Warriors of God

by Nicholas Blanford

  The next morning, bored militiamen sat in the shade beside the high street waiting for the order to pull out. A T-55 tank, a towed artillery cannon, and two trucks laden with household goods were parked nearby. One teenage militiaman, called Manny, dressed in an olive-green Israeli uniform, said he had been forced to join the SLA only four months earlier. “I keep asking them if I can leave, but they won’t let me,” Manny said quietly so his comrades could not overhear.

  Why didn’t he simply defect?

  “If they catch me they would put me in the trunk of the car and drive me to Khiam,” he said, referring to the SLA-run prison.

  Another veteran militiaman observed sourly, “We’re leaving because the people don’t want us here anymore. Many of them are collaborators with Hezbollah.”

  Another nodded in agreement. “You see someone in the street and you say ‘hi.’ He says ‘hi’ and then he goes around a corner and plants a bomb,” he said.

  In a newly abandoned SLA outpost in the Christian village of Roum, west of Jezzine, children collected ammunition boxes and brass cartridge cases as other residents wandered around the empty bunkers and offices. The outpost overlooked the coastal hills to the west all the way to Sidon and the silvery sun-speckled Mediterranean.

  On a wall at the rear of the outpost, an SLA militiaman had written in English the heartfelt plea, “Jesus, save me!”

  “The Fighting in Sojod Is a Good War”

  That night, the SLA prepared to pull out of its last remaining positions in Jezzine and withdraw to the new front line just south of Kfar Houne village. The SLA expelled reporters from the town as they prepared for the southbound retreat. We congregated at Jezzine’s western entrance, where an M-113 armored personnel carrier, painted pale green and covered in scratches and rust spots, blocked the road beneath the town’s landmark statue of the Virgin Mary. The crew of the APC was tasked with bringing up the rear of the last SLA column to leave Jezzine that night. They knew there was a strong chance that they would be hit by roadside bombs on the journey.

  “The worst thing that can happen to us is that we get killed,” said Johnny, the thick-set and unshaven APC commander, with war-weary bravado as he swigged from a bottle of whisky. Johnny and his comrade Nimr, a skinny militiaman with unkempt hair and a straggly beard, were both former Lebanese Forces militiamen and veterans of the civil war. They had joined the SLA in 1990 at the war’s end and had served in frontline positions such as Sojod in the northern sector, one of Hezbollah’s favorite targets.

  “The fighting in Sojod is a good war,” Johnny observed as he fed a belt of ammunition into his .50 caliber machine gun mounted on top of the APC. “Hezbollah come up the hill to us and we kill them. But here in Jezzine, they are like cats. We never see them.”

  Manny, the young SLA recruit who wanted to leave, was clearly unnerved at what Hezbollah might have in store for them in a few hours’ time. He fiddled with the strap of his AK-47 rifle and tried to smile for the cameras. He personified the predicament facing many SLA militiamen: he wanted to quit, but feared the prospect of arrest and imprisonment by the Lebanese authorities or the wrath of the SLA if caught deserting. Staying in the militia, however, he risked injury or death in combat with Hezbollah and an uncertain future if, or when, Israel withdrew from Lebanon.

  Just before 2:00 A.M., two Mercedes cars pulled up beside the checkpoint and Johnny was ordered to pull out. Nimr handed us tiny pictures of the Virgin Mary and Saint Charbel with short prayers inscribed on the back. Manny’s face was frozen in a rictus of fear as he hauled himself through the rear hatch of the APC. Nimr followed him and gave us a brief, fleeting smile and wave before slamming the steel door.

  A somber-looking Johnny politely shook our hands and thanked us for keeping him and his crew company that evening. The bluster and fiery rhetoric were gone, dampened by whisky and trepidation for the journey ahead.

  “Our fate is now in the hands of God,” he said quietly as he climbed in through the rooftop hatch of the APC. Taking a final slug of whisky and a deep drag on his cigarette, Johnny gunned the engine, and without a backward glance he steered the APC into the darkness of the road leading south from Jezzine.

