Warriors of God (14 page)

When Hezbollah's influence reached the teeming slums of southern Beirut, trucks were purchased and volunteers hired to remove the mountains of garbage that had remained uncollected for years. Hezbollah launched a construction organ in 1985, Jihad al-Bina, the Holy Struggle for Construction, that initially rebuilt war-damaged homes and buildings. One of its first tasks was to repair the damage caused by the massive car bomb that came close to killing Fadlallah in March 1985. Jihad al-Bina also established infrastructure for sewage disposal and delivered drinking water to households by truck. Over the years, the organization has expanded its services around the country, building and rehabilitating dozens of schools, hospitals, clinics, mosques, homes, and shops. It offers agricultural assistance to farmers, digging wells and providing financial credit and advice on land reclamation and crop cultivation.

In the aftermath of Israeli offensives against southern Lebanon in the 1990s, Jihad al-Bina's teams of volunteers quickly and efficiently surveyed damaged properties and began reconstruction plans even as politicians squabbled over how to spend foreign relief aid. Even during routine periods of daily conflict in the south, homes that had been struck by shellfire or machine gun rounds were speedily patched up by Jihad al-Bina.

Hezbollah's social welfare network astutely filled the void left by a neglectful Lebanese state, deliberately creating a culture of dependency that bonded Lebanon's Shias to the organization. It was the bedrock upon which Hezbollah could build its “society of resistance,” an all-inclusive vision of a steadfast and resolute community existing in a constant state of war readiness to confront the enduring threat posed by Israel. Although Hezbollah's leaders have never disguised its goal of creating a “society of resistance,” it is only in recent years, as the debate over Hezbollah's arms has come to dominate the political agenda in Lebanon, that the concept has been articulated more clearly on a public level.

In 2007, Sheikh Naim Qassem, the diminutive gray-bearded deputy leader of Hezbollah who often expounds upon the party's ideology, described resistance as “a societal vision in all its dimensions, for it is a military, cultural, political, and media resistance.”
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Hezbollah, he said, had always sought to build a “society of resistance” rather than limit it to a “group of resistance,” meaning a military organization operating independently of the society in which it exists. In Hezbollah's concept of the “society of resistance” lie echoes of Mao Tse-tung's famous principle of guerrilla warfare in which he likened guerrillas to “fish” swimming in the “sea” of the peasantry—the sea sustains and supports the fish in the same way that the peasantry sustains and supports the guerrillas. But Hezbollah takes the idea further than merely rallying the local population behind the guerrillas. For Hezbollah, the local population—Mao's peasantry—are also the guerrillas, both directly as combatants and indirectly in support roles.

“The resistance community is an integration of the people, whereby everyone gives, with each member of this society living their own normal life, of going to school, attending universities, working in factories, businesses, and the like, but should a confrontation arise requiring his
involvement, his participation will be according to the confrontation requirements,” Qassem explained.
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Those requirements could involve frontline fighting, providing logistical support, defending rear areas, speaking in support of the cause to the media, or simply enduring the privations and sacrifices of warfare with stoicism and steadfastness. Hezbollah's social welfare networks help sustain the community's will to embrace resistance. If your house is blown up by Israeli jets, never mind, Hezbollah will build you a new one. If your husband is killed fighting the Israelis, he will be honored and memorialized as a martyr, and you and your children will be provided for. “Thus the whole society becomes a resistance society; it provides what is required of it, then goes back to the normalcy of daily life,” Qassem adds. “Hence a resistance society is not one in which arms are randomly distributed to all the people, but such a community governs energies and capacities into an integrated process of confrontation.”

Building a community committed to an all-encompassing concept of resistance—resistance as a way of life—does not occur overnight. The resistance organization must inculcate this idea into the populace through the gentle arts of persuasion and emulation, immersing the community in a culture of resistance that begins in childhood and continues uninterrupted into young adulthood and beyond. The culture of resistance has been sustained through lectures, meetings, study groups, media propaganda—Hezbollah's
Al-Ahad
weekly newspaper began publication in 1984, and two years later its Al-Nour radio station began broadcasting.

