Warriors of God

by Nicholas Blanford

  “Imam Musa began visiting universities in 1974 and 1975 and asked students to join Amal,” recalls Aql Hamiyah, who at the time was a student follower of Sadr. “The Shia intellectuals developed relations with Imam Musa and he persuaded them to be part of the struggle with the Palestinians. It was not easy, however, because relations between the Shias and the Palestinians were bad at the time.”

  Sadr and Yasser Arafat agreed that Fatah would help train the recruits at newly established Amal camps in the eastern Bekaa, a move intended to enhance relations between the Shias and the Palestinians as much as to provide military instruction to the new Amal cadres. The formation of Amal and the training by Fatah were conducted in secrecy. Sadr, after all, had crafted an image of peace and tolerance, which stood to be discredited if it emerged that he, like other political bosses in Lebanon, was in the game of militia building.

  Fate forced his hand, however. In April 1975 the communal tensions in Lebanon finally erupted into civil war. Three months later, at the beginning of July, a Fatah instructor accidentally detonated an antitank mine he was handling at an Amal training camp in Ain Boulay in the hills east of Baalbek. Nearly thirty Amal recruits were killed in the explosion and dozens more wounded. Sadr, who had just ended a well-publicized hunger strike in a Beirut mosque to protest the civil war, was compelled to admit that he had established a militia. Although he insisted that Amal’s purpose was to defend the south against Israel, the revelation that he was now head of a Lebanese militia made his public fast against the civil war seem hypocritical. The episode marked the beginning of a decline in Sadr’s status and influence, his social activism overwhelmed by the grim realities of war.

  “We Were Pushed into Israel’s Arms”

  South Lebanon, meanwhile, had been spared the initial horrors of the civil war raging farther north. The bulk of the PLO had deployed to the north to fight on the front lines in Beirut. However, the tentacles of war extended southward in January 1976, when a split in the army saw units deserting to join militias or leaderless soldiers simply going home.

  Despite his wariness at becoming sucked into Lebanon’s fractious, complex, and treacherous political landscape, Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli prime minister, gave his blessing to offering both humanitarian assistance to the Christians of southern border villages that found themselves besieged by the PLO and their Lebanese militia allies, and material support for the Christian militias farther north. Israel, Rabin explained, would help the Lebanese Christians help themselves.

  A formal border crossing was constructed next to an Israeli army post on the western side of Metulla, Israel’s most northerly town. A small open-air clinic was established in a nearby apple orchard, providing free medical aid to Lebanese. Soon Lebanese farmers began crossing the border to sell their produce to Israeli merchants, and others found work in factories, supermarkets, and hotels.

  Shimon Peres, the Israeli defense minister, gave his full backing to the budding relations with the Christians of south Lebanon, formally announcing his “Good Fence” policy in June.

  The southern Christians were under no illusions about the risks of cooperating with the Israelis, but besieged by the PLO and cut off from Beirut, they felt they had no choice. “Why do you think we would break down the wall and go to Israel?” asked Father Mansour Hokayem, the Maronite priest of Qlaya, the first village to build ties with Israel. “We had a thousand shells raining on us. We had many casualties and they had to go to Israel. There was no escape for us.… We were pushed into Israel’s arms.”

  Inevitably, the cooperation soon moved from humanitarian relief to military support. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) secretly lent assistance to the building of a local border militia centered on the redundant Lebanese army regulars and enlarged with local youths from Christian villages. Some of the newly recruited militiamen wore olive-green Israeli army uniforms (with the Hebrew patches scribbled over with ink) and carried Israeli rifles. The Israelis set up a liaison unit in Metulla and handed over to their new Lebanese allies some thirty World War II–vintage Sherman tanks, light mortars, heavy machine guns, radio equipment, and old Soviet armored personnel carriers (APCs)—each emblazoned with the militia’s signature white cross. Israeli troops, who had maintained a presence just inside the Lebanese border for the previous two years, began patrolling deeper into Lebanon.

  Neighboring Syria, meanwhile, was keeping a close eye on the burgeoning relationship between Israel and the Christians of Lebanon. Hafez al-Assad, the Syrian president, feared that Israel would intervene in Lebanon to protect the Christians if it appeared their militias were on the verge of defeat. An Israeli intervention would grant the Jewish state a toehold in Lebanon and represent a threat to Damascus’s western flank, a development Assad was determined to thwart.

