Warriors of God

by Nicholas Blanford

  In a neighboring bed, Noor Hashem, thirteen, told us in a shy, trembling voice that her mother had pulled her free of the rubble along with her older sister and taken them to a neighboring house. Her mother returned to the bombed house to look for Noor’s three brothers. “They haven’t come to the hospital yet, and my mother hasn’t returned,” she said, and began crying.

  Her three brothers were among the dead, the youngest only nine months old, but no one at the hospital had the heart to break the news to Noor.

  This latest massacre in Qana marked a turning point in the war, just as the slaughter at the Fijian headquarters ten years earlier had changed the direction of Grapes of Wrath. U.S. diplomatic efforts to achieve a favorable cease-fire were left in tatters as international opinion began to weigh against Israel. Even Fouad Siniora, responding to the angry mood in Lebanon, snubbed Rice, forcing her to cancel a scheduled return trip to Beirut, just as Hafez al-Assad a decade earlier had refused to meet then secretary of state Warren Christopher during the Grapes of Wrath campaign. Yielding to U.S. pressure, Ehud Olmert agreed to a 48-hour halt in air operations.

  The cease-fire provided an opportunity for reporters to visit the front lines where the main fighting had taken place. I knew Bint Jbeil had been bombed heavily during the fighting, but the level of destruction inflicted upon the center of the town was astonishing. The main street, where the weekly market was held, was gone, submerged beneath a carpet of rubble, chunks of concrete, asphalt, and stone, and pitted with pond-sized bomb craters. One unexploded bomb with Hebrew markings sat ominously in the middle of the street. Broken medicine bottles, pills, and diapers were scattered over the debris beside a gutted pharmacy. Several buildings had caught fire, and the smell of stale smoke and explosives hung heavy in the still air. Dozens of cars had been crushed by collapsing buildings. Almost all the small traditional stone houses of the old quarter were damaged or had collapsed into sad piles of stone and timber. Cheap plastic furniture, pictures, books, toys, clothing—the mundane detritus of people’s lives—were strewn across the rubble, coated in the ubiquitous gray dust.

  Slowly, frail elderly men and women emerged, wraithlike, from the bombed buildings, blinking in the sunlight, stumbling over the rubble and gazing in confusion at what had become of their town.

  Mohammed Bazzi, a white-haired and wizened seventy-year-old, said he and his sister, Mariam, had been trapped since the beginning of the war in the basement of their building after it was bombed. They had survived on instant coffee, powdered milk, and water. “It has been a nightmare,” he said.

  Mariam was too frail to walk or even speak. Reporters briefly set aside notebooks and cameras to carry the seventy-six-year-old woman across the rubble in a wool blanket. Her long white hair fluffed around her face as she sipped from a bottle of water.

  “All We Can Do Is Pray”

  By the end of July, the IDF had begun calling up some fifteen thousand reservists to help the floundering regular forces. Once the cease-fire was over on August 2, the IDF dispatched larger numbers of troops into Lebanon in an attempt to seize the territory that comprised the old occupation zone. By August 5, there were around ten thousand IDF soldiers operating inside Lebanon. But progress was slow and hesitant. The reservists were ill-trained and poorly equipped, were often reluctant to fight, and suffered a shortage of basic supplies in the field such as food, water, and ammunition because of a badly coordinated logistics chain. Most reservists had spent the previous six years policing the West Bank and Gaza, where the enemy consisted of undisciplined street fighters, suicide bombers, and stone-throwing children. They were not trained for fighting Hezbollah. In fact, only a handful of elite soldiers, such as those belonging to the Egoz commando unit or the Paratroop Reconnaissance Battalion, had ever fought Hezbollah at close range in south Lebanon. Most IDF soldiers in the 1990s had pulled garrison duty in the hilltop compounds, dodging mortar shells and trying to avoid IEDs on foot patrols. Not only were the reservist units ill-prepared to wage a more conventional conflict, the enemy they faced in Lebanon in 2006 was qualitatively different from the guerrillas the IDF had confronted six years earlier. No wonder some soldiers were reluctant to tangle with the missile-wielding Hezbollah men lurking in the villages and valleys ahead of them. The commander of a battalion marching on Aitta Shaab ordered a “tactical retreat” after suffering just one casualty. A reservist engineering officer point-blank refused orders to clear a road into Bint Jbeil, protesting that “ten soldiers had already been killed there.” The brigade commander had the entire platoon arrested and jailed.4

