Warriors of God

by Nicholas Blanford

  Under Fire

  Israeli tanks prevented a southbound advance along the border road from Houla by firing at any vehicle attempting to do so. Two civilians were killed about a mile farther down the road in separate incidents when their vehicles were struck by tank shells. On the southern outskirts of Houla, orange flames darted from the hatch of a burning T-55 tank that had been abandoned by its SLA crew after it broke down earlier in the morning. An Israeli helicopter had fired a missile into the tank to prevent its falling into the hands of Hezbollah. A crowd gathered two hundred yards from the burning tank, watching the blaze and wondering whether to risk proceeding. Steven Wallace, an American photographer, and I walked farther down the road to a teenager holding a yellow Hezbollah flag. He said he intended to plant the flag on the tank once the fire had burned itself out. He would not get the chance, however. Moments after a pickup truck raced past carrying the bodies of the two civilians killed earlier, a tank round exploded on the other side of the road, just five yards from us. The crowd up the road behind us scattered for cover around a bend, followed at a speedy pace by Steve, the teenager, and me as machine gun bullets cracked past our heads. As we reached the corner, a missile shrieked and exploded just behind us in a thick cloud of brilliant white smoke.

  Israeli firepower halted the civilian advance from spreading along the border road beyond Houla and Markaba, but farther west, the occupation zone was collapsing. Some forty SLA militiamen left their positions in the frontline village of Beit Yahoun and surrendered to the Lebanese army. Other frontline positions were abandoned by the SLA during the afternoon, the desperate militiamen forced to choose between exile in Israel and turning themselves in to the Lebanese army or Hezbollah.

  A battered Volvo accelerated up the lane from the tiny hamlet of Srobbine, the back doors swinging open as tank rounds exploded in quick succession in the hillside above. The car halted beside a UNIFIL checkpoint, and wide-eyed Hezbollah men pulled two badly wounded people from the blood-soaked backseat. More tank rounds exploded nearby, sending onlookers scurrying for cover in doorways. The crackle of automatic weapons rose from the folds of the deep wadis near Srobbine as Hezbollah men advanced on the neighboring village of Beit Leif.

  That night, the IDF’s western sector headquarters at Saff al-Hawa on the edge of Bint Jbeil was vacated and hundreds of SLA militiamen and their families stampeded across the border into Israel. In Tyre that evening, we watched the flashes of explosions and brief orange bubbles of fire light up the area around Biyyada village on the coast to the south as Israeli artillery and naval gunboats shelled the edges of the zone to provide cover for the retreating SLA.

  While the Shia residents of the rapidly collapsing zone celebrated their liberation, nervous residents of Christian villages gathered in churches wondering what the next day would hold for them.

  “Fear of the Unknown”

  UNIFIL soldiers were no longer bothering to try to stop the mass of civilian traffic from entering the zone. Just after dawn on Tuesday, May 23, at the Hamra crossing point on the coastal road, Fijian peacekeepers stood back and watched as a motley collection of disheveled Mercedes sedans, pickup trucks, vans, and motorcycles passed an abandoned SLA outpost that a day earlier had marked the beginning of Israel’s jurisdiction.

  At the newly abandoned SLA position outside Teir Harfa village, a bearded Amal militant dressed in a black uniform stepped on some strands of coiled razor wire, allowing two of his colleagues to hurry across a fifty-yard patch of rock and grass to reach the compound, apparently oblivious or unconcerned that they were traversing a minefield. Minutes later, the two Amal men reappeared laden with ammunition belts, green tin boxes of ammunition, and a .50 caliber machine gun. The looting of the SLA and Israeli outposts had begun in earnest.

