Warriors of God (30 page)

Ansariyah and the surrounding villages were traditional Amal strongholds where Hezbollah had only a light presence. A few days earlier, Hezbollah men had met with local Amal commanders and informed them that resistance fighters were on operational duty each night on the northern perimeter of the village. The Amal commanders were given
few details, for security reasons, but the Hezbollah men told them that if they were to hear shooting and explosions, they would know what was happening.
Be careful
, the Hezbollah men said,
that you don't shoot us in the confusion. Our men will be out there, too
.

Local Amal units were rotated each night to provide assistance to the Hezbollah professionals. On this night it was the turn of Ahmad and his comrades. Ahmad was glad of the opportunity to participate in an operation alongside Hezbollah. He and his comrades often grumbled that it was always Hezbollah that grabbed the headlines for its resistance exploits, rarely Amal.
At least we are getting a share of the action this time
, he thought.

The naval commandos struggled through the dense undergrowth on the steep climb leading to the northern edge of the village. As they reached the brow of the hill, they moved onto a dirt track running beside an orange grove and a windbreak of scrawny pine trees. The team cautiously approached a lane on the northern edge of Ansariyah.

Hidden among the orange trees were Abu Shamran, the Hezbollah commander, and another fighter crouching barely four yards from the Israelis.
²
Abu Shamran could hear the soldiers talking to each other in Hebrew and felt they were close enough to touch. But he waited for the right moment before springing the trap.

That moment came as the naval commandos bunched up on reaching an iron gate beside the lane. Abu Shamran silently gave the order to attack and the first roadside bomb exploded in a deafening thunderclap, blasting the assembled soldiers with steel ball bearings and knocking them all to the ground. As they were recovering from the shock of the blast, the team was hit by a second bomb, which exploded in a large bubble of orange flame. Then the Hezbollah men hidden in the orchard opened fire with machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades. One bullet struck the commander of the Israeli team in the head, killing him instantly.

At the sound of the first explosion, Amina Farhat, Ghalib's mother, sat bolt upright in bed.
Could Amal and Hezbollah be fighting each other again?
, she wondered. Her son, Ghalib, a former fighter with the Communist
Party, immediately recognized that the explosions and rate of fire signaled something far more serious than another clash between the rival Shia groups.

“Get the children up,” Ghalib Farhat ordered Kholoud, his wife. The firefight was just two hundred yards up the road, and Ghalib figured that his mother's two-story house next door would provide better protection than his simple bungalow. The terrified family ran outside and barged in through the back door of his mother's home. As they took cover beneath the stairway, Ghalib noticed the flash and heard the report of a third explosion among the orange trees.

The third blast was caused by a bullet detonating explosives carried by Sergeant Itamar Ilya, the Israeli unit's sapper. The explosives were intended for roadside bombs that the team planned to set up around Ansariyah. The blast tore Ilya into bloody fragments and killed more members of the team. Eleven of the sixteen naval commandos were now dead, with at least another four wounded.

As the firefight raged among the orange trees and the surviving Israeli commandos desperately radioed for support and evacuation, Hussein Younis, a baker from the nearby village of Msaylah, drove his BMW toward Ansariyah, completely unaware of the fighting ahead of him. In the backseat was Samira, a young married woman with whom he was having an affair. As Hussein approached the scene of the ambush, he noticed black shapes moving on either side of the road just ahead and then saw bright flashes as the Israeli soldiers opened fire on his vehicle. The bullets punched holes through the windshield, showering Hussein with glass chips as he ducked down onto the passenger seat. The car's momentum propelled the vehicle forward into the firefight as bullets shredded the chassis and tore into Hussein. One gave him a glancing blow to the skull, another hit an arm, another a shoulder. The car rolled off the road and stopped against an irrigation pipe. Still the Israelis blasted the car at almost point-blank range. Hussein saw the dashboard above his head explode into splinters of wood, plastic, and glass. The shooting stopped, and Hussein eased himself out of the passenger door onto the road.

“Get out of the car,” he whispered to Samira. He could hear her whimpering faintly and see she was not moving. There was nothing he could do for her. Hussein crawled into an overgrown ditch and hid.

