Warriors of God

by Nicholas Blanford

  The Narrowing Corridor

  The dilemma facing Hezbollah over the investigation into the Hariri assassination is but one component of a broader paradox that has dogged the organization since its inception in the 1980s. For all the progress Hezbollah has made in its three decades of existence, it remains beholden to two potentially conflicting dynamics: its military and ideological submission to Iran and its social and political obligations to its Shia constituency in Lebanon. The two are not necessarily mutually compatible, but Hezbollah needs both if it wishes to survive in its current form.

  Iran provided the critical state support in terms of weapons, logistics, training, and funds that allowed Hezbollah to become arguably the most powerful nonstate military organization in the world. Such comprehensive and sustained backing comes with a hefty price tag: total obedience.

  On the other hand, Hezbollah could not have survived for three decades in as fractious, complex, and pluralistic an environment as Lebanon if it had failed to maintain the support of the Shia community. That explains why Hezbollah has invested so much effort over the years in building and sustaining its popular base, primarily through the provision of social services to satisfy material needs but also by unifying the community through the tireless promotion of a “society of resistance.”

  While Hezbollah confronted Israel in south Lebanon and serviced the needs of its Shia constituents, its two commitments lived comfortably with each other. Yet a glance at Hezbollah’s history since the early 1980s suggests that meeting its obligations to both Iran and the Lebanese Shias is a paradox that is growing ever more difficult to reconcile.

  In the beginning, when Hezbollah burst upon the scene, Lebanon was mired in civil war, Israel was occupying the southern half of the country, and there was little or no state control. Lebanon was a broad canvas upon which the nascent organization could do much as it pleased under the stewardship of the Iranians. This was the era of suicide bombings against Western targets, kidnapping foreigners, and hijacking airliners. The idealistic Islamic revolutionaries scorned, rejected, and vowed to overturn the Lebanese political system with its sectarian checks and balances, nepotistic feudal leaders, and corrupt patronage networks. Even Syria was treated as an enemy, its officers and soldiers attacked, the decrees of Damascus ignored.

  But with the end of the civil war in 1990 and the dawn of the Pax Syriana in Lebanon, the corridor began to narrow, necessitating a change of attitude and conduct, if not ideology and agenda. Syria was no longer an enemy but a newfound ally and protector. Hezbollah astutely chose to embrace parliamentary politics, despite its earlier public disavowal of the political system, winning seats in the 1992 election and performing credibly in the years ahead as an opposition to the governments of Rafik Hariri. It had no desire to join the government but was content with its parliamentary toehold, where it could generally remain aloof from the sordid bargaining and compromises inherent in Lebanese politics. Hezbollah’s pragmatism and recognition of Syrian hegemony were rewarded by Damascus in the preservation of its resistance priority. These were Hezbollah’s “golden years,” in which it waged an increasingly successful resistance campaign against Israel and enjoyed a broad consensus across Lebanese society. Analysts spoke of Hezbollah’s “Lebanonization” and pointed to the party’s behavior in the 1990s as a potential model for the accommodation of Islamist groups within pluralistic societies.

  Inevitably, the national consensus over Hezbollah’s right to bear arms ended with the successful conclusion of the resistance campaign when Israel unilaterally withdrew in 2000. The corridor had narrowed a little further as Hezbollah faced the quandary of justifying resistance when there was nothing left to justifiably resist. However, the Shebaa Farms loophole provided the excuse, and Syria’s continued domination of Lebanon provided the cover. Hezbollah also began articulating the argument of a national defense strategy incorporating its arms to counter the growing number of dissenters.

  Then, in 2005, following Hariri’s assassination and the subsequent disengagement of Syria from Lebanon, Hezbollah found itself hemmed in even more. It allied with onetime rival Amal, reached out to the Christian supporters of Michel Aoun, and entered the government for the first time, taking a previously unwanted step deeper into the morass of Lebanese politics to better defend its resistance priority now that the Syrian umbrella had been removed. The fate of Hezbollah’s weapons became the single most divisive issue in Lebanon, splitting the country roughly in two. Hezbollah played for time, bogging down the question of its arms in a series of fruitless national dialogue sessions beginning in early 2006 in which Lebanon’s top leaders discussed weighty national issues.