  After the SLA vehicles disappeared into the night, we waited quietly and listened for any sound of fighting that would indicate the militiamen had run into trouble. But the only explosions heard that night came from an abandoned SLA position on a hill above the town where the militia had dynamited the munitions they had chosen to leave behind.

  “We were telling each other earlier that if God wills it, these will be the last explosions we will hear,” said an elderly resident standing on the balcony of his home at the southern end of Jezzine as he watched the orange glow from the fires raging in the SLA outpost in the darkness above the town.

  “The People Here Never Stop Worrying”

  Johnny and his companions survived the retreat from Jezzine. I found him three weeks later in Marjayoun, sitting in the smoke-filled, sparsely furnished living room of a small stone house in the center of the town. He said they had discovered twelve roadside bombs and had been attacked with antitank missiles during the tense drive. “We were the last to leave Jezzine, but I was at the head of the column that entered Marjayoun the next day,” he said proudly.

  Jocelyne, his wife, sat quietly beside him nursing her baby. Her skin was gray and she looked very tired. On Johnny’s biceps was a tattoo of a skull smoking a pipe with a dagger rammed through it. “It’s a dead man smoking hashish,” he said with a grin.

  Manny, I learned, had been sent by the SLA on a medical course which would keep him away from the frontline fighting. But the future for Johnny was much bleaker. He had fought with the Lebanese forces in the civil war and had been arrested and beaten by Syrian and Lebanese intelligence officers in 1990 when the conflict ended. He had no desire to live in a Lebanon dominated by Syria, but the idea of moving to Israel held little appeal, either. Johnny tried to remain cheerful, but it was clear that he knew the occupation was entering its final stages. “What can I do? I do as I’m told. I will carry on driving my tank,” he said, referring to his APC. “That’s all I know and all I can do.”

  It was impossible to disguise the mood of apprehension and uncertainty within the ranks of the SLA. You could see it in the tired, cheerless demeanor of the militiamen on duty at checkpoints or in their tense expressions as they huddled over tiny cups of coffee at the cafés near the SLA headquarters in Marjayoun. Despite some confident bluster, the war was being lost in south Lebanon, and the SLA knew it.

  “They long ago entered a tunnel that is now very hard to come out of,” said Monsignor Antoine Hayek, the head of the Greek Catholic community in Marjayoun, sitting in the cool splendor of his residence beside the Church of Saint Peter. Pictures of Hayek with Pope John Paul II vied for space on the walls with oil-painted triptychs of the Virgin Mary. We walked out onto a balcony overlooking the neighboring church. The dying sun warmed the pastel yellow paint of the church’s dome. The square red-tiled roofs of Marjayoun’s traditional stone houses spilled down the hillside below us. Far to the east, the distant foothills of Mount Hermon turned golden in the evening light.

  “You know, there’s no real joy of life in the area,” Hayek said, gazing at the view. “We celebrate holidays and feasts, but there’s always firing going on. The people here never stop worrying.”

  Israel’s occupation zone was a claustrophobic world of oppression, fear, and paranoia. The daily bouts of violence and the privations of occupation—a mix of arbitrary arrests, restricted movements, routine shelling, and the dreadful uncertainty of roadside bombs—fostered feelings of impotence and despair. Suspected as collaborators by a largely unsympathetic Lebanese government, and treated by the Israeli occupiers as pawns whose welfare was subordinate to the security interests of the Jewish state, no one living here, whether a Shia farmer in a hard-scrabble frontline village or a Christian SLA officer from relatively prosperous Marjayoun, could escape the un
remitting anxiety and sense of isolation that pervaded the zone.

  From the winding road heading out of the coastal village of Naqoura, the location of UNIFIL’s headquarters, up into the low stony hills of the occupied border district, the tall buildings of Tyre could be seen a dozen miles to the north crowding the city’s peninsula jutting into the shimmering blue Mediterranean. Tyre lay beyond the volatile frontline districts. Its easygoing inhabitants could be lying on the sandy beaches, eating fried fish washed down with icy cold bottles of local Almaza beer, the fishermen in the port mending torn nets or playing backgammon in the shade of a quayside café. But the border road east from Naqoura took one far from such languid pleasures. Gazing at the far-off serenity of Tyre was like looking through the bars of a bleak prison cell at distant green meadows and a blue sky, comforting in its familiarity and beautiful to behold, yet beyond reach.