  The poor quality of the troops and the lack or morale did not go unnoticed. “Israeli troops looked unprepared, sloppy, and demoralized,” one former senior U.S. commander noted. “This wasn’t the vaunted IDF that we saw in previous wars.”5

  When I joined a UNIFIL relief convoy on August 5 to Dibil, the Christian village where the late SLA commander Aql Hashem lived, not a single Israeli soldier could be seen, even though we were traveling behind the IDF’s lines. But there was ample evidence of their passing from the churned earth of tank tracks meandering through small fields of green tobacco on valley floors. There was evidence, too, of fierce fighting in the neighborhood. A burned-out Merkava tank lay on the side of the road a mile west of Aitta Shaab, its sleek lines blackened and blistered, a victim of Hezbollah’s antitank missiles. The twin machine guns mounted on the turret were still in place. Beside the tank were broken stretchers and a green canvas military sack stuffed with food and covered in dried blood.

  Shelling and air strikes continued uninterrupted, punctuated by the sharp report of outgoing rounds from border gun emplacements and the metallic crack of exploding shells on the hillsides. The barrages had turned swaths of the normally green hillsides around Dibil into black wastelands of carbonized bushes and scorched rock.

  Unlike their Shia neighbors, many villagers in Dibil had opted to remain in their homes, a risky decision rooted in a belief that their Christian village would be spared the worst of the onslaught directed against Hezbollah. Most of the villagers had gathered in the center of the village, instinctively drawing closer to the stone church with its bright red-tiled roof. They had run out of flour, milk, and fuel for the cars. There was no electricity, the landline telephone was down, and the cellular network was jammed. “All we can do is pray,” said Father Yussef Nadaf, the village priest, with a hopeless shrug. He looked exhausted, and his dog collar hung loosely from his black shirt.

  The artillery shells were howling over our heads and exploding in a nearby valley when we reached Jibbayn, a Sunni-populated border village just west of Dibil. The sharp report of each round fired from an emplacement just over the border felt like a physical slap in the face. There were only a few panic-stricken elderly people remaining in the village. They flocked around the UNIFIL armored personnel carriers begging for rescue.

  “Are you going to Tyre? Please take us with you,” pleaded one woman clutching two plastic bags filled with clothing and personal effects. Another old man leaning on a walking stick insisted to the French soldiers that he must ride with them in an APC. He was told that it was impossible, that there was no room. “But I’m the mayor,” he said with helpless indignation.

  Israeli troops were present two hundred yards up the road in the northern half of the village, which prevented the UNIFIL convoy from proceeding to Teir Harfa, the last village on the itinerary lying just beyond Jibbayn.

  Warrant Officer Martin Lionel, the French convoy commander, studied his map spread out on the hood of a car, looking for alternative routes. There was only one: a narrow stone track that dropped in a series of hairpin bends into a steep valley just to the west of Jibbayn. Lionel pursed his lips as he pondered whether the trucks could make the journey. But there were other perils in the valley besides bad roads. I was familiar with the valley from before the war. It was a Hezbollah “security pocket” and bound to be crawling with fighters firing rockets into Israel and preparing to confront
IDF troops. Lionel absorbed this information and then decided against the trip.

  “We don’t even know if there’s anyone left in Teir Harfa,” he said, and ordered the convoy back to Naqoura.

  “My Tanks Are Getting Mauled!”