  In July 2006, Hezbollah’s weapons inadvertently plunged the country into a destructive war followed by successive political crises and deadlock that soured communal tensions even further and sparked bouts of street violence, mainly between Shias and Sunnis. Even some Shia sympathizers were beginning to rue the alienation of the community from other Lebanese sects and to privately question the cost of unlimited support for Hezbollah. Some southern Shias began to wonder aloud how many more wars they would have to endure under the rubric of Hezbollah’s defense of the nation.

  By early 2008, the sheen of nobility and sacrifice that had given luster to the “resistance” in the 1990s was looking badly tarnished as Hezbollah squirmed within its ever-narrowing corridor to face down the increasing hostility and impatience of its Lebanese critics. Under pressure, it began making errors in judgment. The mass sit-in in downtown Beirut in December 2006 was supposed to last for no more than two or three weeks; but when the Siniora government refused to buckle, Hezbollah found it could not back down first. The protest grew increasingly banal and apathetic, each passing month of continued stalemate simply underlining its failure.

  Even those who had given Hezbollah the benefit of the doubt watched aghast as the party’s fighters stormed west Beirut in May 2008 and fought furious battles with the Druze in the Chouf Mountains, smashing a long-standing promise never to turn its weapons against other Lebanese. The rage and humiliation felt by Lebanon’s Sunnis further aggravated the already raw wound of intra-Muslim relations, a serious setback to Hezbollah’s commitment to unity between the two great Islamic sects.

  True, Hezbollah’s domestic power grew substantially in the vacuum left by the withdrawal of Syrian forces in 2005 and the consequent reduction in Damascus’s influence. But this was a power that was not won through persuasion, compromise, and consensus, but through the weight of its arms and the implicit threat of violence. By 2011, it is fair to say that many Lebanese fear Hezbollah. They fear its obedience to Iran, they fear its determination to keep its arms at all costs, and they fear that its unrelenting hostility toward Israel will inevitably drag Lebanon into yet another destructive conflict.

  “A Thing Called Greed”

  Even as Hezbollah has struggled to fend off its opponents, it has had to cope with rot from within. Despite its reputation for financial probity, Hezbollah was rocked in 2009 by a serious financial scandal when it emerged that Saleh Ezzieddine, a prominent Shia businessman with close ties to the party, had embezzled an estimated $300 million in a massive Ponzi scheme. As many as ten thousand Shia investors had handed money to Ezzieddine, who promised colossal returns of between 40 and 80 percent. Ezzieddine was trusted because of his close ties to Hezbollah. He owned the Dar al-Hadi publishing house, which handles many of Hezbollah’s publications and is named after Nasrallah’s son who was killed in 1997. The story broke when Hussein al-Hajj Hassan, a Hezbollah MP, sued Ezzieddine for bouncing a check worth $200,000. Nasrallah denied Hezbollah had anything to do with Ezzieddine, but the scandal left thousands of defrauded investors feeling angry and bitter and many accusing Hezbollah of “moral guilt” because they had entrusted their investments to Ezzieddine on the basis of his ties to the organization.

  More significant, however, I began to hear of rumblings of discontent from some of the rank-and-file fighters questioning the
investments made by Hezbollah officials. Hezbollah was supposed to be dedicated to the cause of confronting Israel; why were Hezbollah officials involved in the sordid pursuit of profit from investments, which, after all, is forbidden by Islamic law? And where did they find tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars to invest in the first place? Even Jihad Mughniyah, the son of the late Imad, who had given such a rousing speech in the wake of his father’s death, was suddenly tainted with corruption rumors. Residents in Beirut’s southern suburbs whispered that Jihad had invested half a million dollars in a cell phone business and had been spotted driving an expensive SUV. Where did the son of the great Hajj Radwan find $500,000 to invest?