  “This Is the Road to Vietnam”

  To witness the real misery of the zone, one had to visit the handful of Shia villages that had the misfortune to lie on the front line—places like At-Tiri, where around eighty aging residents clung to their homes, having nowhere else to go. There were no cars in At-Tiri and no telephones. Transport was provided by one taxi, which every Thursday braved the IED-laced road to ferry three or four passengers at a time to the market in Bint Jbeil. Many of the houses were destroyed in the 1978 invasion two decades earlier, the shattered walls, rusted reinforcing rods, and weed-ridden interiors emblematic of past violence and current neglect. No children had lived in At-Tiri since 1985. But there was the incongruous spectacle of a pristine school building, its classrooms filled with neat rows of wooden desks and chairs and spotless blackboards. The village school was given an overhaul in 1994 in a brief optimistic expectation of an imminent Middle East peace. The peace never came, of course, and so the children never returned, and the plate glass windows lining one side of the building were gradually shot out by bored militiamen in nearby compounds.

  A wizened seventy-year-old woman engulfed in a voluminous black shawl opened a door leading into a gloomy room furnished with a few tatty armchairs. Several pigeons exploded out through a broken window as we entered, and the room smelled of their droppings. She rocked slowly back and forth in an armchair and spoke in a thin, tremulous voice of her health problems and of her children, who lived in Beirut. She grew wistful when describing At-Tiri before the Israelis came. “It was the most beautiful village,” she says. “There were many people here. You could sit outside all day in front of your house and just watch people pass by.”

  The small, disheveled village of Rihan, tucked into mountains north of the Litani River, had the misfortune of hosting two compounds in the center of the village, one for the IDF and the other for the SLA.

  When I visited Rihan in June 1999, dusk was descending upon south Lebanon. The Israelis had built a new road connecting the headquarters in Marjayoun to the northern sector on the other side of the Litani. The Antoine Lahd Bridge, named after the SLA commander, crossed the shallow waters of the river, and the Israeli road climbed into the steep pine-forested hills and jagged mountain peaks of the zone’s northern sector. It was here that one gained a very real sense of driving into a war zone. The fingerlike salient was flanked by steep mountains to the east and west where Hezbollah fighters had hidden bases and observation positions and from where they infiltrated the enclave to ambush IDF troops or attack SLA compounds. The sides of the road were stripped bare of all vegetation for at least sixty feet to prevent the planting of bombs. There were no other vehicles on the road, no houses, and no people to be seen.

  At the old farmstead of Jarmaq, where the SLA had an outpost, suspicious militiamen trained their heavy machine guns on our car as we passed by. Several gray-painted T-55 tanks and armored personnel carriers jammed the entrance of the position. The sleek lines of an IDF Merkava tank, all but hidden behind a wall of sandbags, flashed into view.

  Each corner of this meandering mountain road had to be approached with caution. Dusk was when the Israelis drove their tanks to reach their nighttime positions. Concrete T-walls and camouflage netting flapping loosely in the evening breeze lined sections of the road to mask Israeli troop movements from prying eyes in the surrounding mountains.

  By 1999, Rihan was the most northerly deployment of the IDF in south Lebanon. The road that ran through the village had been reduced to a rutted dirt track, churned by tank caterpillar treads into a muddy morass in winter and choking dust in summer.

  A handful of old men sat in silence outside a store. An out-of-uniform militiaman leaning on the balcony of his house spoke into his walkie-talkie as we climbed out of the car. The evening tranquility was broken by the roar of a tank engine from inside the Israeli compound. Thick black exhaust smoke billowed above the ramparts as Israeli soldiers prepared the tank for its nighttime duty.

