Warriors of God (15 page)

Hezbollah's harassment of UNIFIL further exacerbated tensions with Amal, the latter already unhappy with the emergence of a robust Shia rival in its traditional stomping ground. By early 1988, it became obvious that a battle between Hezbollah and Amal for control of the south was imminent. Indeed, the catalyst for what would prove to be the first round in a bloody fratricidal war was Hezbollah's abduction of Lieutenant Colonel William Higgins, the head of the 76-man Observer Group Lebanon (OGL), the unarmed UN observer force that had patrolled the Lebanon-Israel border since 1949.

On February 17, 1988, Higgins held a routine liaison meeting in Tyre with Daoud Daoud, the top Amal leader in the south after Mohammed Saad's death. After the meeting, Higgins was returning to UNIFIL headquarters in Naqoura when his white UN-marked Jeep Wagoneer was intercepted on the potholed coastal road south of Tyre by a brown Volvo. Armed men dragged Higgins out of his car and into the Volvo, which then disappeared into the narrow lanes cutting though the coastal belt of orange orchards.

Two days later, a group called the Organization of the Oppressed on Earth issued a statement declaring it had snatched Higgins, “the criminal agent of the satanic CIA.” The kidnappers demanded the withdrawal of Israeli forces from south Lebanon; the release of all Lebanese detainees held in Khiam prison and all Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails; the end of U.S. influence in Lebanon; and the closure of all American diplomatic missions in the Middle East.

Although Hezbollah denied responsibility for kidnapping Higgins, it is common knowledge in south Lebanon that the operation was carried out by local Hezbollah men familiar with the area. According to
several well-placed sources in south Lebanon, Hezbollah bribed a local Amal security officer to ensure safe passage for the kidnappers through territory controlled by the movement. According to the sources, Higgins was initially held in the
husseiniyah
of Siddiqine village, a few minutes drive from the scene of the abduction, before being transferred elsewhere.

More than a year later, in July 1989, Israeli helicopter-borne commandos kidnapped Sheikh Abdel-Karim Obeid, who had replaced Sheikh Ragheb Harb as imam of Jibsheet village following the latter's murder in 1984. The Israelis justified the kidnapping on the basis that Obeid had information on the whereabouts of Ron Arad, the missing Israeli Air Force navigator, and two Israeli soldiers abducted by Hezbollah from the occupation zone in 1986. Furious at the abduction of Obeid, the kidnappers warned that they would execute Higgins unless the Lebanese cleric was freed. When the Israelis ignored the ultimatum, a videotape was released showing Higgins's lifeless body swinging from a makeshift gallows.

Higgins's remains were recovered in 1991, and a forensic examination confirmed that the videotaped execution had been a fake. The marine colonel had been tortured to death earlier and his body preserved. The United States offered a reward of $4 million for information leading to the arrest of Higgins's kidnappers. No American has served with OGL since.

In a twist to the story, in 2003, Zvi Rish, Sheikh Obeid's Israeli lawyer, claimed that the abduction of the Lebanese cleric had nothing to do with Arad and other missing Israelis but was a jointly planned operation by the United States and Israel to allow American investigators to question Obeid about the fate of Higgins and use him as a bargaining chip for the colonel's release. It was suspected that Higgins had been held in Jibsheet at one point and that a relative of Obeid had been involved in the snatch.

“It didn't sound good to admit that we kidnapped Obeid for the sake of Colonel Higgins,” Rish said. “It sounded better to say we did it for Ron Arad. It was a cynical exploitation of Arad's plight, because he had become a national myth by then.”

Higgins's kidnapping embarrassed and angered Nabih Berri and the Amal leadership in the south and brought the rivalry with Hezbollah to a breaking point. For Amal and its Syrian patrons, Hezbollah had gone too far. The Syrians already were unhappy at the extent to which its Iranian ally had penetrated Lebanon's Shia community. Furthermore, Hezbollah had cheekily assisted Fatah in its “war of the camps” with Amal by sending weapons and ammunition to the besieged Palestinians. The support was due partly to a moral sympathy for the Palestinian cause but also to a desire to further emasculate its Shia rival in a costly conflict. Hezbollah had even clashed with Syrian troops in early 1987, when Damascus sent its forces into west Beirut to smash the rule of the militias and restore some semblance of order. When Hezbollah refused to turn over a barracks in the Basta neighborhood of Beirut, Syrian soldiers killed twenty-three Hezbollah militants. Hezbollah leaders denounced the killings, and some fifty thousand supporters took to the streets in protest. Hezbollah militants even attempted to assassinate Colonel Ghazi Kanaan, the head of Syrian military intelligence in Lebanon, by firing rocket-propelled grenades at his car.