  The roads heading away from the coast into the heart of the western sector were almost empty. It was still unclear whether the SLA and the Israelis had completely abandoned the area. Steve Wallace and I drove gingerly along the main border road, no other vehicles in sight. An abandoned T-55 tank lay on the side of the road beside the turning to Dibil, the Christian village that was home to Aql Hashem, the recently deceased SLA commander of the western sector. The tank was draped in camouflage netting, its barrel spray-painted in greens and blacks. A .50 caliber machine gun was still fixed to the turret. We approached cautiously, wary of booby traps. A car raced up to us from the opposite direction, the first we had seen in more than half an hour. Young men sat on the vehicle’s windowsills brandishing green Amal flags. The car braked to a halt and two teenagers jumped out and ran toward the tank, showing none of the caution of the two foreign journalists. One of them grabbed a belt of ammunition, slung it around his neck, and posed for Steve’s photographs, while the second leaped onto the tank. As he did so, we were surprised by a loud bang. I felt tiny chips hit me in the face and thought for a split second that the boy had triggered a booby-trapped hand grenade. But the two teenagers were unhurt and pelted back to their car like startled rabbits, whooping with excitement and festooned with looted booty from the tank. An ashen-faced but grinning Steve told me that the boy had used the grip of the .50 caliber machine gun to haul himself up onto the turret of the tank. But there was still one round chambered in the gun, and he had accidentally fired it. The round had struck the road by my feet and chipped the asphalt.

  In Dibil, the shops were closed and villagers milled uncertainly in the narrow streets. They had thrown in their lot with the Israelis since 1976, and now their benefactors had gone, leaving them to ponder their fate at the hands of Hezbollah.

  One resident claimed in a sonorous voice that an eighty-year-old woman had died that very morning, “from fear of the unknown.”

  “I hope UNIFIL comes here soon. If it takes them two weeks, Hezbollah will kill us all,” said a middle-aged man, drawing a finger across his throat in emphasis.

  Most of the SLA from the village had fled into Israel, but at least one opted to remain behind. Najib Attiyah, a veteran of thirteen years, sat quietly in his small stone house near the church waiting for the Lebanese authorities to arrive. “I have a wife and seven children,” he said. “Where am I going to go?”

  In Rmeish, a group of heavily armed Hezbollah guerrillas swarmed over a T-55 tank. Belching a thick cloud of exhaust smoke, the tank lurched down the high street with Hezbollah fighters clinging to the turret, giving victory salutes to the stony-faced audience of elderly Christian residents.

  Abed Taqqoush

  Bint Jbeil, the largest Shia town in the western sector, was rapidly filling with traffic streaming in from the main road leading north. Most of the vehicles were festooned with Hezbollah and Amal flags and some were plastered with pictures of Nasrallah, a colorful cavalcade that jammed the town’s narrow streets and filled the air with car horns sounding off in celebration.

  In Aittaroun village, east of Bint Jbeil, a procession of captured SLA armored vehicles ground slowly down the main road, forcing civilian traffic to move out of the way. The driver of a jeep crammed with armed Hezbollah fighters motioned people aside as he tried to weave through the throng. Behind the jeep lurched a T-55 tank driven by a Hezbollah man whose bearded head poked through the front hatch, his face scowling in concentration as he steered the unwieldy vehicle. Several of his comrades, some wearing plain green military uniforms and webbing, sat on top of the tank waving yellow and red party flags.

  I heard a voice calling my name and saw a familiar figure hurrying out of a shop carrying several cans of soda. It was Abed Taqqoush, the taxi driver who a week earlier had driven me to Jezzine for my last trip into the occupation zone. Abed’s face was lit up with a magnificent smile, his eyes bulging with excitement. He slapped me on the back and offered me a Pepsi.

  We were joined by Jeremy Bowen, a veteran Middle East correspondent for the BBC, and his Lebanese cameraman, Malek Kanaan. Abed was their driver. After a few minutes of chatting, the BBC team moved on.

  The crowds began to thin as the borde
r road gradually turned from east to north as we entered the central sector. I pulled over to make a call to The Times. As I spoke to one of the editors, we heard an explosion in the near distance, the report loud enough to travel down the phone line to Wapping in east London. A thin column of smoke rose gently into the sky ahead of us. As we drew closer to the smoke a few minutes later, a car speeding toward us from the other direction slowed and the passenger waved at us to stop.

  “The Israelis are shooting at cars on the road. They have just killed a journalist,” he warned. “No, it wasn’t a journalist. It’s a Lebanese,” the driver corrected him.