  Assad’s concerns appeared close to being realized in early 1976 as the Christian militias lost ground to the PLO and its Lebanese allies. When Kamal Jumblatt, the leader of the leftist National Movement, stubbornly refused Syria’s request to ease his assault on the Christians, Assad abruptly switched sides and sent his army into Lebanon. The Israelis relished the irony of their Syrian enemies’ smashing the PLO in Lebanon, but insisted that Syrian troops must not venture south of a “red line” that, although left undefined, effectively included all of south Lebanon.

  By October, the Lebanese leftists and the PLO were defeated, leaving Syria holding the balance of power in Lebanon at the head of a thirty-thousand-strong Arab Deterrent Force sanctioned by the Arab League.

  In an attempt to restore some order to the south, the Lebanese army command in Beirut instructed Major Saad Haddad, a resident of the southern town of Marjayoun, to bring the army remnants and Israeli-backed militia under his control. The loss of state authority in Lebanon placed the army in the awkward position of having to tacitly cooperate with the Israelis in controlling south Lebanon. The only safe route open to Haddad to reach his new command was by sea, on an Israeli missile boat from Jouniyah in the Christian heartland north of Beirut to Haifa in northern Israel. In the months ahead, Haddad found himself in the curious position of reporting to the Lebanese army command in Beirut and continuing to draw his army salary from the Lebanese government (as did other members of the Israeli-supported militia) while cooperating with, and taking orders from, the IDF.

  In early 1977, at the prodding of his Israeli handlers, Haddad launched a halfhearted offensive to expand his area of control around Marjayoun and Qlaya with the ultimate goal of uniting all the Christian village enclaves along the border to form a homogenous security belt. While the rest of Lebanon enjoyed a welcome period of calm under the Pax Syriana, a scrappy war developed in the south, with Haddad’s militia attacking neighboring Shia villages and then more often than not being forced to retreat during counterattacks by the PLO and the leftists. Both sides shelled each other remorselessly, and the flow of civilian casualties kept the Israeli medics along the “Good Fence” busy.

  A Dynamic Islam

  Musa Sadr’s campaigning may have been the most public attempt to mobilize Lebanon’s dispossessed Shia population, but it was not the only dynamic effecting the community. Another, quieter form of religious activism emerged in Lebanon during the 1970s, the roots of which lay not in the rocky hills and valleys of south Lebanon, but far to the east in the blazing desert heat of southern Iraq.

  The holy city of Najaf is the primary center of learning and theology for the Shia faithful and the seat of the leading maraji’, or Grand Ayatollahs. Hundreds of students arrive each year to enroll in religious seminaries, or hawza, tucked away in the warrenlike alleyways that surround the gold-domed mausoleum marking the burial place of Imam Ali ibn Abi Talib, the Prophet Mohammed’s son-in-law and the first Caliph recognized by the Shias.

  Najaf was the birthplace of Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, the son of a respected ayatollah originally from south Lebanon. Fadlallah would later serve as a source of inspiration for the nascent Hezbollah and its leadership and would become the lead
ing Shia authority in Lebanon. Born in 1935, the young Fadlallah was raised in the rarified atmosphere of Najaf and steeped in religion and piety from childhood. A gifted student, by the age of thirteen he was winning acclaim for his poetry and writings in numerous cultural magazines circulating in the Arab world.

  As he continued his religious studies in his young adulthood, his worldview was shaped by the political turbulence that roiled Iraq in the late 1950s. Much as Musa Sadr had attempted in Lebanon to check the penetration of Shia society by secular Arab nationalist movements, Fadlallah and some of his clerical contemporaries in Najaf recognized the challenge to religious observance posed by the growing influence of the Communists and the Arab nationalist Baath Party in Iraq.

  Beginning in 1958, Fadlallah became closely involved with the newly formed Hizb al-Dawa al-Islamiyya, the Party of the Islamic Call, which espoused a revolutionary Islamist agenda and whose leading activist was a close friend of Fadlallah, Sayyed Mohammed Baqr as-Sadr. The Dawa Party sought to promote Islam and Islamic values as a counterweight to secularism and leftist ideologies with the eventual goal of establishing an Islamic state in Iraq.

