Warriors of God

by Nicholas Blanford

  During the previous two decades, Hezbollah’s objective had been to drive Israel out of Lebanon through force of arms. To achieve that goal, it had waged a classic guerrilla-style war of attrition to liberate occupied territory, using deadly hit-and-run tactics to outwit and kill Israeli troops combined with a persuasive propaganda program to grind down the will of the Israeli domestic front to support the occupation.

  Israel, as the occupier, adopted a static defensive strategy to retain its hold on captured territory—building fortified hilltop compounds to dominate the ground, employing a local proxy militia, establishing an array of human, aerial, and ground surveillance and early warning systems. Although the Israelis occasionally used offensive measures, such as the air and artillery blitzes of July 1993 and April 1996, commando raids, and helicopter gunship assassinations north of the zone, these were generally tactical reactions to developments on the ground. Hezbollah, as the resistance force, was the principal initiator, choosing where and when to strike, leaving the Israelis primarily in a reactive role.

  After May 2000, the strategic situation changed. Hezbollah was no longer confronting an occupier of sovereign Lebanese territory (the Shebaa Farms anomaly gave Hezbollah public justification to retain the Islamic Resistance, but its postwithdrawal military concept was not predicated solely on ousting the Israelis from the mountainside). Instead, Hezbollah’s new strategic profile was principally one of defense. The next major confrontation between Hezbollah and Israel would likely involve a ground incursion by Israeli troops into south Lebanon with Hezbollah this time in the role of defender, a reversal of the situation that had prevailed during the previous two decades.

  When confronted with the same situation before 1982, Yasser Arafat’s PLO had built a third-rate conventional army to defend against the IDF. But Hezbollah’s planners opted for a more unorthodox approach, one that combined elements of low-signature guerrilla-style warfare with the technology and sophisticated armaments of a conventional army. Resistance from now on was intended to defend the homeland rather than expel an occupier. This new concept, Nasrallah explained in 2008, “needs close examination.” “I do not think this is paralleled in the world or in history,” he said. “Resistance liberates land, but resistance to prevent an aggression against a country is something new.”

  Hezbollah’s concept of defensive resistance—the blending of guerrilla and conventional tactics and weaponry—was regarded as the most practical means of confronting Israel militarily after 2000, but it also served as an additional justification to skeptical Lebanese who questioned the need for Hezbollah to keep its weapons. It was not enough to expel Israel from Lebanese soil, Hezbollah argued. Now the “resistance” had to ensure the Israelis would not come back.

  The Lebanese army, with its bloated officer corps and arsenal of obsolete and diverse U.S. and Soviet-era armaments, was incapable of defending the homeland against the most powerful army in the Middle East, Hezbollah’s leaders averred. On the other hand, the resistance had demonstrated its strengths by driving Israel out of south Lebanon and proven its deterrence capabilities through the evident reluctance of Israel to mount a powerful retaliation to Hezbollah’s attacks in the Shebaa Farms. As Nasrallah explained to me in 2003,

  The best means of defending Lebanon in the face of a potential Israeli aggression is the presence of a popular resistance in south Lebanon. Any regular army that may exist in south Lebanon will be dealt a severe blow if the Israelis launch an overall aggression. The regular army has tanks and armored vehicles all above ground and Lebanon does not have air defenses, which means that the Israeli Air Force can destroy regular forces within a few hours. What the Israeli Air Force cannot destroy is the popular resistance, which exists in every mountain, every hilltop, every wadi, every house, and every street. And its members come from the villages themselves. The real equation right now is that the presence of Hezbollah in south Lebanon is a defensive necessity to defend Lebanon, not just the south but also Beirut. Any disarming of Hezbollah or removing it from the south will mean that the [Lebanese] arena will be left open for the Israelis to do whatever they want.

  Significantly, Hezbollah’s new case for preserving its arms effectively ended any assumption that the resolution of tangible outstanding disputes between Lebanon and Israel, such as the release of the last Lebanese detainees and the withdrawal of Israeli forces from the Shebaa Farms, would result in a quid pro quo disarming of the Islamic Resistance.