With the backing of Damascus, Amal launched a massive manhunt in cooperation with UNIFIL to locate Higgins, and in the process they cracked down on their Hezbollah rival. Fighting quickly spread throughout the south in what Hezbollah dubbed the “war for domination.” Hezbollah lost ground, and its cadres retreated to its mountain redoubts in the villages of the Iqlim al-Touffah heights east of Sidon.

Fresh fighting erupted in Beirut's southern suburbs a month later. This time, Hezbollah had the upper hand against an Amal that was weakened by poor leadership and undermined by Islamists within its ranks who secretly cooperated with Hezbollah. In one of the more bizarre tactical alliances that emerged during Lebanon's civil war, Samir Geagea's Lebanese Forces militia, Israel's ally in 1982 and an enemy of Damascus, began sending weapons from Christian east Beirut to Hezbollah's cadres in the southern suburbs. In desperation, Nabih Berri
appealed for a Syrian military intervention to crush his Islamist rivals. Hafez al-Assad decided instead to meet with a small delegation of senior Hezbollah officials at his summer palace in Latakia to hear their views directly. In his first meeting with Hezbollah representatives, Assad was told that the party did not seek to supplant Amal, but was primarily a resistance force against the Israeli occupation.

As Nasrallah explained a few months later, “we do not seek power and do not wish to compete with anyone over state positions; our political movement is based on the premise of fighting Israel.… For us, safeguarding the Islamic Resistance is what really matters.”
²³

Hezbollah was learning the logic of survival through pragmatism and compromise to defend its resistance priority. The cold reality facing Hezbollah and its sponsors in Iran was that the party faced annihilation if Assad chose to send his troops against it. A compromise was arranged at the end of May in which Syrian troops were allowed to deploy into the southern suburbs, while Hezbollah was permitted to keep its arms and resume limited operations against the Israelis in the south.

Despite the presence of Syrian troops in the southern suburbs, intermittent street battles broke out during the summer months between Hezbollah and Amal. In September, three top Amal officials, including Daoud Daoud, were killed in an ambush mounted by Hezbollah. Two months later, several Hezbollah leaders, including Nasrallah, Tufayli, and Mussawi, narrowly escaped injury when a bomb exploded beside their ten-car motorcade in the Bekaa Valley.

The worst clashes occurred in January 1989, when Hezbollah launched an offensive from its bases in the Iqlim al-Touffah heights against Amal-controlled villages to the west. Hezbollah quickly overran the villages, killing their Shia rivals in their homes and barracks. Amal rallied and launched a counteroffensive, slowly driving the Hezbollah cadres back into their strongholds of Jbaa and Ain Boussoir, villages that tower over the landscape to the west. Using old Soviet T-54 tanks, RPGs, and even axes and knives, the Shia combatants, many of them high on Valium and hashish, butchered one another with a ferocity scarcely matched at any other time during the civil war. Corpses with heads
chopped off or throats slit littered the bloody streets. “Alas, the Shia community is committing mass suicide,” wailed Sheikh Abdel-Amir Qabalan, a senior Amal cleric.

An agreement was reached at the end of January 1989 between Iran and Syria and their two quarrelsome proxies that strengthened the unwritten deal of May 1988. But fighting waxed and waned over the following months, flaring in December 1989 and again in July 1990 as a handful of Hezbollah fighters endured a three-month siege in their bases in the Iqlim al-Touffah. Among them was Hassan Nasrallah, who had intended only to visit the Hezbollah cadres but found himself trapped in the mountain pocket when Amal tightened its grip. Nasrallah had never played a direct military role in Hezbollah; his forte was logistics and organization. He had moved to Beirut in 1984 to work ostensibly as an assistant to Sayyed Ibrahim al-Amine, the party's spokesman, but was promoted three years later to the newly formed post of chief executive officer and a member of the Consultative Council. Although only twenty-nine years old when he was trapped with the hardened Hezbollah combatants in the Iqlim al-Touffah, Nasrallah was clearly a rising star within the party. The hardships and dangers of the “hundred-day siege,” during which he exchanged his black turban and cloak for combat fatigues, added to his stock and earned him the respect of the fighters. One Hezbollah fighter from the 1980s recalls his colleagues referring to Nasrallah as a “beacon” who would one day lead the party.