  Although Fadlallah claimed never to have occupied a formal position in Dawa, he was a leading proponent of its beliefs, of what he dubbed a “dynamic Islam.” He developed his ideas in the early 1960s, industriously writing monographs while continuing his studies and teaching.

  In 1966, Fadlallah left Najaf for Lebanon, a country he had visited only a handful of times. Settling in the Nabaa district of east Beirut, a poor neighborhood populated by Shia emigrants from the south and Palestinian refugees, Fadlallah was invited by a local businessman to helm a social and cultural organization called Usrat al-Taakhi, the Family of Fraternity. He then opened a prayer hall and a husseiniyah, a religious meeting place for Shia men, and began lecturing and preaching to the young in an effort to dampen enthusiasm for the leftist creeds of the secular political parties then taking hold among Shia youth. Fadlallah additionally established Al-Mahad al-Sharia al-Islami, the Islamic Legal Institute, then a unique institution in Lebanon for advanced religious studies modeled on the seminaries of Najaf.

  Fadlallah quickly built a reputation as a charismatic orator whose vision of a contemporary universal Islam won adherents not only among the ill-educated poor of Nabaa but also among students at secular universities. In 1966, Fadlallah founded Al-Ittihad al-Lubnani lil Talabah al-Muslimeen, the Lebanese Union of Muslim Students, as a vehicle to steer educated youths onto a path where they could practice a progressive Islam while still pursuing careers in the modern secular world. Future leaders of Hezbollah were among the early admirers of Fadlallah, among them Sheikh Ragheb Harb, a tough firebrand cleric who studied in Najaf before taking up the position of mosque imam in his home village of Jibsheet in south Lebanon.

  During the late 1960s and early 1970s, Fadlallah and Imam Musa Sadr were the two most active and dynamic Shia religious figures in Lebanon. Both were brilliant orators and supported the Palestinian cause; but there the similarities ended. Musa Sadr was slim, tall, and charismatic, possessing star quality enlivened with boundless energy that saw him always on the move, holding meetings and giving lectures and sermons up and down the country. Fadlallah was short and portly, a scholarly figure who centered his activities on his Nabaa neighborhood. Sadr won followers by weaving into his discourse Shia imagery of Karbala and the examples of Imams Ali and Hussein. Fadlallah was more ecumenical in outlook, glossing over doctrinal differences between Shias and Sunnis and emphasizing the unity of all Muslims. Sadr’s purview was essentially limited to the communal betterment of Shias in Lebanon within the Lebanese system, while Fadlallah advocated the creation of a modern Islamic state and espoused a universal Islam that shunned man-made frontiers. While Sadr came to regard Palestinian actions in south Lebanon with misgivings, Fadlallah displayed no such hesitancy, wholeheartedly embracing the Palestinian cause and regarding the eradication of the Zionist state as a moral and Islamic imperative.

  Among those regularly attending Fadlallah’s lectures at the Usrat al-Taakhi mosque in Nabaa in the mid-1970s was a slim, earnest-looking boy in his midteens. His name was Imad Mughniyah. In the years ahead, Mughniyah would achieve international notoriety as the elusive, cunning, and resolute military commander of Hezbollah and alleged architect of large-scale suicide bomb attacks against Western targets and kidnappings of foreigners in the war-ravaged Lebanon of the 1980s. Born in 1962, Mughniyah was raised in the slums of Beirut’s southern suburbs, although his family was from Teir Dibna, a small village in the hills east of Tyre. Little is known of his childhood, but friends recall that he was a natural leader, devout from a young age and a devoted admirer of Fadlallah and supporter of the Palestinian cause. Friends and acquaintances variously described Mughniyah as “very smart,” “always alert,” someone who “never slept” and who possessed a good sense of humor and “joked a lot.”

  In 1976, he and a group of friends arrived at a small Fatah training camp near Damour, a Christian village on the coastal highway south of Beirut whose residents had been massacred and driven out by Palestinian and leftist militias that January. The camp was run by Anis Naqqash, by then a legendary figure within PLO circles. Today, his ginger hair and beard having turned steely gray, the affable fifty-nine-year-old looks more like a retired university professor than a onetime revolutionary. A Sunni Muslim from Beirut, Naqqash joined Fatah in 1968 and was a confederate of Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, better known as Carlos the Jackal. He was a member of the team that boldly kidnapped a group of OPEC oil ministers meeting in Vienna in 1975.

