villages, bombing Hezbollah hideouts. But, as Israeli commanders later acknowledged, their heavy-handed approach only alienated the population—much as the French had done in Algeria and Indochina.31 For all their efforts, Israel’s feuding intelligence agencies could not crack the insurgent cells that sniped at, and bombed, their troops. Suicide bombers sometimes rammed Israeli convoys, but the “Islamic resistance” also used sophisticated roadside bombs provided by Iran that stymied Israeli jammers. In 1985, amid disaffection at home and mounting casualties (650 dead, 3,000 wounded),32 the Israel Defense Forces pulled back to a security zone in the south of Lebanon. It was the first military defeat in Israel’s history but not the last at Hezbollah’s hands.

  Israel’s retreat emboldened Hezbollah to pursue its ultimate aims—the “final obliteration” of the “Zionist entity” and the creation in Lebanon of an Islamic republic modeled on Iran.33 In seeking to accomplish its grandiose objectives, Hezbollah was able to reach far outside Lebanon, thanks to the assistance of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards and its intelligence organizations. In 1992 their operatives blew up the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires, killing 29 people. In 1994, another bomb tore apart a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, killing 85 people. Hezbollah and the Revolutionary Guards were also widely suspected in the 1996 bombing of the Khobar Towers complex in Saudi Arabia, which killed 19 American airmen.34 In addition Hezbollah provided training and support to numerous other terrorist groups, ranging from Al Qaeda in the 1990s to Iraq’s Jaish al Mahdi after 2003. Many subsequent terrorist attacks, such as Al Qaeda’s truck bombing of two U.S. embassies in Africa in 1998 and various roadside bombings of U.S. troops in Iraq after 2003, were modeled on the methods Hezbollah had pioneered in Lebanon.35

  In fighting back, Israel claimed a notable success in 1992 when one of its Apache gunships blew up a car in which Hezbollah’s secretary-general, Abbas Musawi, was traveling along with his family. Sixteen years later, in 2008, the onetime terrorist prodigy Imad Mughniyeh met his end in Damascus—killed, appropriately, by his favorite weapon, a car bomb, in an attack attributed to Mossad. Sometimes terrorist organizations are crippled by the removal of their leaders; that was the fate of Peru’s Shining Path after the capture of Abimael Guzmán in 1992 and, in the more distant past, of the Lusitanian rebels against Roman rule in Spain after the death of Viriathus in 139 BC. Hezbollah was already so well established, however, that it would not be slowed by the elimination of Musawi and Mughniyeh.

  Musawi was immediately succeeded by his corpulent protégé, Hassan Nasrallah, a thirty-two-year-old cleric from the slums of East Beirut who was the son of a fruit and vegetable seller but wore the black turban signifying descent from the Prophet Muhammad. Like Musawi, he had studied in Najaf, where he had imbibed Khomeini’s teachings. He revealed himself to be at least as shrewd, ruthless, and charismatic as his predecessor. He was even gifted with a sense of humor, willing to laugh at his speech impediment and other foibles—something it would have been hard to imagine Osama bin Laden doing.

  Nasrallah won the devotion of his followers when his oldest son died in a 1997 clash with Israeli commandos. The sons of most Middle Eastern leaders were dissolute playboys. That Hezbollah leaders—like an earlier, somewhat heretical, Shiite terrorist, Hasan-i Sabah, founder of the Assassins—were willing to sacrifice their own offspring significantly enhanced their credibility.36

  Nasrallah moved Hezbollah away from being purely a terrorist organization. Like Mao, Ho, and Castro, he recognized the importance of political action. Unlike them, he was even willing to compete in more or less free elections, although Nasrallah continued to use considerable coercion to turn out the vote and to silence critics. Over the objections of some members, Hezbollah became a political party that, starting in 1992, competed in Lebanon’s elections and appointed cabinet ministers. It also expanded its role as a provider of social services to Lebanon’s poor Shia, running a vast network of schools, hospitals, construction companies, loan providers, and other businesses funded mainly by Iran, which provided Hezbollah with an estimated $100 million a year.37 It had its own version of the Boy Scouts, the Mahdi Scouts, and a Martyrs’ Association to help the widows and orphans of suicide bombers. It even sold souvenirs to tourists such as the bracelet and lighter adorned with Nasrallah’s image that this author purchased in the Bekaa Valley in 2009. More importantly it set up its own website, four newspapers, five radio stations, and a satellite television station, Al Manar (The Lighthouse), to get its message out. Amazingly, this nonstate group did a more effective job of spreading its message than its Zionist adversaries, who had the full resources of the Israeli state behind them.38

  Its foray into politics did not, however, mean that Hezbollah was eschewing military force. Far from it. Lebanese politicians, generals, and journalists who stood in its way—or in the way of its patrons in Damascus and Tehran—were liable to meet a nasty end. The organization was suspected, most notoriously, in the massive 2005 car bombing that killed former Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri, who was intent on forcing Syrian troops out of Lebanon. But most of Hezbollah’s martial energies went into the struggle against Israel, which it used to justify its refusal to disarm in common with other militias following the end of Lebanon’s civil war in 1989.