Iran and Syria hammered out a second “Damascus Agreement” in November 1990 to bring the internecine fighting to an end once and for all. This time, the arrangement held, and the fighting between the two Shia groups ended.

The end of the Hezbollah-Amal conflicts also marked the resolution of Lebanon's civil war, after sixteen long years. The momentum toward finding a lasting political solution to end the war had picked up a year
earlier, when Lebanon's aging parliamentarians were flown to Saudi Arabia and corralled in a hotel in the resort of Taif to negotiate a compromise agreement. After twenty-two days of argument, the parliamentarians reached consensus on a National Reconciliation Accord, more commonly known as the Taif Agreement. The agreement essentially permitted a more balanced distribution of power among the sects and provided for the gradual abolishment of the sectarian system, although no time frame was given. Syria's influence in Lebanon was formally enshrined by the accord, granting Damascus a role in helping establish and preserve security in the country. It also demanded the dismantling of all militias within six months of the agreement's adoption by parliament.

For Hezbollah, the Taif Agreement was wholly unsatisfactory. Not only did it fail to produce the sweeping constitutional reforms that Hezbollah sought, such as the immediate abolition of the sectarian political system, but the clause calling for the dismantling of all militias threatened the party's resistance priority.

Despite its misgivings about Taif, however, Hezbollah was compelled to accept the agreement due to dramatic domestic and regional changes that required the party to modify its position.

First, the Taif Agreement and the end of the civil war established Syria as the preeminent power in Lebanon, one that could not be ignored by Hezbollah despite their recent history of animosity and distrust. Following Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in August 1990, Syria sided with the U.S.-led coalition against Saddam Hussein, a move that permitted Damascus to finalize its control over Lebanon, with tacit American blessing, and also to secure a seat at the subsequent Madrid peace conference in September 1991. If Hezbollah was to maintain its ability to pursue resistance against Israel, it would have to accept the reality of the Pax Syriana and operate within whatever parameters Damascus wished to set.

Second, there was new leadership in Iran. Ayatollah Khomeini had died in June 1989 and been replaced by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who, as supreme leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran, was also Hezbollah's new source of authority. Khamenei was adamant that Hezbollah must maintain resistance against Israel, but Iran also was emerging from a
crippling eight-year war with Iraq and was seeking an understanding with the West. The argument in Iran over accommodation with the West was reflected in a fervent internal debate within Hezbollah over how, or indeed whether, the party should shape its policies to reflect the new realities in Lebanon and the region. Sheikh Sobhi Tufayli, who had been formally elected Hezbollah's first secretary general in 1989, believed that Hezbollah should maintain its distance from Lebanese politics and concentrate on the broader goal of confronting Israel. Tufayli, a disciple of Khomeini, had little respect for Khamenei, who would be dogged by suspicions that his religious credentials were insufficient for the position of
wali al-faqih
and supreme leader of the Islamic Republic. Lebanon's political system with its inequities, self-serving alliances, and trade-offs was anathema to a rigid ideologue like Tufayli.

But other leaders, such as Mussawi and Nasrallah, argued that if Hezbollah was to survive the post–civil war era, it would have to accommodate itself to the new situation. The dogmatic Islamist rhetoric and demands for an Islamic state would have to be softened, in public at least. Syria's paramount role in Lebanon must be recognized. Railing against the new realities was futile and possibly self-destructive.

The split within Hezbollah over its future direction was profound. Tufayli had watched with some dismay as his hold on the party he had helped establish began to weaken, his role as secretary general notwithstanding. The ranks of the emerging leadership were drawn from south Lebanon, and they were more open to the path of pragmatism than the dour and obdurate clerics from the Bekaa like Tufayli, or dogmatists like Hussein Mussawi, the leader of Islamic Amal. The differences were personal as well as doctrinal. In 1989, Nasrallah left Lebanon for the holy city of Qom in Iran, where he intended to pursue his studies having decided he could no longer work with Tufayli. Although he intended to remain in Iran for five years, he was persuaded to return and resume his duties after a few months when the situation with Amal deteriorated once more.