The process of cultivating the “society of resistance” was intended as an enduring enterprise, one spanning generations, testifying to Hezbollah's patience and willingness to forgo short-term benefits for long-term sustainability.

The process of building the “society of resistance” has grown more intensive and sophisticated over the years as Hezbollah has gained influence
and experience. Initially, however, its methods were crude and clumsy. The Hezbollah men from Beirut and the Bekaa who infiltrated the villages of the south imposed on the generally laid-back residents a stringent moral regimen. Alcohol was banished from shops and restaurants; card and board games, including the ubiquitous backgammon, were banned. Women were required to wear headscarves, and the playing of music was frowned upon.

The UNIFIL peacekeepers watched with some unease as the area and people with which they had grown familiar over the previous eight years became steadily radicalized. “We noticed the increasing Islamization of the locals,” recalls Commandant John Hamill, who served five tours with the Irish UNIFIL battalion, two of them during the 1980s. “In 1978, there were few headscarves in our area, but by the late 1980s, they were becoming more radical.”

Some of the older southerners were ill at ease with the arrival of the zealous Hezbollah cadres, but many of the younger men were inspired by the party's religious rhetoric, which filled a void in their lives that the more secular Amal had ignored.

One veteran Hezbollah combatant says his eagerness to embrace the party was shaped by an upbringing in a south Lebanon border village that blended religious observance with violence, occupation, and eviction:

Besides the intrusive moral code it imposed on southern villages, Hezbollah quickly gained attention for its bold attacks against the Israelis
and the SLA. By mid-1985, Hezbollah was accounting for the majority of attacks against the occupation forces. UNIFIL recorded 248 attacks in its area of operations alone in the period between May and September 1985. In the second half of 1986, Hezbollah began launching “human wave” assaults against Israeli and SLA outposts dotting the front line of the occupation zone. The SLA's outposts were usually circular fortifications with walls of bulldozed earth and cement-filled oil barrels supplemented by a layer of old car tires, ringed by minefields and located on hills with dominant views of the terrain to the north of the zone. The positions had something of a medieval aspect, dominating, as many of them did, villages on the edge of the zone like feudal castles of old.

On January 2, 1987, Hezbollah launched an assault against the SLA outpost on a hill overlooking the village of Braasheet in what was the first concerted attempt to storm and overrun a militia position. The attack was headed by the Kid, the shy young man who had earned his spurs executing collaborators in the Sidon area as a member of al-Shabab al-Aamel. By 1987, he was a well-respected combatant and a sector commander responsible for part of the western edge of the occupation zone.

Prior to the nighttime attack, the unit spearheading the assault, consisting of about twelve fighters, walked beneath a Koran held aloft by Sayyed Abbas Mussawi as a blessing. Then the assault unit made its way through the darkness up the hill toward the SLA outpost. The Kid split his team into two columns for the final approach. There was another unit held in reserve and a fire support unit armed with mortars to the rear. They cut a path through the barbed wire and reached the wall of the compound, close enough to see the glow of a cigarette being smoked by a militiaman on the ramparts above. Once the attack began, several fighters equipped with RPGs quickly knocked out the SLA machine gun nests.

“One of the Lahd militiamen (SLA) was going berserk with his machine gun, firing wildly all over the place. One of our RPGs destroyed his position. There was a big explosion and he was killed,” the Kid recalls. The attackers scrambled over the parapets and down into the center
of the compound. The militiamen ducked into concrete bunkers and bolted the steel doors from the inside, leaving the Kid and his men roaming around the position. The Hezbollah men blew up an old Sherman tank and captured an armored personnel carrier, which they drove out of the occupation zone. The APC was driven all the way to Beirut with the Kid riding in triumph on the vehicle and Mussawi following behind in his car.