  In early August, the IDF began firing cluster munitions into south Lebanon, blanketing huge swaths of terrain with millions of bomblets. Although the Israelis claimed to be attempting to neutralize Hezbollah’s rocket-firing positions, the submunitions saturated remote valleys, farmland, villages, and towns alike. Human Rights Watch subsequently estimated that 4.6 million submunitions were fired into Lebanon, the bulk of them in the last sixty hours of the war. UN ordnance officers told me that the figure was probably lower, but as the IDF refused to hand over its targeting data to deminers, it was impossible to determine. Many of the bomblets scattered over south Lebanon dated from the Vietnam War and should have been destroyed at the end of the 1970s. One air-dropped container carrying tennis-ball-sized U.S.-made BLU-63 cluster munitions failed to open properly in the air and struck the ground near Nabatiyah with its full consignment of dozens of unexploded munitions. The stamp on the side of the container registered the expiration date for the cluster bomb as July 1974.6 The UN estimated that 40 percent of the bomblets failed to explode and were left strewn in gardens, houses, and streets and hanging from the branches of trees. On the first day of the cease-fire, I saw unexploded U.S.-made M-77 bomblets lying on the main road outside Tibnine hospital. Hezbollah men had placed plastic crates over each one and directed traffic around them. The UN subsequently pinpointed more than a thousand separate cluster bomb strikes in south Lebanon. Chris Clark, a former British army officer who headed UN mine-clearing efforts in south Lebanon, told me the cluster bomb situation was “unprecedented and unbelievable” and the worst he had ever seen.

  On August 7, the IDF announced that plans had been finalized for a ground invasion up to the Litani River and that the operation could proceed in two days time. The diplomatic clock was ticking, however. The UN Security Council was drawing close to reaching an agreement on a cease-fire, which suggested there would be only a small window for a final military move.

  Olmert hesitated for two days, torn between ordering the invasion to go ahead and awaiting the outcome of the cease-fire negotiations. The Americans were promising him that a deal favorable to Israel was within reach. But IDF commanders grew increasingly exasperated with each postponement. “The men are fed up, they’re asking if this is or isn’t a war. Either [we fight] or we leave,” Major General Udi Adam, the head of the Northern Command, told Halutz.7

  On August 11, Olmert studied the draft of UN Security Council Resolution 1701 outlining a cease-fire, which in part called for the deployment of a strengthened UNIFIL numbering fifteen thousand troops and an arms embargo on Lebanon intended to prevent weapons from being smuggled to Hezbollah. There was no demand for the release of the two kidnapped Israeli soldiers, and the international force fell far short of Israeli expectations. The proposal was a disappointment for the Israeli government, and even though it was formally accepted the next day, Olmert finally ordered the ground invasion to proceed.

  The dash to the Litani River focused on the villages of Ghandouriyah and Froun on the western lip of Wadi Hojeir, a deep valley lying at the northern end of Wadi Salouqi. Paratroops from the Nahal Brigade were air-dropped into Ghandouriyah, which they took unopposed. An armored assault followed, with two dozen tanks descending westbound into the depths of Wadi Hojeir intending to join the paratroops holding the high ground in Ghandouriyah. But the valley, with its steep, brush-covered slopes, was a natural tank trap. And Hezbollah’s tank hunter-killer teams were waiting for the approaching Israelis. As the column began climbing up the western side of the valley it came under a withering fusillade of Kornet missiles. The missiles slammed into the tanks, setting several ablaze as the desperate crews scrambled out the hatches. The company commander cried over the radio, “My tanks are getting mauled,” then the radio went dead.8

  The beleaguered column received little support from the Nahal soldiers on the heights above. The paratroopers, discovering to their surprise that Ghandouriyah was not secured after all, found themselves pinned down by missile and mortar fire from Hezbollah men who had been hiding in the bombed ruins.

  By the time the fighting in Wadi Hojeir was over, eleven Israeli officers and soldiers were dead and more than fifty were wounded. Eleven of the twenty-four Merkava Mark 4 tanks had been hit. In all, thirty-three soldiers were killed, about a quarter of the war’s total IDF fatalities, in the final sixty-hour push to the Litani before the 8:00 A.M. cease-fire took effect on August 14.

  In a final gesture of its undiminished resolve, Hezbollah fired a total of 217 rockets into Israel on the last full day of the war.

  “We Brought the Israelis to Their Knees”

  The black Toyota Land Cruiser, its windows blown out, a rear tire flat, lurched to a halt beside the Saleh Ghandour hospital at the entrance to Bint Jbeil. Five Hezbollah men tumbled out. They said they were from Aitta Shaab a few miles to the west and had been in the thick of the fighting in the village for the past thirty-four days. Bint Jbeil and Aitta Shaab were in the middle of the area that was supposed to be under Israeli control. Had they not seen any Israeli soldiers on the drive from Aitta Shaab?