  I should have made the connection instantly, but for some reason I did not, and it was only a little later that I learned that the “Lebanese” was Abed Taqqoush. The BBC crew had stopped on a corner opposite the Israeli settlement of Manara, the squat European-looking houses visible through a screen of pine trees on a ridge a few hundred yards away. Bowen and Kanaan left the car and walked a hundred yards back down the road to set up the camera and record a piece using as background Manara and the wreckage of a Mercedes in which a civilian had been killed by Israeli tank fire the day before. Bowen, who was wearing a distinctly unmilitary pink shirt, saw what looked like an observation position at Manara and waved to indicate his friendly intentions. Abed remained in the car chatting on the phone to his twenty-one-year-old son, Mohammed.

  Days later, Mohammed recalled his father telling him, “You should see it down here. A settlement is right next to me, and it looks beautiful.”1

  Those were the last words Abed ever uttered. An Israeli tank positioned on the border beside Manara fired a single round into his Mercedes, striking the gas tank and engulfing the car in a ball of fire. Bowen was speaking to the camera when the blast occurred; wreckage from Abed’s car flew into the background of Kanaan’s camera shot. The horrified pair ducked behind a wall. After a few minutes, Bowen ventured out into the road to check on Abed, but he immediately came under machine gun fire, forcing him to seek cover again. He contacted the Israeli army’s media office by cell phone to alert them to their predicament and halt the shooting. For an hour, Bowen and Kanaan were pinned down by the Israeli machine gunner while the flames stripped Abed’s car to a metal skeleton. It was not until four hours later that a Lebanese civil defense team was able to remove Abed’s body.

  The IDF subsequently claimed that the tank crew at Manara had suspected Bowen and Kanaan of being “members of a Lebanese group preparing to fire an antitank missile against Israel Defense Forces tanks and vehicles.”2 Pink shirts are not the customary garb of Hezbollah fighters, nor do their antitank teams fire from the middle of roads in broad daylight within clear view of their target and begin the operation by giving a cheery wave to their intended victims. If they thought Kanaan’s camera was an antitank missile, why did the Israelis fire at Abed’s car a hundred yards away?

  Abed was not the only civilian victim of Israeli tank fire during the withdrawal, but he had the tragic distinction of being the very last Lebanese civilian killed during Israel’s occupation of Lebanon.

  The Storming of Lebanon’s “Bastille”

  With the western half of the zone liberated, the mainly Christian and Druze eastern sector began to disintegrate. Druze militiamen from Hasbaya fled northward to turn themselves in at Lebanese army positions on the edge of the zone. Israeli artillery gunners pounded areas facing the northern and eastern sectors in preparation for the final pullout.

  During the afternoon, Israeli commanders delivered a blunt ultimatum to their SLA counterparts: Israel was leaving and the border would be sealed the moment the last soldier exited Lebanon. Any militiaman failing to cross the border by then would have to meet his fate in Lebanon.

  Panicked militia commanders hurried home, packed their bags, bundled their families into cars, and dashed headlong for the border. There would be no defiant last stand after all. The bravado exhibited by the SLA leadership in recent weeks—the talk of a return to the “Haddad enclave,” Antoine Lahd’s promise that the SLA would commit collective suicide rather than live as refugees in Israel—had been nothing more than bluster.

  Tensions ran high at the Fatima Gate crossing as huge queues formed of SLA men and their families desperate to enter Israel before it was too late. The Israelis instructed them to leave weapons behind and to abandon their vehicles at the border crossing. The surging crowd attempting to squeeze through the crossing panicked some Israeli soldiers who were trying to maintain order. The soldiers fired shots into the crowd, killing at least two people and wounding several others, a shabby and shameful end to twenty-five years of sacrifice by Israel’s Lebanese allies. Once inside Israel, the new refugees were bused to a temporary camp near Tiberias on the Sea of Galilee.

  “Barak gave them [the SLA] the illusion that we would not leave them, but we did in a very cynical way,” recalls Ephraim Sneh, the deputy defense minister and an ardent champion of Israel’s Lebanese allies in the SLA. “What we did to them was unforgivable, unpardonable.… It was one of the most immoral things Israel has ever done.”

  In Khiam, in the eastern sector of the zone, the Shia residents, aware of what had happened in the previous two days in the western and central sectors, assembled at a mosque and began a march on the SLA-run prison at the southern end of the town. As the crowd approached the stone walls of the prison, SLA jailers began shooting in the air as a warning.