  Indeed, Ali Ammar, a Hezbollah MP, made it abundantly clear in June 2006 that “the resistance will go on; the extent of the resistance is not the Shebaa Farms … nor the return of the prisoners [from Israel], but its extent is when it becomes impossible for Israel to violate Lebanon’s sovereignty even with a paper kite.”

  Still, Hezbollah was careful not to publicly disparage the Lebanese army, an institution that is broadly respected in Lebanon and seen as the principal guarantor of internal stability. Hezbollah’s leadership carefully articulated the notion that the army could play a collaborative role with the Islamic Resistance to form what Nasrallah called in 2004 “a fence around the homeland.”1

  In reality, however, such declarations were for public consumption only. The Lebanese army was irrelevant to Hezbollah’s battle plans, and the Shia organization, in coordination with the Iranians and with the blessing of the Syrians, continued to pursue its military agenda.

  The argument that the Islamic Resistance was necessary for Lebanon’s national defense was contrived, and it merely confirmed in the eyes of many that Hezbollah was determined to pursue its struggle against Israel irrespective of Lebanon’s national interests. Hezbollah’s leadership understood that its somewhat strained argument for keeping its weapons would not convince everyone, but it also knew that its armed status was guaranteed while Lebanon stayed in Syria’s shadow and the Middle East peace process remained deadlocked.

  Hitting the Syrians

  Hezbollah’s war of attrition against Israel along the Blue Line soon began to evolve along the same lines that had shaped the larger conflict in south Lebanon over the previous decade and a half, in which each group struggled to outwit the other. Hezbollah’s first two attacks in the Shebaa Farms in November 2000 were roadside bomb ambushes, with fighters infiltrating the Israeli side of the Blue Line to plant the IEDs. But as the Israelis tightened security, Hezbollah began launching assaults from the Lebanese side, firing wire-guided TOW antitank missiles at Israeli armored vehicles in sporadic attacks in the first six months of 2001. The Israelis ringed outposts in the Shebaa Farms with antimissile fencing and strengthened bunkers with reinforced concrete. They built new supply roads hidden from the Lebanese side of the Blue Line, thus denying Hezbollah targets with their line-of-sight missiles. From June 2001, Hezbollah’s attacks reverted to mortar, rocket, and antitank missile barrages against the seven outposts in the Shebaa Farms.2 In one attack in October 2001, Hezbollah fired thirty-three AT-3 Sagger antitank missiles at one Israeli compound, a large number for a single operation.

  The Shebaa Farms was treated as a free-fire zone by Hezbollah and the Israelis, and was the most visible source of friction between the two enemies. Yet despite the efforts of foreign diplomats to devise creative solutions to resolve the conflict, paradoxically the mountainside became a useful pressure valve, allowing both sides to let off steam and thus mitigating the possibility of a broader conflict erupting along the border. The area was remote and unpopulated and the risk of civilian casualties, especially on the Israeli side, was minimal.

  The renewal of hostilities once more placed Hezbollah at odds with Rafik Hariri, who returned to the premiership in November 2000 after an absence of two years. Hariri had hoped that the Israeli withdrawal would end the violence in south Lebanon that constantly threatened to undermine his efforts to attract foreign investment and rebuild the economy. But unhappily for him, his return to the premiership coincided with the advent of Hezbollah’s new military campaign.

  Hariri’s worries
were not helped by the arrival in February 2001 of a new Israeli government headed by none other than Ariel Sharon, the architect of the 1982 invasion. Many Lebanese feared that the pugnacious old general would not hesitate to respond harshly to Hezbollah’s attacks in the Shebaa Farms. But Hezbollah’s leadership remained confident that the “balance of terror” between the Islamic Resistance and Israel would continue to hold regardless of who held the premiership in Israel. “The coming of Sharon does not change the reality that northern Israel is still within range of our rockets. Sharon will return to his natural size when confronting Hezbollah and will swallow his threats,” Qawq told me.

  But Lieutenant General Shaul Mofaz, the IDF chief of staff, and other top officers were pushing Sharon’s government to establish new rules along Israel’s northern border. Mofaz and others argued that each unanswered attack in the Shebaa Farms was eroding Israel’s deterrence, and that Syria, as the instigator of the violence along the Lebanese-Israeli border, should no longer be spared reprisals. The test came on April 14, when Hezbollah fighters hit a Merkava tank with an antitank missile, killing the radio operator. The next day, Israeli jets bombed a Syrian radar position at Dahr al-Baydar, the lofty pass in the mountains separating Beirut from the Bekaa Valley. Three Syrian soldiers were killed and the radar facility was destroyed in what was the first Israeli attack against a Syrian post since the Grapes of Wrath operation in 1996.

