Warriors of God

by Nicholas Blanford

  The swords, lances, and flintlock muskets wielded by Nasser’s troops may have been replaced with automatic rifles, missiles, and roadside bombs, but the same fierce instinct that motivated Nasser’s warriors to defend their land against external aggression would reappear in future generations of young Lebanese Shias who took up arms to confront the predations and humiliations of Israeli occupation. The sudden phenomenon of Shia militancy in late twentieth-century Lebanon initially took many foreign observers by surprise. Little attention had been devoted to the community before interest was kindled by the Islamic revolution in Iran in 1979, an event that shook the Middle East and helped radicalize the Shias of Lebanon. Yet, although the historical link should not be overstated, the tenacious guerrilla campaigns waged by Amal and then Hezbollah in south Lebanon beginning in the 1980s did not emerge from a vacuum but were drawn, in part, from the same cultural wellspring of defiance and dignity that had sustained Nassif Nasser’s military adventures two hundred years earlier.

  The “Belt of Misery”

  Ahmad Pasha’s campaign of suppression destroyed the primacy of Jabal Amil as a center of Shia teaching, a mauling from which it would never recover. It also ended the autonomy the Shia population had enjoyed under the former Ottoman administration, and in the following decades, Jabal Amil regressed into obscurity. Indeed, European travelers passing through the area in the latter half of the nineteenth century could barely hide their contempt for the squalor and poverty of the hill villages and for the apparent apathy and sullenness of the natives they found there. One wrote that “they are all in rags, except some of the Sheikhs, and all are mendicants.… The filth is revolting.”7

  Another English traveler, clearly unfamiliar with the Shias, observed that their abhorrence of other sects echoed that of the “Israelites” of Palestine and bizarrely concluded that “they may be an apostate body of Jews.”8

  The fortunes of the Shia community were not much improved by the transition from Ottoman colonial rule to the French mandatory authority at the end of World War I. The state of Greater Lebanon was established in 1920 and its borders delineated over the next three years. The residents of Jabal Amil had become Lebanese citizens, and their Arab neighbors to the south were now Palestinians under a British mandate, with a new frontier separating what had been a generally homogenous society.

  Even after Lebanon gained independence from France in 1943, the Shia population, despite its size relative to that of other sects, found itself underrepresented in the new power-sharing system of government. Essentially a compromise between Sunnis and Maronites, the National Pact allocated positions based on a 1932 census—the last ever held in Lebanon—that was of questionable accuracy when conducted and was certainly out of date eleven years later. The Maronites, the largest sect at the time, gained most of the top political and security posts, including the presidency and the command of the Lebanese army.

  In its early years of independence, Lebanon experienced a services-oriented boom period, profiting from its fortuitous geographic position between the West and the newly emerging oil-rich Gulf. But the nation’s increasing prosperity during this period mainly benefited an oligarchy of powerful political families that monopolized the commercial and financial sectors and dominated the politics of the country. The revenues of the boom were spent mostly in Beirut and parts of Christiandominated Mount Lebanon. The peripheral areas in the north, and the Shia-populated Bekaa Valley and south, were left to stagnate. In 1943, there was not a single hospital in south Lebanon.

  The lure of booming Beirut—where earnings in the 1950s were five times higher than in the peripheral regions—encouraged tens of thousands of Shias to abandon their farms and villages and seek fresh opportunities in the city. Most of them settled in the southern quarters of Beirut, cramming into dense and unsanitary neighborhoods. Here they labored on building sites, helping construct the new concrete high-rise buildings that were rapidly changing Beirut’s skyline. By 1971, nearly half of Lebanon’s Shias were living in southern Beirut, a “Belt of Misery” that formed a third distinct area of Shia habitation along with the Bekaa and the south.

  The Shias were poorly represented by their powerful landlords, who exerted a feudalistic hold on their subjects by dispensing ad hoc patronage in exchange for unquestioning loyalty at election time.