  From the center of the village a narrow, potholed lane led southeast to Sojod, a small village that was totally destroyed in 1985. The outpost at Sojod, manned by the SLA and sometimes reinforced with IDF troops, was one of the most heavily hit compounds in the entire zone. “This is the road to Vietnam,” a young Shia militiaman joked bleakly, indicating the lane to Sojod.

  The militiaman said he had been press-ganged four years earlier, “and I’m still objecting.” Small and wiry, with cropped hair and several days’ stubble on his hollow cheeks, he had a weary, fatalistic disdain, all too aware that he stood a more than reasonable chance of being killed or wounded by his fellow Shias in Hezbollah. “It could be a roadside bomb or bullets. Who knows?” he said with a shrug.

  A dust-coated Mercedes pulled up. Inside were two very fat, unsmiling men with AK-47 rifles cradled in their laps. Both wore tight-fitting grubby jeans and denim shirts and both wore their black hair long, greasy, and slicked back. They were like grotesque cartoon characters–Tweedledum and Tweedledee with guns.

  The young militiaman with us shuffled his feet uncomfortably and backed away from the SLA security officers. One of them removed the cigarette from his mouth, examined the burning tip, and asked who we were and what we were doing in Rihan. His obese colleague stared at himself in the rearview mirror and smoothed back his hair with fingers the size of bratwursts, choked by several clunky gold rings. After a few minutes of questioning, the two men drove away.

  It was getting dark, and Rihan was not a place in which to linger. As we departed, I noticed the young militiaman standing alone in the center of the dusty street, staring after us, on his face an expression of utter despair.

  “Remaining Silent”

  As summer turned into fall in 1999, the Israelis, Syrians, and Americans maneuvered and bargained behind the scenes in a preliminary diplomatic dance to hasten the resumption of peace talks. During this period of expectation, the most common question put to Hezbollah officials in interviews was what the party would do in the event of regional peace. The answer was always the same: a frustrating “wait and see.” “We think that remaining silent … and not talking in detail about our role following the settlement … gives Lebanon and Syria strength as they continue on the tracks they believe in,” Nasrallah said in July 1999.

  In August, Bashar al-Assad, the son of the Syrian president, who was being groomed to succeed his father, hinted in a newspaper interview that Hezbollah would lay down its weapons once the Israeli occupation of south Lebanon was ended. “When the causes that led to the resistance are gone, I believe its members will go back to normal life and will choose other ways to serve their country after achieving their long-cherished victory,” he said.

  For many observers, that was the clearest expression yet of Hezbollah’s likely fate following a peace deal between Syria and Israel. There were other teasing indications, too, that Syria might be planning for a future of peace with Israel. They included reports that Damascus had advised Hezbollah and pro-Syrian Palestinian groups that they should prepare for disarming once peace had been achieved with Israel. There were reports that the Syrians were hol
ding up Iranian arms shipments for Hezbollah at Damascus airport. The Iranians, instead, reportedly began airlifting arms directly to Hezbollah via Beirut airport, a move that must have had the tacit approval of Syria, even as it was sending subtle messages to Israel that it could rein in the Lebanese group if Barak fulfilled Syria’s peace demands.

  After all, if Syria won back the Golan Heights in its entirety and no longer had a territorial grievance with Israel, Hezbollah’s utility as a bargaining chip for Damascus was at an end. Clearly, the Israelis would not agree to a peace deal with Syria in which all the Golan was returned unless it received ironclad guarantees that the Islamic Resistance would be dismantled and the Lebanon-Israel border pacified.

  Meanwhile, the IDF General Command were gritting their teeth at the prospect of losing their fiefdom in south Lebanon, especially if Barak ordered a unilateral withdrawal should the prospective negotiations with Syria go nowhere. Not only would it bring Hezbollah to Israel’s northern border, it would also signal to the Palestinians and other Arab enemies that the Jewish state would surrender to determined armed resistance. “This message will be a beacon to all the anti-peace forces in the Arab world, especially Islamic fundamentalists,” wrote Clinton Bailey, a former adviser at the Israeli foreign ministry.1