The Road to Fatima Gate: The Beirut Spring, the Rise of Hezbollah, and the Iranian War Against Israel

by Michael Totten

  “Hezbollah thugs armed with sticks, rocks and in some cases guns are storming Beirut neighborhoods,” Lebanese political analyst Abu Kais wrote on his blog From Beirut to the Beltway.6 “Some were seen approaching [Hariri’s] Future TV news building in Raouche. ISF and army troops trying to stop their advance are being attacked. Security forces are being extremely lax and unorganized—intervening only when it’s too late. Future TV reported that vans carrying covered Hezbollah women are supplying the rioters with rocks. . . . Beirut residents are boiling with anger, and there are rumors of taking up arms against the ‘Hezbollah occupiers.’”

  In south Beirut’s Tariq Jedideh neighborhood adjacent to the dahiyeh, furious Sunnis armed with pistols, sticks, rocks, and iron bars tried to break through some of the roadblocks. Masked Hezbollah militiamen defended their positions with automatic weapons. Lebanese army soldiers managed to break up some of these fights without taking sides, at last showing they were at least not entirely useless.

  Members of parliament described Hezbollah as “terrorists” and Beirut as “occupied.” Even the normally milquetoast and docile Sunni prime minister snapped and accused Hezbollah of “intimidation” and “terrorism.”

  Violent clashes spread from Tariq Jedideh into other parts of Beirut and even to other parts of the country. Cars were on fire. Entire streets were on fire. People on both sides were shot. Lebanese in the Diaspora watching news footage on television said their homeland looked like Gaza—and it did.

  Hezbollah spokesmen liked to say the party modeled its “resistance” to the Siniora government after the March 14 demonstrations, but activists in the Independence Intifada never did anything remotely like this.

  Nasrallah wisely called off his “strike.” Some of the more militant leaders in the March 14 camp told their people to remain on standby to “lift the siege of Beirut” if Hezbollah refused to stand down and if the army remained on the sidelines.

  Hezbollah did, however, stand down. Nasrallah seemed to be at least dimly aware that there were limits to what he could get away with in his crusade, or rather jihad, against the Sunni prime minister. Never mind that Lebanon’s government was democratically elected—no sectarian community in Lebanon was allowed to choose or remove the leader of another. Shias couldn’t select or deselect the zaim of the Sunnis without defeating the Sunnis in war.

  Prices of AK-47s more than doubled after the violence in January, according to correspondent Nicholas Blanford.7 Almost every family in the country owned weapons already, but they’d need to stockpile more if war was coming again. According to Beirut’s half-believable rumor mill, Walid Jumblatt’s Progressive Socialist Party was expanding its arsenal and training fighters again, and so was Bashir Gemayel’s old Maronite militia now turned political party, the Lebanese Forces. Both denied it, and their denials were as plausible as the rumors, but somebody was snapping up rifles and ammunition in preparation for something.

  The air crackled with sectarian tension, and Tariq Jedideh exploded again two days later when a mere fistfight between students at Beirut Arab University turned into a firefight. Hezbollah brought in gunmen wielding M-16s by the van load to shoot it out with Sunni university students packing pistols.

  Hardly anyone in 1975 could imagine that seemingly isolated clashes could spark a civil war that would last for fifteen long years, but that’s what happened, and no one in Lebanon had forgotten it. Lebanese army officers could not just stand idly by now that the sectarian monster was stalking the country again, so they clamped down on the city with an after-dark curfew.

  “For the third time in almost a year,” Michael Young wrote,8 “Lebanon has averted a civil war, but we’re nearing the end of the rope . . . what happened on Tuesday was, in its permutations, pretty much war. . . . And if anything induced Hezbollah to suspend the protests, it was an awareness that if these continued for even a day, war was inevitable. . . . The next time the opposition threatens to do something similar, we might as well load the guns or head for the shelters.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  guns in the capital

  Life—soaked in a moving carcass, and the human being—poured into a temple of terror: that is the Lebanon that they want for us today.