  Given the lack of political representation and the poor social conditions, the teeming slums of southern Beirut proved a fertile ground for the growth of the leftist pan-Arab ideologies that shook the Middle East in the 1950s. Young Shias, raised in the feudal atmosphere of Jabal Amil and the impoverished Bekaa, found themselves drawn to the secular parties of the left, with their goals of disrupting the existing order and promoting social equality.

  “It Was as If He Was Jesus Christ”

  It was into this budding Shia social and political ferment that Musa Sadr arrived in 1959 at the age of thirty-one. Sadr had first visited Lebanon four years earlier as a guest of Sayyed Abdel Hussein Sharafeddine, a relative and the aged mufti of Tyre, the most eminent Shia authority in Lebanon at the time. Sharafeddine, who was much impressed with the tall, charming Iranian, overlooked Sadr’s youth, inexperience, and lack of knowledge of Lebanon to nominate him as his chosen successor.

  Based in Tyre, Sadr quickly integrated himself within the local community, preaching at the Abbas Sharafeddine mosque each Friday and meeting with leading figures in the city.

  “At the beginning, nobody knew who he was,” recalls Abdullah Yazbek, at the time a local businessman who later became an aide to Sadr. “I used to pray with other religious sayyeds,9 but I thought the message was always the same. Then I began praying with Sayyed Sadr, and suddenly I was hearing new things about religion and economics and social reforms, things I had never heard before.”

  Helped by some state funds and access to religious donations, Sadr embarked upon a program of social activism. One of his first acts was to abolish begging in Tyre. He reorganized and expanded a small local charity and founded an institute for Islamic studies and several vocational centers in Tyre. His flagship project in those early years was the Jabal Amil Institute, located in Bourj Shemali, just outside Tyre. The institute continues to run today under the leadership of Sadr’s sister, Rabab. In Beirut, he opened orphanages and a hospital.

  With his Persian-accented Arabic, striking physical appearance, and enormous energy, Sadr soon attracted the interest and support of the Shia middle class. Sadr represented an alternative path to the ossified feudal barons and the alarming revolutionaries of the left, one that combined communal awareness, progress, and reform.

  He worked hard to heighten a sense of communal identity among the geographically isolated Shias, traveling with unflagging energy from one end of the country to the other. Although the focus of his work was on the betterment of Lebanon’s Shias, Sadr also reached out to other communities and—to the initial outrage of the more conservative members of the Shia clerical establishment, known as the ulama—regularly preached in churches. On one occasion, Sadr was due to deliver a sermon in Alma Shaab, a Maronite village on the Israeli border, but found the road blocked by the huge crowd that had arrived to hear him speak. He and his aide Abdullah Yazbek were forced to leave their car and walk through fields of tobacco to reach the church.

  “We arrived at the church thirty minutes late and the people had grown anxious,” Yazbek recalls. “But the moment he arrived and stood on the pulpit where all could see him, the people lost control. They were Christians, but they were yelling ‘Allah u-Akbar’ like Muslims. The way people treated him, it was as if he was Jesus Christ. Christians used to tell me how lucky we were to have someone like this.”

  Sadr’s popularity provoked the enmity of the entrenched feudal barons, who recognized that this dynamic cleric represented a threat to their stranglehold on the Shia community. Sadr sought to undermine their influence by lobbying for the creation of the Higher Shia Council, which was established in 1967 as the principal representative o
rgan for Lebanese Shias. The following year, he formed the Harakat al-Mahrummin, the Movement of the Deprived, which would become his main vehicle for civil and social activism on behalf of the poorest members of society. Although it was formed as a nonsectarian organization—its deputy was a Christian bishop—for all practical purposes it was the first large-scale Shia political and social organization in Lebanon.

  The Rise of the Fedayeen

  In the second half of the 1960s, Sadr found that his efforts to politically and socially mobilize the Shia community were becoming complicated by the emergence of Palestinian militants in south Lebanon and with it the initial sparks of a cross-border conflict with Israel.

