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

by Michael Totten

  Charles stayed for dinner before returning to his own apartment and getting back on the Internet.

  His American acquaintance Vince had been in the country for three months and was one of the oddball Westerners who washed up in the country every so often. Nobody really knew what he was doing there. While he said he was studying Arabic, he never seemed to take classes. Some thought he might work for the CIA, but Charles just thought he was weird.

  “I want to head over to Captain’s Cabin,” Vince typed in an instant message, “and check on Andre.”

  Captain’s Cabin was a popular bar among the expat crowd, and Andre had been running the place since the civil war.

  “Don’t do it,” Charles typed back. “Don’t try to go.”

  But Vince signed off and seemed to have left.

  Charles called Andre and was relieved when the call was patched through.

  “I’m okay,” Andre said, “but tell Vince not to come here. Shit’s going down. It’s crazy. There’s fighting outside, and I won’t be able to let him in if he shows up.”

  Militiamen banged on Andre’s door with the butts of their rifles and demanded he open up, but they couldn’t get in because he lashed it shut with the same metal bars he’d used to barricade himself inside during the civil war. He ended up spending the night there and, like just about everyone else, hardly slept.

  Vince’s apartment was only a few blocks from Captain’s Cabin, and Charles’s apartment at the Mayflower was just a street over from Vince’s, but these kinds of distances are enormous in war zones. You can really only run “safely” from one position to the next if it takes less than three seconds.

  Urban combat environments are much more dangerous than open battlefields. Combatants can conceal themselves on roofs, inside cars, behind dumpsters, and within apartments. Anyone can be shot at any moment from any direction. If you’re there and you’re a civilian, you damn well better act like a civilian.

  Do not carry a weapon. Do not carry anything that even looks like a weapon. If you’re driving a vehicle and you accelerate toward a checkpoint, you should expect to be shot.

  If all the other civilians have cleared off the street, get off the street, close your shutters, turn off your lights, and be quiet.

  Vince ran toward Captain’s Cabin.

  An SSNP militiaman carrying a rocket-propelled grenade launcher stopped him.

  “What are you doing in Lebanon!” the militiaman demanded.

  Vince put his hands up, apologized, and slunk back inside, but he still didn’t get it. He parted his curtains, opened his window, leaned out, and pointed his camera at the men with the guns.

  An SSNP fighter, possibly the same one who had just stopped him, fired a rocket-propelled grenade straight at his window. Vince saw it flying right at him and dived into the kitchen. The explosion vaporized his air conditioning unit, blew a hole in the exterior wall, and set everything in his apartment on fire.

  Nobody shot at Charles’s building. Somebody on the Mayflower’s staff seemed to have paid someone off or had the right connections. Both the hotel and apartment wings were untouchable. The Napoleon Hotel was likewise untouchable.

  Charles called the front desk.

  “Look,” the guy downstairs said. “Don’t worry. Really. Just don’t go anywhere. You’ll be perfectly fine if you stay here. Oh, and by the way, we have room service.”

  They had room service?

  Charles wasn’t hungry. He had already eaten at Rama’s, but he was thirsty. And while the hotel charged several dollars just for a small bottle of water, if there was ever a time to pay extra for Evian, this was it.

  The gunmen outside were aligned with Hezbollah, but they weren’t Hezbollah. That meant they were more dangerous. Hezbollah’s fighters missed entire Israeli cities with their wild Katyusha rockets, but they were crack shots with a rifle. They hit what they aimed at.

  Amal and SSNP militiamen were barely trained, angry young men who saw the current political crisis as their chance to reenact the civil war. They sprayed bullets all over the place. They fired at people, at storefronts, into the air, even into the Mediterranean. They shot up just about everything. Several of Charles’s friends, all of them noncombatants, said they found bullets on their balconies and inside their houses.

  He collapsed from sheer exhaustion around four in the morning and even managed to sleep for a couple of hours.

  During the July War he dreamed about politics, that he was a member of Lebanon’s parliament searching desperately for a diplomatic solution. This time he dreamed of himself in a vibrant city he loved that was about to be washed away by a biblically proportioned tsunami.

