Warriors of God

by Nicholas Blanford

  By summer 2007, it was common knowledge that Hezbollah was operating in the mountains north of the Litani River, but as with its previous security pockets in the border district, it remained unclear exactly what Hezbollah was up to. Perhaps new bunkers were under construction; one Hezbollah fighter told me that the bunkers built after the war are larger and more sophisticated than those from before 2006, with electrical wiring and water pipes embedded in cement-lined walls rather than strung along the ceiling in plastic tubes.

  One intelligence source told me that parked UAVs had been spotted in these hills. The UK-based Jane’s Intelligence Review obtained commercially available satellite imagery of the area dated January and February 2008 and discovered a series of peculiar markings on the side of a sealed-off hill. Jane’s concluded that the configuration suggested possible use for training or rocket activity. Still, given Hezbollah’s custom of operating in strict secrecy inside its security pockets and the near-daily reconnaissance sorties by Israeli jets, UAVs, and AWACS aircraft, it would have been unusual for the organization to construct a site of significant military value in the open, thus raising the possibility that it was simply a decoy to keep Israeli imagery analysts baffled.

  In 2008, I learned that similar unusual ground markings had been detected in the area of Hezbollah’s original training camp near Janta on the border with Syria. The site included what appeared to be an IED range, a building assault course, a small arms firing range, a driver training track, and bunkers and tunnels dug into the sides of hills. Jane’s acquired satellite images of the area dated July 2008 and September 2009. When compared, they confirmed substantial construction activity during the fourteen-month period. If the site was genuine and not a decoy, the facilities suggested it was intended for specialist training rather than instruction in regular guerrilla warfare techniques taught at conventional training camps in wooded areas of the Bekaa Valley. The lack of ground cover at the Janta camp made it vulnerable to Israeli aerial observance, and therefore it was probably used on an intermittent basis and for short durations only.

  “Man, We Really Did It This Time”

  I gained a sharp understanding of Hezbollah’s sensitivity toward the Janta area in July 2007 while reporting a story on cross-border smuggling of commercial goods from Syria to Lebanon. I planned to visit a remote village called Tufayl, which lies at the tip of a fingerlike extension of Lebanese territory poking into Syria. To reach Tufayl requires following a rutted dirt track for about sixteen miles over barren mountain ridges before dropping into the arid approaches to the Syrian desert. For the trip, I took along my usual notebook and camera, but also a GPS device, compass, maps, and satellite phone as a contingency in case our vehicle broke down en route and we had to walk out. My colleague, Dergham Dergham, and I had been told that we needed permission from the army to visit Tufayl and had to apply at the military barracks in Ablah in the Bekaa Valley. But the military intelligence officers in Ablah said they could not help us and that we would need to visit the defense ministry in Beirut. It was midmorning Saturday, and the defense ministry would be closed. Dergham and I decided to forget Tufayl and instead report the smuggling story from another border village. We selected Yahfoufah, a pretty little hamlet tucked into a steep valley of craggy limestone about half a mile beyond Janta. A shallow river flanked by walnut and poplar trees splashed along the valley floor. We found a group of diesel smugglers pumping Syrian fuel from a tank on the back of a truck. They told us how the illegal border trade worked and allowed me to snap a few pictures.

  As we were leaving the village, a white van swerved in front of us, blocking the road, and three unsmiling bearded men climbed out. They were obviously Hezbollah. They asked us who we were and what we were doing in Yahfoufah and then instructed us to follow them. We arrived at a small house beside the river. Instead of asking questions as I expected, the Hezbollah men invited us to sit down while a demure young headscarfed girl served us tiny cups of coffee. It soon became evident from our taciturn hosts that this was not a gesture of Bekaa hospitality. After half an hour, several more unsmiling Hezbollah men arrived in a fleet of SUVs. Dergham and I were split up for the drive to the nearby village of Nabi Sheet. We parked beside a mosque and were marched up a flight of stairs into an office at the back of the building. The moment I had dreaded came when they inspected the contents of my backpack. Out came the camera, GPS, compass, maps, and satellite phone. It really did not look very good. I was made to wait in a conference room while Dergham was grilled separately. He later told me that the Hezbollah men had insisted to him that I was a spy. A slim middle-aged man with a broad, friendly smile beaming through his thick black beard wandered into the conference room and shook my hand.