  Lebanon, like Israel’s other Arab neighbors, had reluctantly absorbed large numbers of Palestinian refugees during the Arab-Israeli war that followed the creation of the Jewish state in 1948. By the late 1950s, Palestinian factions espousing armed resistance against Israel were beginning to emerge. The most important of these early Palestinian factions was Fatah, led by a young engineer called Yasser Arafat. Fatah’s initial military operations—the first from Lebanon was in June 1965—were low-key, sporadic, and often unsuccessful. But that changed in the wake of the June 1967 war, when Israel launched surprise attacks against Egypt, Syria, and Jordan. By the time a cease-fire was signed six days later, Israel had captured the Gaza Strip and Sinai peninsula from Egypt, the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) from Jordan, and the Golan Heights from Syria, tripling the size of the Jewish state in just six days.

  Lebanon was spared direct involvement in the war, but Israel’s swift seizure of the Golan Heights from Syria was to have future implications for Lebanese territorial sovereignty and regional security. While Israeli forces pushed eastward deeper into Syrian territory, their land grab in the northern Golan was checked by the border with Lebanon. However, the Israelis discovered that there was some ambiguity over exactly where Syria ended and Lebanon began, thanks to the laxity with which the French mandatory authorities had delineated the joint border.

  One small hamlet called Ghajar, lying on a grassy plain between the Hasbani River and the jagged limestone foothills of Mount Hermon, was populated by members of the Alawite sect, an obscure offshoot of Shiism. The Israelis stopped just short of the village because, according to their maps, Ghajar was in Lebanon. But the residents of Ghajar considered themselves Syrian. One group of villagers approached the Israelis asking to be taken into Israel’s newly seized territory, while another delegation asked the Lebanese authorities to formally incorporate their village. The Lebanese refused and, after some hesitation, the Israelis accepted the offer and troops deployed into Ghajar.

  The Israelis faced similar territorial uncertainty just to the east of Ghajar, where the volcanic plateau of the Golan buckles and folds into the pale gray limestone foothills of Mount Hermon. Cutting through these hills is a deep brush-covered ravine called Wadi al-Aasal, the Valley of Honey. In 1967, the terrain on the northern side of the valley contained some fourteen farmsteads populated mainly by Lebanese residents of Shebaa and Kfar Shuba villages. The area today is collectively known as the Shebaa Farms and Kfar Shuba Heights. During the mild summer months, the villagers farmed the flatter reaches of the valley’s upper slopes, growing wheat and lentils and grazing sheep, cattle, and goats. During the cold winters, most of the farmsteads were abandoned as their occupants descended to warmer climes in the valleys below.

  Having seized Ghajar, the Israelis moved east into the adjacent hills, overrunning the farmsteads on the lower slopes of the Shebaa Farms area. The residents fled to Shebaa and Kfar Shuba or to other farms higher up the mountainside.

  Fatahland

  With the armies of the Arab world defeated and disgraced by Israel in the 1967 war, the nascent Palestinian armed movement gained traction. In October 1968, fighters belonging to the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) began moving out of the refugee camps and establishing military bases in south Lebanon close to the border with Israel.

  The Lebanese government watched this post-1967-war buildup with apprehension. Even before Palestinian raids from Lebanon had begun in earnest, Israel gave the Lebanese a foretaste of what they could expect if the Palestinians were not kept in check. On December 26, helicopter-borne Israeli commandos landed at Beirut airport and blew up thirteen aircraft, including eight airliners belonging to Middle East Airlines, Lebanon’s flag carrier. The subsequent public protests in Lebanon forced the resignation of the government.

  In April and October 1969, violent clashes erupted between the Lebanese army and the PLO in south Lebanon, quickly spreading to the streets of Lebanese cities. The actions of the Palestinians were seriously aggravating the strains of communal power sharing between the entrenched, predominantly Maronite ruling elite and the mainly Muslim and leftist groups. The former resented the growing power of the PLO and its potential to upset the status quo, while the latter viewed the Palestinians as useful allies in the struggle for greater representation.

  A set of understandings known as the “Cairo Accords” was reached in October 1968 between the Lebanese state and the PLO, permitting the Palestinians the right to participate in the armed struggle against Israel “in accordance with the principles of the sovereignty and security of Lebanon.” The fact that the interests of the Lebanese state were incompatible with the right of the Palestinians to armed struggle was left unaddressed.