  The scandal represented “the greatest alarm bell” for Hezbollah, wrote Ibrahim al-Amine, the chairman of Al-Akhbar newspaper and Hezbollah confidant. He accused Hezbollah of becoming lazy and soft, surrendering its position as “the sacrificers of worldly life” for a “certain pattern of consumption … a thing … called greed.”

  According to Hezbollah sources, in the wake of the Ezzieddine scandal, Nasrallah assembled the top leadership, admonished those who had been paying too much attention to filling their bank accounts, and instituted new rules governing personal finances. Nasrallah is surely aware that the festering cancer of corruption poses an even greater menace to the organization in the long term than the military threat posed by Israel. Uri Lubrani, who for many years was Israel’s top civilian official overseeing Lebanon, once declared that Hezbollah would be defeated only when it became infected by the PLO “virus”—in other words, lazy, bourgeois, and greedy.

  Even as Nasrallah was slapping the wrists of his avaricious lieutenants, Hezbollah was running into problems with its Shia support base, particularly in the Bekaa Valley. Despite Hezbollah’s strict adherence to Islamic values, it has learned over the years to grant a relatively wide latitude to the Shia community as a whole and not become too involved in issues of lifestyle or behavior in areas under its control. Hezbollah is wary of roiling social waters by trying to impose its brand of Islamic observance upon such a heterogeneous society. In the Hezbollah stronghold of the southern suburbs of Beirut, for example, it is more common to see young girls dressed in tight jeans and T-shirts with long flowing hair than wearing the full-length black chador worn by more pious women. Alcohol is banned from stores, but so long as decent behavior is maintained, Hezbollah is uninterested in stopping young Shias from enjoying themselves at restaurants, beaches, movie theaters, and fairgrounds.

  That laissez-faire attitude even extends into the lawless northern Bekaa, where drug barons retain small private militias to protect their hashish fields, where stolen cars are traded and counterfeit money printed. Hezbollah disapproves of drugs on moral and religious grounds, even though it is not averse to using narcotics as a weapon of war against the West and Israel. But it turns a blind eye to the cultivation of hashish in the flat, dusty plain of the northern Bekaa Valley, unwilling to antagonize the powerful clans that profit from the illicit business.

  “They Can’t Afford to Mess with the Tribes”

  One chilly fall morning in 2008, as the sun crested the barren ridges of the mountains marking the border with Syria to the east, a bleary-eyed bodyguard dressed in military trousers and boots with a gray blanket wrapped around his shoulders shuffled out of a ground-floor dormitory clutching a small metal pot of steaming Turkish coffee. He poured us tiny cups as we sat in the courtyard of a walled compound belonging to Noah Zeaiter, one of the Bekaa’s most notorious hashish farmers. His home lay outside Knaysse village, a small cluster of stone houses and narrow, empty streets that looked like the set of a Sergio Leone western. Surrounding Noah’s compound were fields of shoulder-high green cannabis plants ready for harvesting. In the distance we could hear the faint staccato thump of machine gun fire carried on the cool morning breeze from the wooded hills to the west, where a Hezbollah training session was under way.

  Noah was still asleep upstairs. He and his men had spent the previous night shooting up a house with machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades in Baalbek, a few miles to the south of Knaysse. The house belonged to a building contractor who unwisely had run away with $140,000 of Noah’s money. The gunfire had attracted the attention of local Hezbollah men in Baalbek, but when they saw it was Noah and his boys who were the source of the commotion, they left him alone.

  The sun had climbed high into the deep blue sky by the time Noah joined us for coffee. At over six feet tall and powerfully built, with a thick ponytail dangling from beneath his baseball cap, Noah was a legendary figure in the Bekaa. There were dozens of outstanding warrants for his arrest, but the police were unwilling to tackle the ferocious bandit and his small private militia comprised of villagers and criminals on the run who had sought his protection. Unusually for the publicity-averse hashish farmers of the Bekaa, Noah did not mind meeting journalists and attempted to cultivate something of a Robin Hood image, the altruistic outlaw growing and selling hashish to feed and clothe his people in the face of government neglect.