  “If you want to find Israeli soldiers in Aitta Shaab, look under the rubble,” said one of them with a grin. The fighters were bubbling with triumph and exhausted emotion. The fighter, who called himself “the Hajj” wore a grubby sweatshirt and khaki-colored trousers. Some of his companions wore combat trousers and boots, lending them a paramilitary appearance. One man’s head and upper left arm were bandaged. “Israel used all kinds of weapons against the resistance men,” the Hajj said. “Despite this, Hezbollah stood strong. I fired my weapon for the last time at eight A.M.”

  The southern half of Aitta Shaab facing the Israeli border was heavily damaged. Small houses of two or three floors each had pancaked into pathetic heaps of rubble. Walls were scored by bullets or punctured by tank rounds and missiles. Jagged shards of steel shrapnel and twisted sheets of missile casings littered the rubble-strewn street. Exhausted fighters, some in uniform, sat on the side of the road in contemplative silence. Two Hezbollah men walked out of a small shell-scarred mosque just as a loudspeaker in the minaret began blaring out a Koranic verse. “That’s the first time we have heard the Koran from the mosque in fifteen days,” one of the men said.

  Most of the residents had fled the village in the early days of the war, seeking refuge with their Christian neighbors in Rmeish a couple of miles away. Now they were returning, small groups of women, elderly men, and children walking along the shell-pocked road and gaping in awe at what had become of their village. It was evident that rebuilding the village would take months, if not years. But for the stoic residents, the massive destruction was a badge of honor for having confronted and triumphed against the vaunted Israeli army.

  “Yes, it looks like Leningrad,” conceded Sameeh Srour, a fifty-three-year-old policeman, “but we brought the Israelis to their knees.”

  The thirty-four-day war between Hezbollah and Israel is one of the most closely studied conflicts in recent history. The ability of a relatively small group of nonstate combatants to fight to a standstill the most powerful army in the Middle East has lessons applicable to future theaters of conflict. One influential study concluded that Hezbollah more closely resembled a conventional army in 2006 than a traditional guerrilla force through its emphasis on holding ground, using terrain rather than the population for concealment, and by concentrating its forces.9

  “Hezbollah’s position on the guerrilla-conventional continuum in 2006 was much closer to the conventional end of the scale than non-state actors are normally expected to be. In fact, Hezbollah was in many ways as ‘conventional’ as some state actors have been in major interstate warfare,” the study said.

  Nasrallah himself recognized this criti
cal distinction in the evolution of the Islamic Resistance, saying days after the end of the war, “I never made the commitment that we could prevent an invasion, but we managed to do so. The resistance withstood the attack and it fought back. It did not wage a guerrilla war, either. I want to clarify this point: it was not a regular army, but [it] was not a guerrilla [army] in the traditional sense, either. It was something in between.”

  With the help of its state sponsors, principally Iran, but also to an extent Syria, the Islamic Resistance was transformed in the six years between the Israeli withdrawal in 2000 and the outbreak of the thirty-four-day war into what military analysts today describe as a “hybrid” force—a nonstate militant group employing both irregular and conventional weapons and tactics in a single battlespace. The United States, in particular, has shown great interest in the 2006 war, suspecting that Hezbollah-style hybrid forces will provide a persistent threat to its military in the years ahead, requiring deep thought on future defense planning and force structure.

  “The conflict … that intrigues me most, and I think speaks more toward what we can expect in the decades ahead, is the one that happened in Lebanon in the summer of 2006,” said General George Casey, the U.S. army chief of staff, in May 2009. Referring to Hezbollah’s exploitation of rockets, antiship and antiarmor missiles, and sophisticated communications capabilities, Casey added that hybrid warfare opponents offer a conventional force like the U.S. military “a fundamentally more complex and difficult challenge than the challenges of fighting large tank armies on the plains of Europe.”

  Nonetheless, Hezbollah’s stalwart performance against the IDF in 2006 owes much to Israel’s poor handling of the war—from the unrealistic expectations and ill-considered decisions of the Israeli civilian and military leadership to the tactical shortcomings and lack of preparedness and coordination among the ground forces. In response to the public outcry over the humiliating outcome of the war, the Olmert government convened a commission of inquiry to examine what had happened and issue recommendations to prevent a recurrence. The commission, headed by retired judge Eliyahu Winograd, issued its final report in January 2008. Olmert, Peretz, and Halutz were harshly criticized, and the latter two subsequently resigned.