  “Hello. It is good to see you again,” he said in English.

  Had I met him before? It was possible, although I did not recognize him.

  “You were here last year in Nabi Sheet with some Australian journalists,” he explained.

  Clearly a case of mistaken identity. I assured him I had not stopped in Nabi Sheet for at least five or six years. No, no, he insisted, he remembered me well.

  He placed a notepad on the table and began asking me questions about my background, such as where I was raised in England. He even threw in a couple of questions about English soccer teams. Each answer was carefully written down. Dergham joined me and we were served strong sweet tea in tiny glasses—“to help you stay awake,” one of the Hezbollah men joked.

  I gave them a list of Hezbollah officials they could contact who would verify my identity. Dergham, a Shia who lived in Beirut’s southern suburbs, had his own contacts within Hezbollah. But our captors did not bother to make a single phone call. Instead, one of them politely asked us whether we would mind being handed over to military intelligence. We said that was fine, but I groaned inwardly. It meant that we would be entering a nightmare of slow-paced bureaucracy, ensuring that there would be no swift return to Beirut for either of us. In retrospect, Dergham and I concluded that the Hezbollah men probably did not believe we were spies but calculated that interrogating and temporarily detaining us would send a message that foreigners, especially journalists, were not welcome in this corner of the Bekaa.

  We were bundled out of the mosque and driven in two separate vehicles at high speed through Nabi Sheet’s narrow, winding streets and out into the open countryside. We rendezvoused with two cars full of plainclothes military intelligence agents who were waiting for us at a farm in the middle of the valley. The officers took custody of us and we continued our journey in their vehicles, arriving minutes later at the Ablah military barracks.

  For the next eight hours Dergham and I were questioned repeatedly on who we were and where we had been, while a muscled officer with a shaved head and wearing a grubby white vest slowly wrote down our answers, his face frowning with concentration. Writing, it seemed, did not come easily to our interrogator, who looked as though he would have been much happier extracting answers from us with the aid of a car battery and crocodile clips. They probably believed we were innocent as well, but as we’d been handed to them by Hezbollah, they could not let us slip out the back door immediately. It is no secret that Lebanese military intelligence cooperates closely with Hezbollah, especially in sensitive areas like the Bekaa. One of the officers even had a clip from a Nasrallah speech as the ringtone on his cell phone.

  An agent handed me my camera and asked me to run through the pictures. I scrolled through the shots I had taken of the diesel fuel smugglers that morning, which elicited no interest from the officer. Suddenly, a picture flicked up on the small screen showing me firing a 9 mm automatic pistol. It was from a couple of weeks earlier, when Dergham and I and another friend had lunched at a restaurant in the Bekaa frequented by Hezbollah men and then fired a few potshots at a watermelon with a pistol. I had foolishly forgotten to erase the pictures.

  “This is you?” asked the astonished agent.

  I nodded guiltily, and Dergham closed his eyes i
n resignation. It was going to be a long night.

  Firing weapons is illegal in Lebanon, although it must be the most violated of all Lebanese laws. When Nasrallah begins his speeches, the crackle of celebratory gunfire is heard all over Beirut, despite frequent pleas by the Hezbollah leader for his followers to desist. During the height of the sectarian tensions in Lebanon in 2007 and 2008, the Shia residents of the southern suburbs would aim their celebratory fire toward the neighboring Sunni quarter of Tarikh Jdeide, the spent rounds tumbling out of the sky onto the roofs and streets of their political rivals. One enterprising individual even rented out his rocket-propelled grenade launcher so that people could fire grenades into the air for $30 a pop.