  —ADONIS

  War did return to the Land of the Cedars that summer, but it wasn’t the war anybody expected.

  Sunni terrorists from a group hardly anyone had ever heard of before called Fatah al-Islam massacred twenty-seven Lebanese army soldiers in their sleep outside the gates of the Palestinian refugee camp of Nahr al-Bared. Hardly any of the militants were Lebanese or Palestinian. They were fanatical Salafists from all over the place who had murky ties to Syria’s intelligence agencies, and possible ties to al Qaeda.

  The terrorists had embedded themselves in the camp near the northern city of Tripoli, and when the army laid siege to it, Lebanon lost almost as many soldiers in the next three and a half months as the British lost in five years in Iraq.1

  It was, however, a sideshow—a bloody and frightening sideshow, to be sure, and it underscored that Lebanon was an unstable country that generated armed conflict like weather, but it was a sideshow. A far more significant conflict was coming, one that would decisively shift power in the Middle East away from the American-backed Arab states to the Islamic Republic regime in Iran.

  Lebanese President Emile Lahoud’s extended term finally expired in November of 2007 after nine years of service to the al-Assads in Damascus. He left quietly.

  The leaders of Lebanon’s squabbling factions could not agree on a successor, and the next six months passed like one of the world’s longest staring contests. The government’s March 14 majority still refused to resign or hand over veto power to the March 8 bloc, Hezbollah still refused to end its occupation of downtown Beirut, and all the while, the presidential palace in Baabda stayed empty.

  In the spring of 2008, Walid Jumblatt convinced Saad Hariri and their allies in the Christian parties to shove Hassan Nasrallah hard in the chest. They vowed to disable Hezbollah’s vast illegal telecommunications network and fired the head of airport security, Brigadier General Wafiq Choucair. Choucair wasn’t a Hezbollah member, but he helped Hezbollah receive clandestine shipments from abroad and monitor everyone who flew in and out of the country.

  Hezbollah’s parallel telecom system ran from South Lebanon and the Bekaa Valley to the dahiyeh and the airport, and it apparently survived the July War intact. According to Telecommunications Minister Marwan Hamadeh—who, if you recall, barely survived a car-bomb explosion in front of his house shortly before Rafik Hariri was killed—the network reached all the way to the city center where government buildings were located.

  In early May, Jumblatt said during a press conference that he and Saad Hariri were being stalked by assassins. He added that Hezbollah was surveilling the private jets of Lebanese politicians and foreign dignitaries on runway 17 and was possibly passing intelligence to the car bombers.2

  A few years earlier, assassins had killed Member of Parliament and An-Nahar newspaper publisher Gebran Tueni just hours after he secretly returned on a brief trip home from his self-imposed semi-exile in France. Somebody at the airport alerted the killers he’d landed, and Jumblatt wasn’t the only one wondering if it was Hezbollah.

  “It has been taken for granted for a long time that Hezbollah controls Lebanon’s international airport,” wrote David Schenker at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.3 “There is much speculation as to the purpose of Hezbollah’s surveillance camera, but at a minimum, this asset could assist Hezbollah, Syria, and Iran to monitor the movement of anti-Syrian Lebanese officials, and perhaps even facilitate kidnappings or murders.”

  The Druze leader, no longer content to resist only Damascus, pushed back hard against Hezbollah’s patrons and armorers in Tehran. “Iranian flights to Beirut should be stopped,” he said,4 “because Iranian planes might be bringing in money and military equipment.”

  Iranian planes certainly were b
ringing in money and equipment, and none of it ended up in the hands of the government or the army.

  “The Iranian ambassador should be expelled,” Jumblatt said.5

  All this was too much for Nasrallah, and he announced on the morning of May 8 that he would hold a press conference that afternoon. A sinking, even cloying, feeling of dread washed over much of the country.

  Beirutis cleared the streets as they often did even during the smallest of crises. The Lebanese feared each other, and I even knew some who didn’t trust themselves to behave if things went pear-shaped.