  Hamra was just one of West Beirut’s neighborhoods, and it was farthest from Hezbollah’s stronghold. It therefore made sense for local Amal and SSNP members to take over that one. Every neighborhood to the south was closer to the dahiyeh, and some were directly adjacent. Hezbollah could hit them as fast and as hard as the Israel Defense Forces could cross the border into South Lebanon. From the time the gunmen were given the “go” from the boss, they only needed minutes or even seconds to get into position.

  Advance teams burst from brand-new black SUVs and moved in perfectly executed formations. Witnesses saw two men in each squad carrying mint-condition AK-47s, one a rocket-propelled grenade launcher, another a sniper rifle, and the last a tripod-mounted machine gun.

  They stood out markedly from the ragtag gangs of kids shooting up Hamra.

  These men were professionals, and they looked it in their dark green shirts and black combat fatigues. They knew how to run, where to take cover, how to carry their weapons, how to aim and fire their weapons, and how to hit what they aimed at.

  “They weren’t just running down the street,” one witness told me. “They sent out scouts, and they knew how to take cover. They clearly knew how to handle their weapons, especially compared with the SSNP guys riding around on Honda scooters with their guns on their laps while talking on their cell phones. There’s no way Hezbollah would do that.”

  The journalist Nir Rosen secured permission to embed with Hezbollah fighters while they patrolled West Beirut. “It felt just like being on patrol with young American soldiers in Dora in December,” he said to counterinsurgency expert and former U.S. Army Captain Andrew Exum.8 “They operated that well, moved that well, and were as young as American soldiers on their first tour.”

  Saad Hariri’s Future TV station was near the top of their target list, and they brought engineers with them who knew exactly which lines to cut to disable the satellite feed. When they left the scene to shut down the Al-Mustaqbal, Al-Sharq, and Al-Shiraa newspapers, masked SSNP men firebombed the station with Molotov cocktails, burned it to the ground, and put up a poster of Syria’s Bashar al-Assad on the ruins.

  “I have learned,” Nasrallah said,9 “through experiences, that we should not say ‘the Siniora government.’ Siniora is a poor man, an employee. We should say ‘the government of Walid Jumblatt.’ When Jumblatt wants to remove the airport security chief, he does. This decision is a declaration of war by Jumblatt on the resistance and its arms for the benefit of the U.S. This decision has uncovered the truth behind this team and their loyalties and behavior during the July War.”

  “This is a characteristic of totalitarian parties,” Jumblatt said in response.10 “You are either under their command or a traitor.”

  “Any hand that reaches for the resistance and its arms will be cut off,” Nasrallah continued.11 “Israel tried that in the July War, and we cut its hand off. We do not advise you to try us. Whoever is going to target us will be targeted by us. Whoever is going to shoot at us will be shot by us.”

  Samir Geagea, leader of the Lebanese Forces party, was furious that he and his men had surrendered their weapons at the end of the civil war while Hezbollah had not. The resistance, he said,12 “uses revolutionary means of violence and fire, which turns Hezbollah into another Mahdi Army in the streets and alleys of Beirut.”
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br />   Of course, Hezbollah wasn’t the only militia on the rampage in Beirut at the time, but Amal and the SSNP could never get away with shooting up the capital without Hezbollah’s protection and blessing. In return, Amal and the SSNP gave Hezbollah political cover by soaking up some of the blame.

  SSNP spokesperson Maan Hamieh spun it the best he could.13 “The coordination between the SSNP and Hezbollah is very spontaneous and on the ground,” he said. “It does not need an operation center.” He admitted, though, that his party shared Hezbollah’s goals, and that his own men were really just helping. “Hezbollah has a significant role in this. It is like a compass for everyone.”

  After shutting down West Beirut’s media, Hezbollah hit Saad Hariri’s house in Qoreitem just south of Hamra. Gunmen fired an RPG at the gate and broke into the complex. Hariri’s bodyguards from the Secure Plus company were no match for an Iranian-trained revolutionary militia, and they scattered when Hezbollah shot at everything in front of the house and seized control of the entrance and exit.