The thud of helicopter rotor blades alerted the surviving Israeli commandos that help was at hand. Cobra helicopter gunships unleashed TOW antitank missiles into the orange trees and blasted the area with their 20 mm chain guns slung beneath the aircraft, creating a perimeter of fire to allow CH-53 rescue helicopters to land. Abu Shamran and his team, two of them slightly wounded, pulled back from the ambush site and slipped away unseen. Ahmad and his Amal comrades opened fire with their rifles and rocket-propelled grenades in the direction of the Israelis before pulling back themselves. It was twenty minutes since the first explosion had decimated the naval commandos.

Under the cover of fire from the Cobra helicopters, two CH-53 helicopters touched down in open fields. Reinforcements from the elite Sayeret Matkal unit and the Israeli Air Force's aeromedical evacuation force dismounted from the CH-53 helicopters about a hundred yards from the ambush site and split into two groups. The commandos formed a defensive perimeter while the medics began ferrying survivors and bodies into the stationary helicopters.

The medics had a terrible task to perform. Some of the commandos had been blown to pieces, but the medics were obliged to observe Jewish custom and recover the entire remains of each individual. The rescuers were certain that two bodies were missing, but despite scouring the darkness with their night vision goggles, they could find no trace of them. What they failed to realize at the time was that the remains of one of the missing commandos were already on board a helicopter. The body parts of the other commando, Sergeant Ilya, whose explosives had been detonated by a bullet, were lying scattered over the battlefield. Hezbollah's close-quarter machine gun fire had stopped, but the Israeli rescuers faced a new threat as mortar rounds began falling around them. The shelling claimed a final victim. A doctor from the rescuing force was killed when a mortar round exploded beside him. Nearby Lebanese army antiaircraft units blindly pumped rounds into the night sky, hoping to hit the helicopters and jets flying overhead. They also fired illumination
shells to light up the ambush site. An F-16 jet fired a missile at an antiaircraft position. Israeli missile boats offshore fired a few rounds toward the village to silence the mortar fire. Several houses were damaged and two civilians wounded.

When news of the enormity of the disaster unfolding in south Lebanon reached the Israeli government, urgent contacts were made to the Americans to pass a message to Syria. Israel would respond with massive force if Hezbollah prevented the rescue mission from proceeding, the Israelis warned. The Americans contacted Damascus, and the message was then relayed to the Lebanese. Hezbollah pulled back, and Lebanese troops began moving into the area. One Amal fighter with an RPG on his shoulder who was running to join in the battle was seen being picked up by a hulking Lebanese army sergeant and thrown into the back of a jeep.

Shortly before dawn, more than four hours after the battle began, the last CH-53 lifted off and headed south.

Hussein Younis was still conscious as the Israelis departed. After hours of noise and commotion, the sudden silence was unnerving. He listened to the sound of the morning breeze blowing dust and garbage across the road. Ignoring the pain from his torn and bruised muscles, he inched toward the car and climbed inside. Samira was lying facedown on the backseat. It was obvious she was dead.

Hearing voices, Hussein looked through the shattered windshield to see two men walking toward the ambush site. He called out to them, but the men froze and turned away. He called to them again, and one of the men paused and spoke to his companion. Then they turned toward Hussein's car. For the first time since he had driven his Mercedes into the middle of the firefight, Hussein Younis thought he might survive after all.

A row of pine trees beside the lane was on fire, the branches crackling with orange flames and thin tendrils of smoke spiraling into the pale blue dawn sky. The branches of trees lay smashed and torn on the ground covered in rubbish from a nearby garbage dump. Civilians and
a few local Amal fighters clutching AK-47s and wearing T-shirts and jeans milled around the site, collecting trophies of the battle—weapons, ammunition, clothing, wet suits, helmets, and flippers abandoned by the Israelis. The Hezbollah fighters had departed the battleground long before, ensuring they were well away before the media arrived with their cameras. Lebanese soldiers cordoned off part of the scene to search for booby-trapped explosive devices left by the retreating Israelis. A UAV circling above caused some anxiety. Everyone remembered the Kfour incident a month earlier, when five Hezbollah men had been killed by bombs detonated by a drone after the Israeli assault force had departed.