  The beginning of 1970 marked an increase in Palestinian attacks against Israel, which inevitably provoked harsh retaliation. In July, the Israelis moved to occupy the entire Shebaa Farms mountainside, from where Palestinian spotters had directed artillery bombardments against the plain of northern Galilee far below. Israeli engineers bulldozed supply roads into the hillside and built military outposts on the rocky bluffs overlooking Kfar Shuba and Shebaa. The last farmers and shepherds who had stubbornly resisted the harassment of Israeli troops were forced to leave. The new hilltop positions afforded the Israelis commanding views over much of southeast Lebanon.

  By 1974, barely a day went by without south Lebanon’s experiencing Israeli troop incursions, artillery shelling, or air strikes. The United Nations had, at Lebanon’s request, established three observation posts along the border in 1972. But the unarmed UN observers could only log the transgressions of the Palestinians and Israelis and write post-facto reports on damages and casualties on the Lebanese side of the border; they had no mandate to intervene.

  After a Palestinian cross-border commando raid in May, the Israeli government decided to seal off the Lebanon frontier by constructing a nine-foot-high electrified fence, fitted with motion detectors, alongside coils of razor wire and a parallel “smudge trail,” a dirt track to record the footprints of infiltrators. Military observation posts were established at regular intervals along the border; undergrowth was cleared and mines planted on the Lebanese side of the fence. Searchlights and flares were used for nighttime detection. The Israelis also stepped up interdiction and observation patrols inside Lebanon. Tanks accompanied by troops during daylight hours crossed the border and took up positions with commanding views of the terrain to the north. The Lebanese government issued some formal complaints to the UN, but the army was instructed not to intervene.

  Israel’s policy of deliberately inflicting punishment on the southern Lebanese was intended to compel the Lebanese authorities to take action against the PLO themselves. But Lebanon was small, weak, and polarized between rival sectarian and ideological allegiances and social disparity. The Lebanese state could not reach consensus on what to do with the PLO, which left the southerners at the mercy of the martial whims of the Palestinians and Israelis.

  The Lebanese Resistance Battalions

  Musa Sadr urged the Lebanese state to redress the plight of the southern Lebanese, but to little effect. As an Iranian trying to make headway in an Arab environment, he found it expedient to publicly and repeatedly declare his antipathy toward Israel and his support for the right of the Palestinians to win back
their homeland. Yet despite his declarations and genuine feelings of sympathy for the Palestinians, Sadr could see that the actions of the PLO were bringing ruin and misery to his constituents in south Lebanon. He found it increasingly difficult to reconcile his sympathies for the stateless Palestinians with the reckless behavior of the PLO in the south.

  In early 1974, Sadr lost patience with the apathy and impotence of the Lebanese government and took matters into his own hands, advocating, for the first time, armed struggle as a means of defending the southerners and advancing the rights of the dispossessed. It was an unlikely departure for the mild-mannered cleric who once confided to a colleague that until he arrived in Lebanon, he had never heard a shot fired in anger. But Sadr recognized that if he was to remain relevant, he would have to adopt a more muscular approach.

  He set the tone at the mass rally in the Bekaa Valley village of Bidnayil in February, telling his followers that there was “no alternative for us except revolution and weapons.” The Bidnayil speech was followed a month later by the huge event in Baalbek, where he controversially declared that “armaments are the adornment of men.” It was here that Sadr told the Shia clans of the Bekaa to stop feuding and join a new force he would establish to defend the south against Israel. Baalbek was followed by another mass rally in Tyre. The rallies helped crystallize the Movement of the Deprived in the public consciousness. Although the movement had been founded some seven years earlier, it had not been particularly well organized and only became truly relevant beginning in 1974.

  Following those rallies, Sadr began recruiting volunteer fighters for a new group that would operate as the military wing of the Movement of the Deprived, tasked with defending the south against the Israelis. He named it Afwaj Muqawama al-Lubnaniyya—the Lebanese Resistance Battalions—better known by its Arabic acronym, Amal, which means “hope.”