There was never any intention to hold on to captured SLA outposts. This was a campaign of hit-and-run assaults. Hezbollah's strategy in those early days, as articulated by Sayyed Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah at the funeral of the two fighters killed in Braasheet, was to “terrorize” and “exhaust” the SLA. If the SLA were to fall apart, Israel's hold on the south Lebanon “security zone” would inevitably weaken, requiring the Israelis either to reinforce the zone with their own troops, thus risking further casualties, or to pull out altogether.

While Hezbollah's strategy may have been sound, the tactics employed generally were counterproductive. The “human wave” assaults, some of which saw as many as two hundred fighters charging the well-defended SLA outposts in broad daylight, exacted a costly toll among the resistance cadres. In April 1987, about a third of the attacking force of sixty Hezbollah fighters were killed during a single assault on an SLA outpost.

Many of the Hezbollah men moving into the south were from the Bekaa and Beirut and were unfamiliar with the peacekeeping troops deployed with UNIFIL. While the local residents had come to appreciate the presence of UNIFIL in their villages, and Amal especially had cordial relations with the peacekeepers, to Hezbollah, the UN troops were just another foreign army on Lebanese soil whose checkpoints and patrols hampered the ability of the Islamic Resistance to confront the Israeli occupation forces. In August 1986, Hezbollah began attacking UNIFIL troops, mainly French soldiers. In early September, a roadside bomb killed three French soldiers on a morning run, and days later another French soldier died in a bomb attack against his patrol. The sudden slew of attacks led to the French pulling the bulk of its troops from UNIFIL.

The Irish battalion also faced its own problems with local militants, specifically members of a radical offshoot from Amal that later allied with Hezbollah: the Believers' Resistance, led by Mustafa Dirani. A young Irish lieutenant, Aonghus Murphy, was killed by a roadside bomb in August 1986 while leading a mine-clearing patrol along a dirt track near At-Tiri village. The attack deliberately targeted the patrol and was orchestrated, the Irish believe, by Jawad Kaspi, a local official with the Believers' Resistance, who had grown irritated at the peacekeepers' ability to uncover his IEDs. Irish soldiers nearby apprehended two teenagers who had detonated the bomb and turned them over to the local police, whereupon they vanished. More than two years later, when the Believers' Resistance was operationally dormant, Israeli troops abducted Kaspi in the hope that he had information on the fate of Ron Arad, an Israeli Air Force navigator, who had been captured by Amal militants in 1986 after bailing out of his Phantom F-4 jet when a faulty bomb exploded beneath it. The Believers' Resistance suspected that the Israelis were aided by the Irish peacekeepers in revenge for Murphy's death. Irish posts came under attack and three Irish soldiers were briefly abducted. A few months later, three Irish soldiers were killed when a large mine blew up a truck. It is still unclear whether the explosion was a deliberate attack or an accident; however, following the deadly incident tensions began to ease in the Irish area.

UNIFIL not only had to put up with threats from newly radicalized militants, it continued to face daily harassment from the IDF and SLA. SLA militiamen routinely fired heavy machine guns and mortar rounds in the general direction of UNIFIL outposts, sometimes with the deliberate intention of causing casualties, more often out of frustration at Hezbollah's attacks.

Given the attacks and harassment they faced from both sides, UNIFIL performed its duties with admirable restraint, despite the urge felt by many peacekeepers over the years to shoot back. In the early 1980s, the Dutch peacekeepers monitoring a stretch of the coastal littoral just
north of the occupation zone were routinely harassed by a local SLA commander. The Dutch battalion was replaced in 1985 by troops from Fiji. The Fijians, while gentle giants most of the time, had little patience for the SLA commander's routine provocations. One day, a Fijian officer spotted the militia officer at a checkpoint more than four hundred yards away. Undeterred by the distance, the Fijian officer raised his M-16 rifle and shot the militiaman through the throat. The SLA officer survived, but the Fijian area suddenly became very quiet.