Warriors of God (29 page)

On the night of August 3, an Israeli Blackhawk helicopter skimmed above olive groves, hugging the hilly terrain before descending into a valley a few miles northwest of Nabatiyah. Soldiers from the Golani Brigade's Reconnaissance Battalion dismounted, split into two teams, and slipped through the undergrowth toward the nearby village of Kfour. One team crept through olive trees until they reached a stone wall running alongside a narrow lane. On the other side of the lane were several houses, one of them the home of Hussein Qassir, a district commander of the Islamic Resistance. The Israelis buried three roadside bombs packed with steel ball bearings, each one a yard apart, in the stone wall opposite Qassir's home before retreating through the olive grove. But before the Israelis reached the helicopter, they were spotted by Hezbollah fighters on night watch duty, and a firefight broke out. Israeli jets and helicopters flying cover for the Golani troops came under antiaircraft fire from Hezbollah and the Lebanese army. The shooting ended at three in the morning as the Blackhawk took off with all the Israeli troops safely on board.

As dawn broke two hours later, armed Hezbollah men swept the village, checking for booby-trapped explosive devices and making sure that all the Israelis had departed. The atmosphere was still tense from the unexpected raid and from the presence high above of an Israeli UAV, invisible against the watery blue sky but audible from its motorcycle
whine. Among the fighters was Hussein Qassir, who was accompanied by another senior officer, Sheikh Taysir Badran, the Islamic Resistance commander in Nabatiyah, and three more combatants. As they passed the stone wall opposite Qassir's house, the three bombs exploded simultaneously, apparently detonated by a radio signal transmitted from the circling drone above. All five Hezbollah men were killed instantly. Qassir's severed head was later found seventy-five feet from his front door.

The next day, three of the dead, including Qassir, were buried in Kfour in a ceremony attended by some two thousand mourners, many of whom crammed into the small pine tree–shaded cemetery. The bodies, wrapped in plastic bags, were lifted out of the coffins and lowered into their graves. Hezbollah fighters wept as a sheikh clambered down to deliver a final prayer. Then the corpses, shrouded with Hezbollah flags, were entombed beneath stone slabs.

“We will create funerals for the occupation troops and our retaliation will be so hard that pain for the Israeli troops will head the next stage [of the conflict],” vowed Sheikh Nabil Qawq during a visit to Kfour.

The Israelis had reassessed their tactics months earlier, choosing to adopt a more confrontational policy using special forces units to wage roadside bomb attacks and deep penetration raids to keep Hezbollah on the defensive. Now it was Hezbollah's turn to reexamine its operational choices and devise new means of staying a step ahead of the Israelis.

In June, Hezbollah switched its attention from the Israeli-controlled border zone to the Jezzine panhandle, the northern tip of the zone, which was patrolled by a three-hundred-strong garrison of SLA militiamen. The absence of Israeli troops and the rugged landscape of mountains and pine forests that surrounded the salient allowed Hezbollah to infiltrate the Jezzine area with relative ease to plant and detonate IEDs. A spate of attacks from mid-June on claimed the lives of several militiamen and civilians. Hezbollah took responsibility for the SLA fatalities, but the civilian deaths went unclaimed. As the casualty toll mounted,
traffic along the bomb-laced mountain roads around Jezzine almost stopped, and many families fled to Beirut.

It was easy to understand the fear that gripped the population of Jezzine in the summer of 1997. The threat of roadside bombs made even a routine shopping trip in Jezzine a daunting prospect. Even the topography of the salient, with its tall, jagged peaks and forested slopes looming over the town and the neighboring villages, helped create a sense of isolation from the rest of the country and a paranoid feeling that one was being watched all the time by silent and unseen observers hidden in the surrounding mountains.

Most SLA officials attempted to convey an impression of confidence, but there was no doubt that their morale was sinking with each fresh bomb attack. “The bombs have killed my friends,” said a thin, pale-faced SLA officer who chain-smoked as we chatted in his flat-roofed one-story home outside Jezzine. “They died in front of their families. I'm scared for my family and I'm scared to leave the house. I don't use my car anymore. I walk everywhere.”

His wife, in her midtwenties but looking much older with her dyed yellow hair and gray skin, nervously twisted her wedding ring around her finger as she talked. “I can't sleep at night with worry,” she said. “As women, it's as if we are in prison here. Our husbands are in the Army of the South [SLA] and we cannot leave the area. There are government agents here in Jezzine and they know everything about us.”

During the hot summer months of 1997, tempers flared in tandem with civilian casualties—victims of roadside bombs in Jezzine or increasingly reckless Israeli and SLA shelling. On August 18, another roadside bomb killed Jean and Rima Nasr, a teenage brother and sister who were driving on a road south of Jezzine. Again, there was no claim of responsibility. Instead, Hezbollah and the Israeli army blamed each other for the attack. The victims were the children of Assad Nasr, an SLA security officer from the Christian village of Aishiyah, a few miles south of Jezzine, who had been killed a year earlier. Two of Assad Nasr's brothers had also died fighting with the SLA, and the fourth sibling, Emile, was the commander of the SLA's Jezzine battalion in 1997.

Enraged at the sight of his dead nephew and niece lying in the
morgue of the Jezzine government hospital, Emile Nasr instructed SLA artillery gunners to open fire on Sidon. Over the next hour, around half a dozen 155 mm shells slammed into the center of the bustling port town, killing seven people and wounding nearly forty more.