  When the inmates, all 160 of them, heard the gunshots and distant cries of “Allah u-Akbar (God is greater)” from the crowd of marchers, many of them thought the SLA was massacring the prisoners before fleeing. The inmates began chanting “Allah u-Akbar” as well as they awaited their fate.

  The SLA guards knew they were in an untenable position. A deal was struck allowing the jailers to leave unharmed in exchange for not opposing the liberation of the prison. With the departure of the guards, the crowd surged through the open gate into the prison compound. The locks were smashed from the cells, and the prisoners were hugged and kissed by their liberators.

  “I thought we were all going to be taken to Israel,” recalls Riad Kalakish, who had been incarcerated in Khiam prison since 1985. “I was not expecting to be released. It was only when I walked outside that I understood we were free. I felt as though I had been born again.”

  That night, under the cover of artillery fire, the last Israeli troops pulled out of Lebanon, blowing up their compounds in the northern sector and creeping in armored columns along the winding mountain road to the safety of the border at Metulla.

  The soldiers broke into relieved smiles and hugged one another as they crossed into Israel. It had been a retreat, but not under fire, and they had incurred no casualties. Hezbollah could have harried the departing Israelis, but wisely took the decision to let them leave unmolested. The hasty manner of the Israeli withdrawal was triumph enough.

  “People were flocking to the villages and the Israelis were pulling out under heavy covering fire,” said Nazih Mansour, the Hezbollah MP. “If civilians were killed needlessly, then we would have lost the flavor of victory. I’m not going to risk my people just to shoot a bullet at the Israelis.”

  At 6:42 A.M., as dawn broke on May 24, 2000, an Israeli officer snapped the padlock on the metal swing gate in the border fence, a simple gesture that symbolized the end of the occupation after twenty-two long years.

  “C’est Fini”

  The thump of exploding munitions echoed through the eastern sector that morning as an ammunition dump set alight hours earlier by the departing Israelis continued to burn, cooking off an assortment of missiles, flares, and artillery and mortar shells. The ammunition had been stockpiled beside the main road between several houses just south of Qlaya. The explosions had blown out all the glass from the sides of houses facing the dump. For Ghada Khoury, a twenty-four-year-old mother of two infants, it had been a terrifying night.

  “They never even told us to leave. They left us sleeping in our beds,” she said, her voice s
haking with hysteria and her face caked in dried blood. “There were bombs exploding all the time. My little daughter is in shock. She can’t speak. She’s only a year old and she’s not accepting her milk.”

  She led us through her small home to inspect the damage, her feet crunching on the shattered glass. “We spent the night in the bathroom because it has no windows,” Khoury said. “My baby was screaming and I was crying and my husband didn’t know what to do.”

  The ground outside her home was littered with shiny aluminum missile fragments and steel shrapnel. The burning munitions sent clouds of smoke billowing into the blue sky. A blazing flare shot skyward, cartwheeling through the air before tumbling into the main road. Across the road from Khoury’s home, local residents prayed in the church as others swept up broken glass.

  In Marjayoun, a mile to the north, at the headquarters of the now-defunct SLA, a bearded gunman booted open the door of a room and fired a few rounds from his AK-47 rifle into the dark interior. He stepped inside and emerged moments later laden with military clothing. To the victors, the spoils. And there was plenty to choose from in the abandoned headquarters. Dozens of gunmen, mainly Amal militants, ransacked the barracks, bursting into offices and grabbing what they could. Others attempted to start up a fleet of T-55 tanks, armored personnel carriers, trucks, military jeeps, and a few World War II–vintage half-track vehicles parked in a mechanics depot. Black smoke billowed out a window where someone had started a small fire. A hand grenade exploded in another burning room. Hundreds of civilians mingled with the militants. A headscarfed teenage girl, one of a class of students from Nabatiyah, less than five miles to the west, gazed eastward across the flat Marj Valley to the hilltop town of Khiam and beyond to the mountainous skyline where the Shebaa Farms hills melded into the soaring heights of Mount Hermon. The distant mountains were a washed-out pale gray in the early morning sunlight. “What a wonderful country,” she exclaimed. “I had no idea that it was so beautiful here.”