  At the end of June, Hezbollah fired a volley of antitank missiles at an Israeli patrol on the edge of the Shebaa Farms. Again Israel hit back against the Syrians, bombing an antiaircraft site in the Bekaa Valley. This time, however, Hezbollah counterretaliated almost immediately with a heavy mortar bombardment of Israeli outposts in the Shebaa Farms. Hezbollah’s leadership recognized that it could not afford to let Israel set a new precedent of destroying Syrian positions every time the Islamic Resistance launched an operation in the Farms. The mortar shelling focused on the “Radar” outpost on a sharp mountain peak opposite Shebaa village. It was the first time that the compound, which actually lay just north of the Shebaa Farms area, was struck, and it was deliberately selected because of its equivalence to the bombed Syrian position in the Bekaa Valley. RADAR FOR RADAR ran a headline in Lebanon’s Al-Mustaqbal newspaper a day after the attacks. The Israelis refrained from further retaliation. The “balance of terror” had held.

  While the attacks and retaliation centered on the Shebaa Farms were the most obvious examples of friction between Hezbollah and Israel, a more subtle conflict was waged almost every day along the Blue Line. Hezbollah erected billboards and dummy Katyusha rocket launchers visible to Israelis on the other side of the border as part of its psychological warfare effort. The most conspicuous example was a billboard placed directly opposite the Israeli compound on the summit of Sheikh Abbad Hill displaying photographs of dead and injured Israeli soldiers, including what was left of the head of Sergeant Itamar Ilya, the Shayetet 13 naval commando who was blown to pieces in the Ansariyah ambush. Written in Arabic and Hebrew beneath the gruesome pictures was the caption “Sharon: your soldiers are still in Lebanon.”

  When the wind was favorable, Hezbollah supporters would release dozens of balloons carrying anti-Israel messages or pictures of Nasrallah across the border into northern Israel. Hezbollah took to tapping the Israeli security fence along the border with sticks, triggering the alarm system, then timing how long it took Israeli soldiers to reach the scene to check if there had been a breach. “We are in a state of war with them, and psychological warfare is one of the arenas of war,” Sheikh Nabil Qawq explained.

  Israeli soldiers were not averse to unilaterally goading their opponents on the other side of the fence, either. In January 2002, a Hezbollah militant manning an observation post was temporarily blinded when Israeli soldiers directed a tank’s laser range finder at him. Hezbollah fighters lasered Israeli soldiers in kind.

  In another incident, soldiers from the Golani Brigade took to dashing across the border and snatching Hezbollah and Amal flags on a dare, an act apparently blessed by the unit’s commanding officer. In retaliation, Hezbollah booby-trapped the flags, and the cross-border forays stopped.

  Sometimes, however, Hezbollah’s psychological needling of the Israelis went dangerously close to snapping the fragile “balance of terror.” In March 2002, Hezbollah engineered an audacious—and risky—operation in which two Islamic Jihad volunteers were dispatched across the border to carry out a deadly ambush near the kibbutz of Metsuva. Wearing IDF uniforms and carrying army issue M-16 rifles, the two gunmen opened fire on passing vehicles. By the time Israeli troops rushed to the scene of the ambush and shot the two gunmen dead, five civilians, including a shepherd, two truck drivers, a woman, and her daughter, had been killed.

  Although the Israelis were initially unsure whether the gunmen had originated from Lebanon or the West Bank, soldiers tracking the militants found a ladder hidden in brush beside the border fence, which the IDF said was as of “special design.” The Israelis concluded that Hezbollah was responsible for the attack.

  Hezbollah responded coyly. Nasrallah maintained his usual ambiguity, saying, “Whatever the Israelis are accusing us of, be it realistic or not, is a great honor for us.”