On the edge of the orange orchard beside the dirt track where the Israeli commandos were ambushed, two small holes beside a metal water pipe marked the spot where the roadside bombs had exploded. Several flattened ball bearings were fused to the metal pipe by the heat of the explosion.

Mingled with the fragrant smell of burning pine wood was the reek of fresh blood. Scattered amid the debris were pieces of human flesh—a jawbone with a set of teeth, white blobs of brain matter. Someone had ripped a piece of cardboard from a box and used it as a tray for a gruesome collection of small body parts, including individual fingers, two fingers joined at the knuckle, an elbow, and several pieces of unidentifiable flesh. There were more body parts hanging from trees, including what was left of the head of Sergeant Ilya, the Israeli sapper whose explosives had been detonated by a bullet. In a gesture that captured the horror of the battle, a grinning Amal fighter lifted the shattered head by an ear and held it aloft in triumph.

The bungled naval commando raid on Ansariyah resulted in the death of twelve elite troops, including eleven of the sixteen-man Shayetet 13 team. It was the worst single-day casualty toll for the Israeli military in south Lebanon since 1985. To add to the blow, the disastrous raid came just hours after three Hamas suicide bombers blew themselves up in a
crowded street in Jerusalem, killing seven civilians and wounding nearly a hundred others.

Netanyahu, himself a former Sayeret Matkal soldier, described the raid as “one of the worst tragedies that has ever occurred to us.” “We lost some of our best soldiers, and that's not an exaggeration,” he said. “There have been several tragedies in the past, but I've never seen this type of tragedy.”

It was a staggering success for Hezbollah, yet many questions remained unanswered. What were the naval commandos doing in Ansariyah? Did Hezbollah have prior knowledge of the raid and set up the ambush?

In October, an Israeli commission of inquiry concluded that the naval commandos had fallen into a chance ambush by Lebanese guerrillas. The casualties were caused by two roadside bombs and the detonation of explosives carried by Sergeant Ilya. Most important, the investigation claimed there had been no breach of intelligence that could have forewarned Hezbollah. Not everyone was convinced, however. Two more army inquiries were held over the next eighteen months, as well as a separate investigation by the Israeli Knesset. All produced inconclusive results. “We feel we had a leak, but we can't prove it,” Major General Moshe Kaplinsky admitted to me a decade later.

While the Israelis pondered what had gone wrong, Hezbollah quickly offered an explanation. Nasrallah told reporters later on the day of the ambush that the Islamic Resistance had tightened its defenses and nighttime
haras
units around southern villages to prevent any repetitions of the Kfour raid. His explanation dovetailed with the subsequent findings of the first Israeli inquiry.

Yet rumors persisted that Hezbollah had concocted an elaborate trap for the Israeli commandos, perhaps by turning a spy and giving him information to deliver to his Israeli handlers about a meeting of top Islamic Resistance commanders, with names and dates, in Ansariyah. Although Hezbollah refused to address such speculation, as the years passed, it began offering a different version of events.

In September 1998, on the first anniversary of the ambush, Nasrallah admitted on Lebanese television that Hezbollah had had foreknowledge of the Israeli raid, setting in motion a tantalizing psychological campaign that would keep everyone guessing for another twelve years.

“All I can say now is that we knew beforehand that there was going to be an operation,” he said. “Now the question is: If the resistance knew, who told them? But we can't disclose that, because that won't be in the Resistance's best interest.”
³

The truth was finally revealed by Nasrallah in August 2010 during a lengthy press conference. It turned out that Hezbollah had discovered in the mid-1990s how to intercept Israeli UAV video transmissions. The video footage captured by Israeli drones was unencrypted at the time, which allowed Hezbollah technicians to download the intercepted data and watch it on television screens.

Nasrallah said that they noticed the Israelis were showing an unusual amount of interest in Ansariyah, particularly the northern entrance of the village. Hezbollah surmised that the Israelis were planning another Kfour-style operation, and set up an ambush.