  If the intelligence officers were looking for an excuse to detain us longer, now they had one. They refused to allow us to make any phone calls. Dergham suspected that they were deliberately stalling, knowing that our first call would set in motion the process of getting us released. In Lebanon, if you want to get something done, it helps to have wasta, connections with powerful people who can pull strings on your behalf. Both Dergham and I had sufficient wasta, if only we could contact them.

  At midnight, we were handcuffed and driven to the cell block at one end of the barracks. Our cell stank of stale sweat and urine. The lights were switched off, plunging the prison block into darkness. I lay on a smelly wool blanket, using my boots as a pillow, and breathed in the fetid stink from the cell’s latrines. Dergham, lying on another reeking blanket, stirred in the darkness.

  “Man, we really did it this time,” he muttered.

  We later learned that we had been tracked down and that the phone lines were burning overnight with generals in the security services, cabinet ministers, prominent businessmen, politicians, and diplomats working to secure our release. The breakthrough came at nine o’clock the next morning when we were told we could leave military custody. The Lebanese military prosecutor presumably had concluded that it was not worth the trouble to charge a foreign journalist with brutally gunning down a defenseless watermelon.

  An “Organized and Official Transfer”

  Even before Hezbollah began constructing its new lines of defense north of the Litani River after the war, it was steadily restocking its depleted arsenal. Such was the apparent flow of weaponry into Lebanon that Nasrallah was able to declare just five weeks after the end of the war that Hezbollah had already restored its entire military organizational structure and its armaments. “Today, 22 September, 2006, the resistance is stronger than at any time since 1982,” he said.

  Nasrallah’s boast may have been rooted more in propaganda and reinforcing Hezbollah’s deterrence against Israel than in reality. But there was little doubt that Hezbollah’s arsenals were rapidly filling up with all manner of weaponry.

  After a truck loaded with 122 mm Katyusha rockets and mortar shells was stopped by Lebanese customs police on the edge of Beirut in February 2007, Nasrallah candidly admitted that weapons were being transferred to Hezbollah’s bases in the south. “The resistance declares now that it is transporting weapons to the front [south],” he said; “we have weapons of all kinds and quantities, as many as you want … we don’t fight our enemies with swords of wood.”

  In addition to the air corridor between Iran and Syria, the traditional conduit for the transfer of Iranian arms to Hezbollah, the Iranians may have taken advantage of the sea route to smuggle even larger quantities of basic weapons and ammunition. In 2009 alone, three suspected Iranian arms shipments were intercepted en route. The largest shipment was discovered in November when Israeli commandos stormed the Antigua-flagged Francop sailing between Egypt and Syria and found five hundred tons of Iranian-supplied weapons hidden in the hold. The armaments included twenty-nine-hundred 107 mm and 122 mm Katyusha rockets, three thousand antitank rounds for 106 mm recoilless rifles, and twenty thousand hand grenades.

  “This could supply Hezbollah for a whole month of fighting,” said Rear Admiral Rani Ben-Yehuda, the Israeli navy chief of staff.

  In May 2010, Israel leaked to The Times of London satellite photographs of a military base eighteen miles east of Damascus near the town of Adra with tunnels sunk into the flanks of the valley where rockets and missiles were stored. Hezbollah militants allegedly had their own living quarters on site and access to a fleet of trucks to ferry the weapons across the border. Western and Lebanese intelligence sources say Hezbollah usually transfers weapons at night and in adverse weather conditions to hinder aerial and satellite reconnaissance. Following the 2006 war, some of the dirt tracks traditionally used by Hezbollah in the Janta area were graded and hardened and in some cases asphalted, according to commercially available satellite imagery.

  As an additional security measure, Hezbollah switches off the local electricity supply and jams communications during the transfer of weapons across the border. When local residents suddenly lose the picture on their televisions and their phone lines go dead, they know that the arms convoys are on the move.

  Yossi Baidatz, a top Israeli military intelligence officer, told Israel’s Knesset in early May 2010 that the huge quantity of arms being sent to Hezbollah by Iran and Syria could no longer be described as smuggling, but was an “organized and official transfer” of weapons.