  Still, Hezbollah’s fingerprints were all over the operation. The area of the border on the Lebanese side where the militants had crossed into Israel was under Hezbollah control. The location of the ambush site lay within sight of a Hezbollah observation post on an escarpment from which fighters enjoyed unhindered views of the western Galilee coastline to Haifa, twenty-five miles to the south. The actual attack was even filmed from the Hezbollah post and broadcast live on Al-Manar television.

  Although the attack crossed the red line in the evolving “balance of terror” between Hezbollah and Israel, the Israeli government again chose to stay its hand.

  The Green Light Turns to Red

  In March 2002, rising violence in Israel claimed the lives of 135 Israelis, the highest monthly toll during the Al-Aqsa intifada. During the same period, more than 230 Palestinians died at the hands of the Israeli army, many of them during a major two-week incursion into the West Bank in the first half of the month.

  At the end of March, Beirut hosted the annual Arab League summit, during which Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia unveiled a proposal to achieve comprehensive peace in the Middle East. In essence, his plan, subsequently known as the Arab Peace Initiative, offered full normalization and security in exchange for an Israeli withdrawal from all Arab territory occupied since 1967, the creation of a Palestinian state, and the return of Palestinian refugees to their original homes. Although Syria endorsed the plan on March 29, along with the twenty-one other members of the Arab League, it did so with reluctance. Syria had consistently refused to discuss normalizing ties with Israel before receiving a guarantee that Israel would fully withdraw from the Golan Heights. In Syrian eyes, the Saudi initiative weakened its negotiating position in future peace talks.

  Hours after the vote in Beirut, a Hamas suicide bomber blew himself up in a hotel in Netanya on the eve of the Jewish Passover holiday, killing thirty Israelis. Sharon ignored the Arab Peace Initiative and sent his army back into the West Bank in a massive punitive offensive.

  As Israel launched its “Defensive Shield” operation against the Palestinians, Hezbollah, Syria, and Iran sensed an opportunity to squeeze Israel from the north. Nasrallah reportedly ordered the Islamic Resistance to prepare for stepped-up operations in the Shebaa Farms and then met with Bashar al-Assad to secure a green light. Nasrallah is said to have told Assad that Hezbollah could not stand idly by while the Palestinians were being slaughtered in the West Bank and recommended a controlled escalation along the Blue Line. Such a meeting would have been unthinkable during the presidency of Hafez al-Assad, which only underlined how the relationship between Syria and Hezbollah under Bashar al-Assad was evolving from one of client and proxy to a more balanced partnership. For Syria, fuming over the Arab Peace Initiative,
a controlled escalation along the Blue Line could be useful.

  The Islamic Resistance launched its offensive on March 30, hitting Israeli outposts on the occupied mountainside with an estimated fifty AT-3 Sagger antitank missiles and one hundred mortar rounds. While a symbolic gesture of support by Hezbollah for the Palestinians had been widely expected, the events of the next few days caught most observers by surprise. Hezbollah was soon battering Israeli outposts in the Shebaa Farms on a daily basis, with ever-increasing ferocity. After two weeks of clashes, UNIFIL estimated that Hezbollah had fired 1,160 mortar rounds, 205 antitank missiles, and Katyusha rockets as well as several SAM-7 antiaircraft missiles, the first recorded use of SAMs since before 2000. The attacks peaked on April 10, when all outposts in the Shebaa Farms came under what UNIFIL said in an internal memo was probably the heaviest artillery barrage by the Islamic Resistance since 1992. According to one report, an estimated $800,000 worth of ordnance was expended.3 At least four hundred mortar rounds were fired in the attack, some of them 120 mm “bunker-busters” fitted with delayed-action fuses designed to penetrate the thick reinforced concrete roofs of outposts before exploding, the first time Hezbollah had employed such munitions. The barrage provided cover for a “publicity raid,” in which a squad of Hezbollah fighters approached an IDF forward base on the edge of the Shebaa Farms to plant a yellow party flag on the ramparts.

  Within two or three days, Hezbollah’s bombardments settled into a routine. Most of the attacks occurred in the late afternoon when the setting sun shone directly into the west-facing Israeli outposts. The offensive was tailor-made for the media. Camera crews obediently lined up each afternoon beside an Indian UNIFIL observation post facing an IDF outpost less than a mile away, ready to capture the next attack on film.