  Hamra, Qoreitem, Verdun, and other parts of northwestern Beirut fell almost at once. The resistance met precious little resistance in those “bourgeois” middle-class neighborhoods full of college students, shoppers, and tourists. Farther south, however, in gritty working-class Sunni areas nearer the dahiyeh, Hezbollah found itself with a fight on its hands—especially in Tariq Jedideh.

  Tariq Jedideh was the kind of place Humphrey Bogart’s character Rick Blaine in Casablanca warned a Nazi officer about when he said, “There are certain sections of New York, Major, that I wouldn’t advise you to try to invade.”

  There were more firearms than people in Lebanon, even in the most progressive of areas. Almost every family in the country had at least one rifle stored in a closet somewhere. They knew from bitter experience that their neighborhood could be attacked at any time while impotent state security forces cringed and stepped out of the way.

  Hezbollah couldn’t take Tariq Jedideh. Nasrallah may have even regretted that he tried. Hariri told the neighborhood’s residents to stand down, but instead they threw everything they had at their attackers and either killed or repulsed every last one of them. They were furious that Hariri ordered them not to fight back, especially after proving they were up to the job.

  This meant two things.

  First, Hezbollah was secure in its strongholds but vulnerable when it stepped outside. Nasrallah may have been stronger than everyone else, but he was not strong enough that he could easily conquer and rule the whole country.

  Meanwhile, moderate Sunnis like Siniora and Hariri would have to become war leaders if the conflict continued, or they would risk being swept aside as irrelevant.

  Lebanon’s first civil war was a short one. Sunni Arab Nationalists in thrall to Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser hoped to attach Lebanon to the United Arab Republic, a brief union of Egypt and Syria. A larger bloc of Maronite Christians resisted, and President Camille Chamoun even tried to rig an election. A nation cannot hold itself together when a third of its population wishes to be annexed by another.

  The second civil war was a long one. This time, Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization formed a state within a state in West Beirut and South Lebanon and used it as a launching pad for terrorist attacks against Israel. Again, Lebanon’s Christians resisted, as did Lebanon’s Shias. The second civil war was actually a series of wars triggered by that first fatal schism.

  This conflict resembled both the first and the second. With Iranian money and weapons, Hezbollah built its own state within a state in South Lebanon and the suburbs south of Beirut and used it as a base to wage war against Israel. Hezbollah also wished to violently yank Lebanon from its pro-Western and pro-Arab alignment into what Lee Smith began calling the Iranian-led Resistance Bloc, an agenda roughly a third of the population supported.

  No country on earth can withstand that kind of geopolitical tectonic pressure.

  Hezbollah may not have overthrown the government outright, but the invasion of Beirut was still a coup d’état. It was, literally, a blow against the state.

  “The Hezbollah rampage in Lebanon,” Noah Pollak wrote in Commentary,14 “should make it obvious to any sentient observer that Hezbollah’s claims to democratic political legitimacy have always been intended only to manipulate the credulous. Participation in politics requires the willingness to persuade your foes, to compromise, to stand down when you don’t get your way. But there is no record of Hamas or Hezbollah ever observing such restrictions: the moment Hezbollah was confronted with political pressure, it responded not within the political sphere, but with warlordism. . . . In the streets of Beirut, with Kalashnikovs and RPGs, Hezbollah is making it abundantly clear that its participation in Lebanese politics ends when Hezbollah is asked to submit to the state’s authority.”

  Until May of 2008, Hezbollah existed both inside and alongside the state. After attacking Beirut, Hezbollah showed the Lebanese that it existed above the state, the parliament, the police, and the army. No members of Hezbollah or its affiliates were arrested or prosecuted for murder, arson, or terrorism as they would have been in any other country in the Middle East, including Syria, Iran, and Iraq.

  The army was too weak to protect the country from external threats and too divided to protect the country from internal threats. The previous summer it could barely win a fight against a few hundred foreigners it had completely surrounded in a refugee camp.

  Americans at the time were training and equipping Iraq’s army to protect the government in Baghdad from Syrian- and Iraniansponsored terrorist groups, but al-Assad’s regime had sabotaged Lebanon’s armed forces for more than a decade and staffed it at the highest levels with Damascus loyalists who had yet to be purged. Not every officer, though, was corrupt. Brigadier General Ghassan Balaa and forty of his fellow officers sent resignation letters to army commander General Michel Suleiman to protest, as they put it,15 “the way the military handled the latest violence.”