  After Damour fell to the PLO, Naqqash set up a small military training camp to teach basic weapons skills and tactics over a twenty-day period to a diverse array of small factions and individuals. “Imad Mughniyah came up to me and said that he and his friends were an Islamist group that wanted to be trained militarily but did not want to join Fatah,” Naqqash recalls. “Most of them were very young, just seventeen or eighteen years old. Imad stood out from the others because while everyone was looking forward to the end of the course when they would get to fire guns, Imad was more interested in learning about tactics. He was the only one, apart from a teacher and a Maoist, who wrote down notes during the course. He was not interested in shooting guns like the others.”

  Naqqash drilled into his militant students the necessity of strategic and tactical planning. For resistance to be effective, he argued, it could not be merely reactive to developments, but had to be proactive in order to retain the element of surprise and to stay one step ahead of the enemy. “I used to make speeches,” he recalls, “about the need to think where we would be in a year, or two years or three years. What would be the enemy’s movements by then? How would we be deployed? How would we be ready for whatever events might come? This is what I taught Imad from the beginning.”

  “People honor me by saying that I was Imad’s teacher,” Naqqash adds with a soft chuckle, “but all I did was to teach him the A’s, B’s, and C’s. Imad later ‘graduated’ from a ‘university of resistance’ and then set up his own ‘school of resistance’ to teach others.”

  Thirsty for Learning

  Another religious-minded youngster enamored by Fadlallah’s sermons was Hassan Nasrallah. A shy, skinny boy with long, thick eyebrows and full lips who had yet to reach his tenth birthday when he began visiting the Usrat al-Taakhi mosque in Nabaa in the late 1960s, Nasrallah would later become the charismatic leader of Hezbollah and one of the most influential leaders in the Arab world, a figure adored by the party faithful and treated with wary respect by his enemies.

  He was born in 1960, the eldest of nine siblings. His father, Abdel-Karim, was a greengrocer who sold fruit and vegetables from a street cart in the slum quarter of Karantina, near Nabaa. The young Hassan spent his time reading the Koran and studying religious tracts, and by his own account he was a fully observant Muslim by the age of nine.

  With the beginning of the civil war in 1975, the Nasra
llah family escaped Karantina just before it fell to Christian militias for the relative peace of Bazouriyah, their home village surrounded by dense orange orchards on the outskirts of Tyre in south Lebanon.

  Bazouriyah was a Communist stronghold in the mid-1970s, and Nasrallah’s political consciousness quickly developed as he set about organizing religious youths into a study group held at an Islamic library in the village. That same year, he joined Amal, and although only fifteen years old, he was appointed the group’s representative for his village.

  Yet, for the young Nasrallah, the seminaries of Najaf beckoned. With a letter of introduction from a cleric in Tyre, he traveled to Baghdad, then Najaf, hoping to meet Sayyed Mohammed Baqr as-Sadr, the Dawa party leader and Fadlallah’s old friend. By the late 1970s, the Shia religious institutions were facing pressure from the Baathist regime in Baghdad. On arrival in Najaf, Nasrallah met with a friend from Lebanon, who warned him that being seen with Baqr as-Sadr could cause him problems with the Iraqi authorities. The friend said he would introduce Nasrallah to someone close to Baqr as-Sadr who would arrange a meeting. The intermediary’s name was Abbas Mussawi.

  “I met Sayyed Abbas Mussawi for the first time in the street while we were on our way to see him, and, maybe because of his dark skin, I thought he was an Iraqi at first,” Nasrallah later recalled. “I had already spent two days in Baghdad and Najaf and had become accustomed to the Iraqi accent, so I started talking to Sayyed Abbas in an Iraqi-tinged Lebanese accent; but he laughed and said, ‘I am Lebanese, not Iraqi, you can relax.’ ”10

  It was the beginning of a long and fruitful relationship between the two young men. Originally from Nabi Sheet, a small village scattered over a barren mountainside in the eastern Bekaa, Mussawi was eight years Nasrallah’s senior and had been studying in Najaf with Baqr as-Sadr since 1970. On meeting Nasrallah, Baqr as-Sadr instructed Mussawi to take the Lebanese youngster under his wing and serve as his mentor and tutor.