  The entire country seemed to suffer from collective post-traumatic stress disorder. I’d seen nerve-racked citizens unnecessarily wall themselves up in their homes so many times that I no longer paid it much mind when it happened.

  It was easy for me to shrug and assume the best instead of the worst. I hadn’t lived through the civil war, and I didn’t lug my own portable nightmares around with me. I was also out of the country this time on assignment in Eastern Europe. From a distance, the latest news hardly even appeared to be news.

  But it was about to.

  “The [government] decisions,” Nasrallah said,6 “are tantamount to a declaration of war, and the start of a war on behalf of the United States and Israel.”

  Then Lebanon came apart.

  Hamra is the most diverse neighborhood in Beirut. It’s the most diverse neighborhood in the country, in fact, and probably the most diverse in the Middle East. It’s on the western side of the city and therefore predominantly Sunni, but it’s also effectively a “college town” wedged between the American University of Beirut and the Lebanese American University. Substantial numbers of Christians, Druze, Shias, and foreigners—including Jews—live there alongside the Sunnis. Everyone gets along reasonably well most of the time, and you can fool yourself into believing the Middle East is more peaceful and tolerant than it is if you spend enough time there.

  Achrafieh on the predominantly Christian east side is a little more polished and feels a lot more Western, but Hamra is more interesting, as it’s the closest thing Lebanon has to a microcosm of itself. Cafés, all-night bars, and even brothels are right around the corner from mosques, which are just up the street from churches, which themselves are only a twenty-minute walk from a Jewish synagogue that was being restored with some of Saad Hariri’s money.7

  Most of Hamra’s residents may have been March 14 Sunnis, but every political ideology relevant to the region, from communism to American-style neoconservatism, had champions there. This was the place where all of Lebanon’s sects and ideas came together, and with so many intellectuals, college students, professors, journalists, and foreigners, it was no less international than Tel Aviv or Jerusalem. You could drink with the enemy there. Western Jewish Zionists could argue politics over coffee or beer with Hezbollah supporters. I personally know three dual-national Israelis who sneaked in on second passports, and I have no doubt there were others. Nonconformists who didn’t fit in well in Damascus or Cairo loved Hamra as much as Westerners who found themselves alienated, understimulated, or both in cities like New York and London.

  Charles Chuman, my Lebanese American friend who gave me a tour of Hezbollah’s dahiyeh the first time I went down there, lived in the neighborhood on the top floor of the Mayflower Hotel just a few streets over from my old apartment. He spent the morning of May 8 in his office where he worked as a media and political analyst, but he didn’t want to stick around long after Nasrallah announced the upcoming press conference. Most of his coworkers left at lunch and were not coming back. Crossing the city was a major hassle already. Hezbollah and its allies in the opposition were “on strike” and were burning tires again.

  A few of his American friends casually went to their favorite cafés or to the gym, but most Lebanese people went home and shut their doors, as did Charles.

  When he set up his laptop in the living room so he could keep working from home, a spooky feeling came over him. Normally he wouldn’t be able to hear much over the roar of traffic and the blaring of car horns, but the city was as quiet as if it were three o’clock in the morning.

  Nasrallah’s face filled his TV screen, but Charles wasn’t listening. He left the volume down so he could concentrate on his work, but he did not need to listen. Instant message windows opened up on his laptop.

  “Oh, my God,” wrote one of his friends. “It’s going down.”

  “Hezbollah,” said another, “is invading Beirut.”

  Then the gunshots started.

  They were in the distance at first, most likely in the neighborhood to the south, somewhere in Verdun, perhaps near the Bristol Hotel. Charles could have walked there in ten minutes, but the shots were sporadic, and it was hard to tell if someone was just firing into the air or if this was for real.

  It was for real.

  The distant cracking of gunshots mushroomed into a terrifying crescendo. The firing wasn’t sporadic anymore; it was constant, and so was the screaming.

  He closed his curtains, bolted the door, and moved his laptop into the hallway between the bedroom and kitchen. Floor-to-ceiling windows were about to turn his living room into a death trap.