  Hezbollah was also seeking specific weapons systems to burnish the Islamic Resistance with a new qualitative edge against Israel in the next war. Like Israel, top Hezbollah military officials and the leadership of the IRGC’s Quds Force undertook a comprehensive after-action review to assess which weapons and tactics worked, discover where shortcomings lay, and prepare fresh battle plans for the next encounter. The main findings appear to have placed a priority on acquiring improved air defense systems and new rockets of increased range and fitted with guidance systems enabling Hezbollah to strike specific strategic targets in Israel such as government, industrial, and military facilities.

  “We Will Destroy Buildings in Tel Aviv”

  The Zelzal-2 was the largest rocket in Hezbollah’s arsenal during the 2006 war, but by 2010 the organization was thought to have acquired the Syrian-manufactured M-600 short-range ballistic missile. Little is known about the M-600. Some analysts believe it is an indigenous Syrian-designed system, others that it is a version of the Iranian Fateh-110 rocket upgraded by the Syrian Scientific Research Council, the state-run weapons development authority. The solid-propellant rocket can carry an eleven-hundred-pound warhead, has a range of around 150 miles, and, according to some analysts, is fitted with an inertial guidance system allowing the weapon to strike within five hundred yards of its target at maximum range. Israel believes the M-600 was transferred to Lebanon in the latter half of 2009. The range of the M-600 allows Hezbollah to deploy the rocket well to the north of the UNIFIL-patrolled southern border district. To strike the oil refinery at Ashkelon, for example, the rocket could be launched from just south of Beirut. To hit targets in Tel Aviv, Hezbollah can deploy M-600 batteries in its hidden strongholds in the central and northern Bekaa Valley.

  At almost 27 feet in length, the M-600 is harder to camouflage than smaller rockets systems. To overcome the problem, the rockets are fired from the same specially adapted shipping containers used to launch the Zelzals. The container is fitted on the back of a flatbed truck and the hinged top flips open to reveal a launch rail that can be elevated to the angle necessary for firing.

  In April 2010, reports surfaced that Syria had transferred Scud ballistic missiles to Hezbollah. Unlike the relatively unknown M-600s, Scuds evoke among Israelis grim memories of the 1991 Gulf War, when Saddam Hussein fired several of the missiles at Tel Aviv. The notion that Hezbollah was now deploying these weapons along Israel’s northern border caused a storm of controversy and recrimination in Washington, Damascus, Beirut, and Jerusalem.

  The allegations threatened to undermine the cautious attempts by President Barack Obama’s administration to reengage Damascus after the policy of isolation under President George W. Bush. The State Department summone
d a Syrian diplomat for the fourth dressing-down in as many months, warning Syria against its “provocative behavior” and that Scuds in Hezbollah’s hands “can only have a destabilizing effect on the region.”

  Sheikh Naim Qassem gave a typically noncommittal response, telling Ash-Sharq al-Awsat newspaper that the fuss “passes over us like a drizzle of light rain.”

  Possession of the high signature Scud presents significant logistical challenges. Unlike the solid-fueled M-600, the Scud uses liquid propellant, a mixture of two highly toxic substances that must be stored and handled by trained operators and entail a lengthier launch preparation time. Smuggling the forty-foot missiles into Lebanon would be a formidable undertaking given the intelligence scrutiny of the Lebanon-Syria border. The dedicated transporter-erector-launcher required to fire the missiles is even larger, and presumably more difficult to sneak into Lebanon, than the missiles themselves.

  Given that the Scud and M-600 carry warheads of similar size, the only real advantage for Hezbollah is the former’s extended range—three times the distance of the latter. However, there are few targets that would elicit Hezbollah’s interest south of the Tel Aviv area lying beyond the reach of the M-600. Perhaps the only target worthy of the Scud’s logistical complications is the nuclear reactor at Dimona in southern Israel, 140 miles south of the Lebanese border. How much damage would be caused by a direct hit by a Scud on the nuclear facility is uncertain, but it would have enormous propaganda value, especially if the strike came in retaliation to an Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear sites.