Warriors of God

by Nicholas Blanford

  The concept of reciprocity against Israel is a cornerstone of Hezbollah’s strategy. In a speech in February 2010, Nasrallah warned that if Israel hit Hezbollah’s stronghold in the southern suburbs of Beirut, known as Dahiyah, the Islamic Resistance had the appropriate weapons to accurately target and destroy buildings in Tel Aviv:

  They [Israel] think they can demolish Dahiyah’s buildings as we barely “puncture their walls.” But I tell them today: You destroy a Dahiyah building and we will destroy buildings in Tel Aviv.… If you [Israel] target Beirut’s Rafik Hariri International Airport, we will strike Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion International Airport. If you target our electricity stations, we will target yours. If you target our plants, we will target yours.

  The strategy of reciprocity is not confined to the land theater, but has expanded to the Mediterranean front. In May 2010, Nasrallah indicated that Hezbollah now has the ability to target shipping along Israel’s entire coastline. “If you blockade our coastline, shores, and ports, all military and commercial ships heading toward Palestine throughout the Mediterranean Sea will be targeted by the rockets of the Islamic Resistance,” he said.

  Hezbollah fighters have hinted to me that they have acquired longer-range antiship missiles beyond the C-802/Noor system used in the 2006 war. Iran fields several reverse-engineered antiship missiles other than the Noor. The largest is the Raad, based on the Chinese HY-2 Silkworm, which can carry a seven-hundred-pound shaped-charge warhead a distance of 225 miles. If Hezbollah has received the Raad, it could theoretically target Israeli shipping off the coast of southern Israel from launch sites as far north from the border as Beirut.

  “We Are After Quality, Not Quantity”

  As for new air defense weapons, another key priority for the Islamic Resistance, news reports in mid-2009 claimed that Hezbollah’s cadres were receiving training in Syria on the SA-8 Gecko radar-guided mobile antiaircraft system. At the time, the SA-8 units were not thought to be deployed inside Lebanon, possibly due to Israeli warnings that the transfer of improved air defense systems to Hezbollah would constitute a “red line.”

  Other reports claimed that Hezbollah had received the SA-24 Grinch shoulder-fired antiaircraft missile system, a more advanced version of the SA-18 Grouse on which it is based. Hezbollah also may have acquired the Misagh-2 shoulder-fired missile produced by Iran and based on Chinese technology.

  As usual, Hezbollah refuses to confirm such allegations, and the truth of the claims will probably only become clear in the next war with Israel. But the acquisition of the SA-8 and SA-24 systems would raise the threat profile to Israeli aircraft operating in Lebanese skies, especially to low-flying helicopters and UAVs, necessitating a change in operational procedure.

  In 2007, some Israeli media outlets claimed that Hezbollah had installed radars and antiaircraft missiles on top of Mount Sannine, at almost eight thousand feet Lebanon’s third highest mountain. DEBKAfile, an Israeli “intelligence” website that is suspected of being used sometimes to propagate disinformation, said that Hezbollah had “commandeered” the summit at the behest of Iran and Syria. Its radar and air defense systems on the mountaintop “are capable of monitoring and threatening U.S. Sixth Fleet movements in the eastern Mediterranean and Israeli Air Force flights,” it said.1

  The top of Sannine is completely exposed. There is no vegetation, only sheets of frost-shattered limestone and rocky outcrops, so any permanent radar structure erected on Sannine would be vulnerable to attack. Indeed, anyone attempting to erect anything larger than a sand castle would soon be spotted by shepherds, hikers, hunters, and not least by Israeli aerial reconnaissance patrols, which frequently fly over the summit. I climbed up the mountain shortly after the DEBKAfile story was published in order to confirm my doubts. As expected, the summit of Sannine had changed not one bit since I was last there a year earlier. Beyond my fellow hikers and the odd lone eagle riding the thermals, nothing stirred within sight of the peak.