  He called the front desk downstairs on his cell phone.

  “What’s going on down there?” he said.

  “It’s fine,” said the man at the desk as though nothing was out of the ordinary.

  “What do you mean, it’s fine?” Charles said. He could barely even hear the man’s voice over the gunfire, and the ground floor had floor-to-ceiling windows just like his apartment.

  “Just don’t go outside.”

  “Okay,” Charles said in disbelief. “Whatever you say.”

  The instant he ended the call, his phone rang again. It was one of his friends in America.

  “Look,” he said, “I’m fine, don’t worry, but I have to hang up. I need my phone.”

  He tried placing one call after another to friends elsewhere in the city hoping they could tell him what was happening in front of their own houses, but he heard a recorded message every time telling him in Arabic that all the circuits were busy.

  The Internet was his only line out to the world.

  “Dude, it’s f**kin scary,” one of his friends who lived near the International College wrote to him using Facebook. “Snipers across from my house just got rocket launchers.”

  Civil war veterans told him what to do.

  Stay in an interior room or a hallway. Lie down in your bathtub if the gunshots get close. Keep the hell away from the windows, and for God’s sake, close the curtains. Be nice to the doorman. Don’t go anywhere unless you know where the snipers are.

  His phone rang. According to the caller ID, it was one of his distant cousins who lived in the mountains northeast of the city.

  “Charles! It’s the opening night of White, mate. I can get us in, we’ve got to go.”

  White was a fashionable club reopening for the season on top of the An-Nahar building downtown.

  “Um,” Charles said, “we’ve got a little bit of a war going on over here.”

  His cousin couldn’t see Beirut from his house and obviously wasn’t paying attention to the news or to anyone else.

  Charles heard several men wearing boots run up the stairs and go out onto the roof, and he had an idea what they were doing.

  “I have to go,” he said and ended the call.

  Saad Hariri’s house in Qoreitem was a few minutes’ walk toward the south, and Prime Minister Fouad Siniora lived just a few streets to the north. Charles could almost see each of their homes from his balcony. His building would make an excellent sniping position.

  He thought he heard men out in the hallway. Someone could easily kick through the flimsy lock on the front door, so he tiptoed into the kitchen to get out of the way.

  His refrigerator and cupboards were almost empty. He was supposed to make his weekly trip to the grocery store the day before, but he got home late and blew it off. So he sat on th
e floor by himself, wary of whoever was out in the hallway and up on his roof, listening to automatic weapons fire in front his building, amazed that the front desk guy told him everything was just dandy, and he had no food or water.

  His friend Rama lived downstairs with her roommate. They presumably had a stocked kitchen, and he desperately needed some company.

  He crept to the door and pressed his ear up against it. The hallway sounded quiet, so he slowly unlocked the bolt, turned the knob, and pushed the door slightly ajar. He heard the suction sound of a rocket-propelled grenade launcher firing, the shattering of a plate-glass window, and a choir of car alarms, but no one seemed to be in the hallway.

  He darted downstairs to Rama’s apartment.

  “Charles!” she said as she opened the door. “Jeez, come in.”

  She was the young Syrian American woman who also accompanied me on my first trip to Hezbollah’s dahiyeh.

  Charles collapsed into her couch. Her Jordanian American roommate was there with her boyfriend, Hassan.

  “I know some of those people out there,” Hassan said. “They’re with Amal and the SSNP.”

  So it wasn’t Hezbollah outside, at least not on their street.

  Amal, recall, was Lebanon’s secular Shia party and Hezbollah’s junior partner in the March 8 coalition. The SSNP was the Syrian Social Nationalist Party, a minuscule but violent pro-Syrian militia that had been around since before Lebanon even existed as an independent republic.

  Charles peered behind the curtain and saw young men with guns running up the street.

  “A guy I know from the university escorted me over here,” Hassan said, “but his friends are riding around on scooters and shooting up everything. All the pro-Hariri stores are getting shot up. They aren’t trained. They don’t even know what they’re doing. They’re just shooting at everything.”