  THE 1990S SAW many bloody guerrilla struggles around the globe. Any list of the grim lowlights would have to include the former Yugoslavia, where Orthodox Serbs were battling Muslim Bosnians, Catholic Slovenians, and other ethnic groups; Kashmir, where Pakistan-backed Muslim insurgents were resisting rule by Hindu-majority India; Chechnya, where Orthodox Russian soldiers were trying to suppress resistance from Muslim Chechens; Nagorno-Karabakh, where Armenian Christians were seeking autonomy from Muslim Azerbaijan; Somalia, where various clans and parties were fighting for control after the breakdown of central authority; and Rwanda, where hard-line Hutus were slaughtering the Tutsi minority and moderate Hutus. For all of their diversity, each of these conflicts was rooted in differences of ethnicity that were seized upon by nationalist ideologues and that were exacerbated in most cases, Rwanda and Somalia excepted, by differences of religion. It was such conflicts that led the political scientist Samuel Huntington in 1993 to claim that the world was seeing a “clash of civilizations.” His thesis was overstated—there were at least as many clashes within civilizations as between them—but it gained widespread currency because it seemed to account for the prevalence of conflict in the first decade after the end of the Cold War. Certainly Lebanon fit the mold. In the 1990s, this small Mediterranean state was still recovering from its own civil war, and it was relatively peaceful by comparison with countries such as Rwanda, where over 800,000 people would die, but it too saw a struggle rooted in ethnicity and religion.

  Throughout that decade Hezbollah waged a guerrilla war in southern Lebanon against the IDF and its 2,500 proxies, primarily Christians, in the South Lebanese Army. Hezbollah had only a few thousand full-time fighters, but that was enough to harass the larger and better-equipped IDF. Its low-level attacks in the southern “security zone,” often employing roadside bombs, killed an average of 17 Israeli soldiers a year along with 30 South Lebanese Army soldiers39 and sparked a potent antiwar movement in Israel led by the mothers of slain soldiers. Hezbollah knew it did not have to kill that many people, because it could magnify its attacks through its powerful propaganda arm. It cleverly nurtured antiwar sentiment in Israel by broadcasting images of dead or wounded soldiers followed by the Hebrew-language tagline “Who’s Next?”40

  In May 2000, Prime Minister Ehud Barak finally withdrew Israeli troops from Leba
non after eighteen years. Nasrallah promptly claimed a “great historic victory . . . achieved by martyrdom and blood.” The lesson that Hezbollah and others drew—including the Palestinians, who soon thereafter launched the Second Intifada—was that, in Nasrallah’s words, even “with all its atomic weapons, Israel is weaker than cobwebs.”41 Far from admitting that its raison d’être—opposing Israeli occupation—had been removed, Hezbollah made fresh demands for Shebaa Farms, a small sliver of the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights that had previously belonged to Syria, not Lebanon.

  Long-simmering tensions with Israel boiled over in 2006, resulting in Israel’s biggest war since the 1982 invasion of Lebanon. On July 12, Hezbollah operatives infiltrated northern Israel and ambushed two IDF Humvees, killing three soldiers and kidnapping two more. Two hours later, Israeli troops went in pursuit, but Hezbollah knocked out a Merkava tank with a mine and killed five more soldiers. Israel’s prime minister, Ehud Olmert, responded with aerial and artillery strikes targeting Hezbollah infrastructure in southern Lebanon and on the outskirts of Beirut. Over a hundred high-rise buildings in the capital’s suburbs were demolished, but most were unoccupied because of Israeli warnings. To increase the pressure on Lebanon to bring Hezbollah to heel (something that its government was too weak to do), the Israeli navy blockaded the Lebanese coastline while the Israeli air force bombed the Beirut airport. During the next month Israeli aircraft would drop more than 12,000 bombs and missiles while Israeli ground and naval forces would fire more than 150,000 rockets and artillery shells. Yet even all this firepower could not prevent Hezbollah from firing an unceasing barrage of 122-millimeter Katyusha rockets into northern Israel. These short-range, unguided missiles could be set up in minutes almost anywhere, making them impossible to knock out from the air.