  However, it was true that there was a Hezbollah presence in the Sannine foothills to the east, which rise up behind a string of Shia villages along the western flank of the Bekaa Valley. These rugged and forested hills had constituted Hezbollah’s training areas since the early 1990s. From 2006, the level of activity in these hills increased significantly as Hezbollah launched a massive recruitment and training drive unprecedented in scope since the organization emerged in the early 1980s. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of young Shias were recruited into the ranks of the Islamic Resistance in the few years after the war. For the first time, I began to hear of new recruits or seasoned veterans who had disappeared from their homes to attend courses in Iran, underlining how large the recruitment and training process had become. Driving up the Bekaa Valley, it was possible sometimes to hear the distant sound of machine gun fire and see puffs of smoke from explosions in wooded hills where the new recruits were drilled.

  Hezbollah also resurrected the multifaith volunteer force, the Saraya Muqawama al-Lubnaniyya, or Lebanese Resistance Brigades, which originally was formed in 1997 and then disbanded in 2000 when Israel withdrew from Lebanon. Depending on past military experience, the Saraya volunteers could attend monthlong courses in the Bekaa split into three ten-day phases in which recruits were taught basic weapons-handling skills, communications, deploying IEDs, and first aid. Reviving the Saraya served several purposes for Hezbollah. The inclusion of non-Shia partisans into a reservist “resistance” force helped strengthen the impression of a national resistance rather than one rooted solely in the Shia sect. And giving training to Hezbollah’s political allies—Christians, Sunnis, Druze, and Shias alike—helped build esprit de corps within the parliamentary opposition to Fouad Siniora’s government between 2006 and 2008. The Saraya militants were not expected to play a significant combat role in the event of another war with Israel; one Hezbollah fighter told me sniffily that the Saraya would “look after the refugees from the south.” But the basic weapons training with AK-47s and rocket-propelled grenades meant Hezbollah had a useful army of street fighters under its control if the rising sectarian tensions in Lebanon from 2006 should flare into violence.

  Despite the enormous expansion of the Islamic Resistance and the revival of the Saraya in 2006, Hezbollah fighters insist to me that the same strict standards still apply to all recruits. “We are after quality, not quantity,” said one Hezbollah unit commander. “There are many new recruits since 2006, but not all of them succeed. Some cannot endure the training, others do not have the right frame of mind. They leave or are expelled or some choose to work in the party’s bureaucracy instead.”

  Nevertheless, since 2006, Hezbollah’s ranks have swelled with untested raw recruits, well-trained and motivated, perhaps, but none of whom have experienced the rigors and uncertainties of combat.

  Paying Lip Service to Resolution 1701

  The consolidation of Hezbollah’s new front line north of the Litani River and the extensive training in the Bekaa overshadowed suspected covert military preparations in the UNIFIL-patrolled border district. Resolution 1701 expressly forbade the presence of weapons and armed personnel between the Blue Line and the Litani other than those of the Lebanese government and UNIFIL.

  Hezbollah paid lip service to Resolution 1701 publicly, but it was inconceivable that the organization would jeopardize its efforts to plan for the next war because of the edicts of a UN Security Council resolution. Nonetheless, Hezbollah was careful to mask its activities in the border district, partly to disguise what preparations were being made, but also so as not to embarrass the Lebanese army, which has primary responsibility for ensuring the implementation of Resolution 1701. While the focus of Hezbollah’s war preparations before 2006 was on the remote valleys and hills of the border district, since then it appears to have centered on the villages and towns of the area. It is more than probable that new bunkers and tunnels have been constructed in the villages to connect buildings and arms storage points. In 2007, one of my sources in south Lebanon told me that Hezbo
llah men had been spotted returning to their homes at dawn “covered in dirt,” suggestive of digging activity. Weapons and ammunition are believed to have been smuggled into the border district and dispersed in the villages. There may have been some new underground construction in the rural areas as well. In summer 2009, a UNIFIL officer told me that Hezbollah had spread a large canvas screen over part of a valley floor beneath which small tracked earth excavators were spotted removing rock and soil. UNIFIL and Lebanese army liaison officers were denied entry to the valley by Hezbollah men, who claimed that it was private property and therefore outside UNIFIL’s jurisdiction. The digging lasted for about two months. Was it another decoy?