Hezbollah launched as many as eighty Katyusha rockets into northern Israel. It was the first cross-border barrage since Grapes of Wrath sixteen months earlier, but both sides quickly moved to de-escalate the crisis. Still, Hezbollah had served notice that the pre–Grapes of Wrath equation of cross-border rockets for Lebanese civilian casualties would continue to hold regardless of the April Understanding and the possibility of censure by the monitoring group.

A week later, Emile Nasr stood at an SLA checkpoint on the Dahr al-Ramleh road outside Jezzine, where many of Hezbollah's roadside bombs had been planted. Several militiamen milled around a T-55 tank, the barrel of which pointed at oncoming traffic.

Dressed in a faded olive-green Israeli army uniform with bleached Hebrew markings on his breast pocket, his thumbs hooked nonchalantly into his belt loops, Nasr denied ordering the shelling of Sidon. The order, he said, had come from Antoine Lahd, the SLA commander. “We hit Sidon because it's more important than hitting the villages. It was a message to the Lebanese government for them to stop the roadside bombs,” he said.

But Nasr now topped Hezbollah's hit list of SLA officers. Given the fate of his siblings, did he not fear assassination?

“It is in the hands of God,” he replied simply.

Tensions began to ease in Jezzine toward the end of August as Hezbollah's attention returned to the Israeli-manned sectors of the occupation zone.

Following the Kfour commando raid, security was tightened in the villages north of the occupation zone to counter further Israeli airborne assaults. The
haras
, or guardian, units responsible for nighttime observation duties around southern villages increased their patrols, staking
out potential helicopter landing spots or infiltration passages from the zone or by sea. IEDs were planted along potential access routes, tracks and roads alike. Key points around the villages, on hilltops, and in valleys, were observed each night by armed fighters equipped with walkie-talkies. “We realized after Kfour that the Israelis were trying new tactics against us, therefore, we planned new tactics to fight back,” Sheikh Nabil Qawq told me at the end of September.

The turnaround began on August 23, when Hezbollah fighters staged a nighttime ambush against an Israeli army unit in a deep brush-covered ravine in the western sector, the first such raid in many weeks. At the end of the month, six Israeli soldiers burned to death during combat with Amal fighters in a deep frontline wadi when Israeli artillery guns fired phosphorus rounds into the tinder-dry undergrowth that covered the steep slopes. Four Amal fighters were killed in the clash, but several Israeli soldiers found themselves cut off and desperately climbed up the side of the valley to escape the blaze. But the hill was too steep and the flames too fast. The rings of white ash marking the impact site of each phosphorus shell on the blackened hillside were visible for weeks afterward, until they were finally washed away by the winter rains.

By the end of August, eighteen Israeli soldiers had been killed in south Lebanon, excluding the seventy-three soldiers who died in the helicopter collision, suggesting that 1997 might exceed the previous year's toll of twenty-seven, setting a new record in combat fatalities.

But worse was to come for Israel. For at the beginning of September, Hezbollah was putting in place the final touches for an operation to ensnare some of Israel's finest special forces troops in an elaborate and deadly trap. The outcome of the operation would force Israel to reassess once again its tactics in south Lebanon, and it would later be ranked by Hezbollah as one of its most successful missions ever.

FIVE
 

ANSARIYAH, south Lebanon
—For ten days, Ghalib Farhat, a citrus farmer, had been bothered by the near-constant whine of an Israeli reconnaissance drone circling invisibly high above the orange groves that surrounded his small home on the northern outskirts of Ansariyah. A small village of square whitewashed houses on a headland overlooking the cobalt-blue Mediterranean midway between Sidon and Tyre, Ansariyah was far from Israel's front line. Adding to Farhat's unease was the strange Hezbollah activity in the village, which had begun about the same time that the UAV had appeared. Each night around ten o'clock, a car drove slowly past his home, the headlights switched off, along a lane lined with pine trees. Four or five people
would climb out of the car and slip into the orange groves on either side of the road. Farhat assumed that the fighters stayed there all night; but there was never any sign of them by daybreak. That evening, he had seen them enter the orange groves as usual.

While Farhat and his wife, Kholoud, watched television that night and their four children slept in the next room, a mile to the west, sixteen black-clad figures silently emerged from the sea onto a rocky beach near an abandoned two-story building. They were members of Israel's Shayetet 13 naval commando unit. All were dressed in matte black clothing with soft rubber boots. Most of them carried AK-47 rifles, favored by the naval commandos for their rugged dependability. At least one of them was weighed down by explosives for IEDs. The stretch of coastline where they had come ashore was the only place where there were no inhabited buildings. But it was still risky. The coastal road was separated from the narrow beach by a few yards of bamboo thickets, and cars continued to pass despite the late hour. The team hurried across the road one at a time while their comrades spread out to cover them. Once across, they began the hard uphill slog toward the northern end of Ansariyah.

Ahmad, a slim, hollow-cheeked nineteen-year-old Amal fighter, crouched among bushes on the edge of an orange grove at the northern end of Ansariyah. Somewhere in the blackness near him were three more of his Amal comrades, all of them armed with AK-47 rifles and rocket-propelled grenades. They were part of a backup unit deployed around the village to support the Hezbollah fighters hidden among the orange trees a few hundred yards to the north of his position. The Hezbollah ambush squad, all of them with extensive combat experience in the south, was split into three sections—two of six combatants each and one of eight. Their commander was “Abu Shamran,” who lived in Ansariyah.
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