  “What has happened in the streets of Lebanon,” Suleiman said,16 “is a real civil war that no national army in the world can confront. Major states encountered such wars and its armies could not contain the fight.” On the contrary, he said, the armies “disintegrated” just as Lebanon’s did under similar circumstances in the late 1970s.

  He rejected his officers’ resignations.

  The restrained rhetoric Lebanese citizens were accustomed to hearing from most of their leaders, along with the erstwhile prevailing mentality of precarious coexistence, all but evaporated.

  “Hezbollah has gained control over Beirut,” Member of Parliament Ahmad Fatfat said,17 “and has caused a Sunni-Shia conflict that will be extended for years.”

  “If no compromise is reached, we will be facing a long internal war,” said Suleiman Franjieh,18 former member of parliament and leader of the small Marada movement in Northern Lebanon aligned with Hezbollah and the Syrians.

  No sect was allowed by law or social contract to bully or rule the others. The system, when it worked, provided uniquely Lebanese checks and balances. Hezbollah overthrew it. And when the system was overthrown, as it had been in the past, some Lebanese in every sectarian community were willing and able to fight as viciously as the militias and death squads in Fallujah and Baghdad. That may have been the only reason Hezbollah didn’t storm the Grand Serail, the Ottoman-era military headquarters where Prime Minister Fouad Siniora kept his office.

  The SSNP, though, was pissing in corners all over Hamra. They flew their spinning red swastika flag all along the main shopping street and threatened to kill anyone who dared take it down.

  Meanwhile, fighting exploded in Tripoli, a more conservative city than Beirut and the stronghold for Lebanon’s small but fiercely committed Sunni Islamist community. Clashes had been breaking out once in a while between Sunni and Alawite gangs, but now entire neighborhoods were at war with each other.

  A few local SSNP gunmen joined in and learned the hardest way imaginable that
the Sunnis of the north were not like the Sunnis of Hamra. An armed gang loyal to the government chased an SSNP squad into their local headquarters, surrounded them, charged inside, shot them, dragged them outside, and mutilated their bodies with axes.

  Most Sunnis did what Saad Hariri told them to do and stood down even though they felt humiliated. Nobody, however, expected them to sit still for long while being attacked. The violent counter-resistance in Tripoli and Tariq Jedideh saw to that.

  Sunnis in the rest of the Middle East wouldn’t sit idly by for long either.

  “As the Christians learned to their detriment during the 1975-1990 war,” Michael Young wrote,19 “fighting the Sunni community in Lebanon is tantamount to fighting the Arab world. The Northern Islamists have been awakened, and with them Sunni Islamists everywhere in the region and beyond who will rally to do battle against the [Shia] apostate.”

  “In the eyes of many Lebanese,” Andrew Exum wrote,20 “the resistance is now an occupying power. How will Hezbollah—which has in the past divided the world into the oppressors and the oppressed—adjust to the ugly new reality where they are seen as the former?”

  Hezbollah, though, was a guerrilla army, not an occupation force. Counterinsurgency was not in its toolbox. Nasrallah would find himself with a deadly serious problem if he tried to emulate Hamas in Gaza and violently seize the whole country. A popular Sunni blogger named Mustapha bluntly wrote what everyone must have been thinking on his website, The Beirut Spring.21 “Expect the fight for Beirut to begin in earnest later,” he wrote, “with the distinct trademark of an occupied population: Hit and run.”

  “Unleashing the sectarian monster can seem like a good idea to Islamists allied with the Future Movement and to the Saudis,” he continued,22 “but they had better think twice before letting that genie out of the bottle. . . . Before we know it, extreme elements can manipulate the sense of victimhood some Sunnis would have and target Shia symbols with terrorist operations that would unleash the same god-forsaken death spiral that exists in Iraq. We don’t have to go through what Iraq has suffered to realize that al Qaeda is not really what the Sunnis want for their protection.”