  Sometimes Hezbollah’s clandestine activities in the UNIFIL area were accidentally exposed. In March 2008, Italian UNIFIL soldiers on a night patrol in armored vehicles spotted a truck towing a trailer in the opposite direction. As the patrol turned to follow the truck, two Mercedes cars raced past. Once between the truck and the patrol, the cars turned and stopped, headlights on full beam at the approaching Italians. Five men climbed out of the cars and retrieved automatic rifles from the trunks. A tense standoff occurred until Lebanese troops arrived fifteen minutes later, by which time the gunmen and the truck and trailer had disappeared.

  In December 2009, another UNIFIL night patrol came upon several men behaving suspiciously on a hill overlooking the border south of Khiam. On seeing the patrol, the men escaped by car, leaving behind 550 pounds of explosive inside twelve boxes. The size of the explosives suggested that the men were Hezbollah operatives preparing to mine a border road with an antitank belly charge.

  In July 2009, a half-constructed building on the outskirts of Khirbet Silm village was destroyed by as many as sixty separate blasts when stored ammunition exploded early one morning. The munitions were generally old and consisted mainly of mortar rounds and short-range Katyusha rockets. UNIFIL found evidence that it was an actively maintained depot, and the UN condemned the incident as a breach of Resolution 1701. Three months later, there was a report of another mysterious explosion in a garage in the center of Teir Filsay village. Israel released UAV footage purporting to show Hezbollah men removing munitions, including a suspected Katyusha rocket, from the building and transporting them to a lockup in a neighboring village. Hezbollah produced its own video footage showing the “Katyusha” was just a roller garage door. When UNIFIL investigators inspected the site in Teir Filsay, they discovered that Hezbollah had torched the inside of the garage to remove any remaining evidence. But evidence of what? UNIFIL was never able to determine exactly what had happened, nor how the Israelis were able to deploy a UAV over the site quickly enough to film the aftermath.

  Israeli civilian and military officials regularly grumbled that Hezbollah was flouting Resolution 1701 by bringing arms into Lebanon and storing them in the border district. Ehud Barak, who was appointed Israeli defense minister in 2008 in Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, complained in August that Resolution 1701 “did not work, doesn’t work, and is a failure.”

  But Israel’s complaints were undermined by its own breaches of Resolution 1701, such as the near-daily aerial reconnaissance flights and the continued occupation of the northern (Lebanese) part of Ghajar, which had been patrolled by Israeli troops since the 2006 war.

  In July 2010, Israeli military intelligence took the unusual step of releasing video footage, maps, 3-D animated graphics, and aerial photographs of what it said were Hezbollah’s arms depots in Khiam. The Israelis said that Khiam was just one of a hundred villages in the border district that had been transformed into “military bases.” “Every day, they are collecting significant intelligence on our forces along the border, and every day they are engaged in digging, building, and laying communications infrastructure to prepare themselves for war,” said Colonel Ronen Marley, commander of the IDF’s Western Division on the border.

  In publicizing the sensitive intelligence data, the Israelis hoped to bolster its deterrence by warning Hezbollah that it had detailed information on its military disposition in the border area. Furthermore, it hoped to catalyze resentment toward Hezbollah from the local population, who might take exception to living next to a building packed with ammunition and weapons, the existence of which the Israelis were aware and which they would assuredly flatten in the next war.

  A Giant Leap in Technology

  In tandem with the acquisition of new and improved weapons and the expansion of the Islamic Resistance, Hezbollah, with the assistance of Iranian technology, made further advances starting in 2006 in its communications and electronic warfare capabilities.

  After the war Iranian technicians installed a highly sophisticated secure cellular telephone network restricted to Hezbollah military commanders and intelligence personnel using frequency-hopping encrypted cell phones. Hezbollah’s network allows top cadres to communicate in complete security and cannot be accessed by normal civilian networks.