  Although the annual harvest was about to begin, Noah had more pressing matters to deal with first. It turned out that the brother of the building contractor whose home Noah had riddled with bullets and RPG rounds the night before was a local Hezbollah official. The Hezbollah man repeatedly called Noah on his cell phone during the morning as the two of them tactfully negotiated the fate of the building contractor. “He’s telling me I’ll get the money back, just don’t kill his brother,” Noah chuckled.

  Noah had little liking for Hezbollah—his face wrinkled with disgust and he pretended to wipe dirt off his shoe when he referred to the party for the first time in the conversation. He boasted that he had chased some Hezbollah men out of Knaysse who had offered to rebuild the village mosque, and that he had told the villagers not to vote for Hezbollah in the municipal elections. “Hezbollah is not allowed to come onto my land,” he said. “They are powerful, but they can’t afford to mess with the tribes here, so they leave us alone.”

  Hezbollah doubtless regarded Noah and his kind with equal distaste, but local political realities deterred the organization from tangling with the Bekaa clans. However, in response to rising vehicle thefts, Hezbollah in 2008 gave a quiet nod to the Lebanese authorities to crack down on car thieves operating in the Bekaa Valley. Hezbollah apparently was spurred into green-lighting the operation when thieves were caught trying to steal the car of Jihad Mughniyah, who was hunting with friends in the valley. The tough clansmen apparently were unimpressed with Mughniyah’s “Don’t you know who I am?” protestations.

  But the army and police soon expanded their crackdown from car theft gangs to currency counterfeiters and hashish farmers. In late 2008, the army raided Noah’s compound, forcing him to flee with his men into the surrounding hills. In early 2009, Lebanese troops ambushed and shot dead a top member of the powerful Jaafar clan, sparking a reprisal attack in which four soldiers were killed.

  Some of the tribes vowed to vote against Hezbollah in the parliamentary elections in June 2009 as punishment for permitting the crackdown in the first place. More broadly, the bitterness revived the old grievance that the modern Hezbollah was dominated by southerners and that the Bekaa warriors, those who had comprised the original cadres and leadership in 1983, were marginalized from decision-making levels.

  In an attempt to mollify the angry clans, Nasrallah devoted a speech to the Bekaa fighters at the end of May, a week before the elections, in which he paid tribute to their sacrifices in the resistance and denounced the long-standing neglect of the region by the state.

  Even in the more passive rural environment of south Lebanon, Hezbollah sometimes has to tread carefully in order not to upset local sentiment. In the buildup to the municipal elections in 2010, I heard of two Shia-populated Hezbollah-supporting villages in the south—and there may have been more—that rebelled at the imposition of a list of candidates presented by local Hezbollah men as a fait accompli. The village elders refused
to accept the lists, compelling apologetic Hezbollah officials to hold a series of meetings to work out a compromise.

  This perpetual delicate dance performed by Hezbollah to balance its obligations to Iran and to its Shia constituency in Lebanon was evident in the long-awaited update to its original 1985 Open Letter manifesto. The new manifesto, unveiled in December 2009, was an exercise in pragmatism and tact in which Hezbollah’s unyielding worldview was tailored to conform to the prevailing political reality in Lebanon. Much of the thirty-two-page document covered familiar ground in articulating Hezbollah’s resistance priority. The United States was cast as a hegemonic global bully, the origin of “every aspect of terrorism” and the “most loathsome nation in the world.” Israel was a “usurping fabricated entity” that “represents an eternal threat to Lebanon.”

  However, the document was perhaps more notable for its omissions than for the topics included. Gone were the fiery rhetoric and zealous language of the 1985 original. Gone, too, was any reference to an Islamic state in Lebanon and to the wilayat al-faqih, even though it remains the indissoluble thread that binds the party to Iran. Although Hezbollah’s leaders long ago publicly acknowledged that the establishment of an Islamic state in Lebanon is a practical impossibility, given the country’s pluralistic identity, it remains among its founding principles. Indeed, as an Islamist, jihadist organization, it would be anathema for Hezbollah to renounce the ambition of living in a state run by Sharia law. The new document even excluded any repetition of the 1985 manifesto’s demand for the destruction of Israel as an ideological imperative.