  The fiber optic telecommunications network was expanded in the south, particularly in Hezbollah’s new frontline areas north of the Litani River, connecting bases, training areas, and local headquarters. UN deminers saw Hezbollah men digging trenches alongside roads, including those constructed by the Iranian company, and burying the inch-thick fiber optic cables. The network also extended into new areas, covering the northern Bekaa and allegedly crossing the mountainous backbone of Lebanon to link up with the handful of Shia villages tucked into the mainly Christian-populated mountains overlooking the Mediterranean north of Beirut. The high-speed broadband data connections for the first time allowed Hezbollah commanders to hold video conferences via computer screens. In southern Beirut, Hezbollah technicians installed a WiMAX system allowing long-range wi-fi coverage of a mile or more.2

  Fiber optic cables cannot be intercepted electronically, only by a physical tap, which presents a challenge for those looking to eavesdrop on Hezbollah’s communications. However, in October 2009, Hezbollah personnel discovered in a valley a mile and a half from the border with Israel a highly complex tapping device hooked into one of its fiber optic cables. The bulky device, which UNIFIL suspected was planted during the 2006 war when Israeli troops briefly controlled the area, was buried a couple of feet underground. It had three main components: an interceptor attached to the fiber optic cable, a transmitter buried about ten yards away and connected to the interceptor by a cable, and a battery pack containing 360 individual batteries. The three units were booby-trapped with explosives. There were no identifying marks except for a small metal label inscribed “Omnetics,” the name of a Minneapolis-based company specializing in the manufacture of commercial and military-spec cables and connectors.

  UNIFIL electronic experts said that the device was highly advanced. The transmitter had no antenna aboveground and may have used a VLF (very low frequency) system to send radio signals through solid rock. The UNIFIL technicians even thought that the batteries could be recharged wirelessly. “The unit could have carried on working for twenty-five years,” one UNIFIL officer told me.

  It appears that Hezbollah had discovered that there was a tap somewhere on its fiber optic cable, possibly due to the reduced flow in data between two nodes on either side of the interception. A Hezbollah team slowly walked the line, stopping every few yards to check the cable. An Israeli UAV steadily tailed the Hezbollah team. When the tapping device was discovered, the Hezbollah men backed away, and the Israelis attempted to destroy the evidence by remote control. But only the transmitter blew up. When UNIFIL and Lebanese troops arrived to investigate the cause of the explosion, the Israelis were obliged to contact the peacekeepers and warn them to stay away. The second device and battery pack were successfully blown up the next day, but only after UNIFIL and the Lebanese army had photographed and inspected the machine in situ.

  The secret electronic intelligence war between Hezbollah and Israel has steadily intensified since 2006, as each side uses ever more sophisticated technology to outwit the other, similar to the tit-for-ta
t advances in the IED war of the 1990s.

  In December 2010, the Lebanese army announced that it had discovered two Israeli reconnaissance systems hidden inside hollow fiberglass rocks, similar to those used by Hezbollah to disguise IEDs, on the Sannine and Barouk mountains. The device on Sannine consisted of five separate components, including a laser designator, a long-range camera, a transmitter, and a battery pack. Both devices were planted overlooking the Bekaa Valley to the east and apparently transmitted collected data to a mountaintop IDF outpost in the Shebaa Farms in direct line of sight.

  Two more Israeli camera systems were uncovered in March 2011, this time in south Lebanon. One of them was hidden close to the UNIFIL headquarters in Naqoura and had views of the coastline south of Tyre. This device apparently transmitted its data to passing Israeli UAVs.

  The sudden discovery of sophisticated Israeli surveillance systems was not a coincidence but due to the persistence and expertise of Hezbollah’s counterintelligence technicians. Equipped with spectrum analyzers, the technicians constantly sweep the country looking for anomalous radio signals that could indicate the presence of an Israeli surveillance device. The technique takes patience and skill, especially as the Israeli devices presumably convey data using short-burst transmissions of a second or less. Once a suspicious signal is detected, it can be monitored and analyzed for a period of time and then its location determined. Hezbollah passes on the information to the Lebanese army, which recovers the devices from the field.

  By summer 2010, the ether in the southern Lebanon border district was awash with rival electronic signals that constantly disrupted civilian and military communications and radar coverage. In early 2010, some UNIFIL battalions were picking up rocket launch signals on their ground radars. The radars showed the source of fire inside Lebanon, tracked the trajectory, and marked the impact point in Israel. Only there were no rocket launches. UNIFIL investigators initially pondered whether Hezbollah had found a way to trick radars by transmitting false launch signals to disguise its real rocket launches. Then UNIFIL thought it might be due to Israeli interference; but the peacekeepers were unable to come to a firm conclusion.