Warriors of God (51 page)

It was unclear to us exactly what Hezbollah was up to inside these security pockets, although clues hinting at clandestine activity emerged from time to time. In early June 2002, residents of two small villages at the foot of the Shebaa Farms hills were kept awake at night by the sound of dynamite explosions emanating from a remote wadi near an abandoned farmstead. The peak of Hezbollah's construction activities appears to have been in 2003, when UNIFIL was recording “sustained explosions” numbering as many as twenty-five at a time, all in remote wadis and hillsides.

But it was only following the August 14 cease-fire ending the monthlong war in 2006 that the astonishing scale of Hezbollah's underground network of bunkers and firing positions in the southern border district came to light.

For example, the Labboune hillside, which was covered in thick brush and small evergreen oaks, was the source of almost constant rocket fire by Hezbollah throughout the war, from the first day until shortly before the 8:00
A.M.
cease-fire on August 14. The Israeli military attempted to stanch the flow of rockets with air strikes, cluster bombs, and artillery shells packed with phosphorus, but the Katyusha fire was relentless. After the cease-fire, Israeli soldiers deployed onto the hill and discovered an elaborate bunker and artillery-firing system sunk into solid rock some 120 feet deep and spread over an area three-quarters of a square mile. The bunkers included firing positions, ammunition storage facilities, operations rooms, dormitories, medical facilities, lighting and ventilation, and kitchens and bathrooms with latrines and hot and cold running water—sufficient to allow dozens of fighters to live underground for weeks without need for resupply. A day after the bunker was dynamited by the Israelis, I visited the site with Lorenzo Cremonesi, a correspondent for Italy's
Corriere della Sera
newspaper. We gingerly followed a caterpillar track into the old minefield running on the Lebanese side of the border fence. All that remained of the bunker was a field of
churned earth and slabs of yard-thick reinforced concrete poking out of the ground like broken teeth. Yet the most extraordinary discovery was not that Hezbollah had built the bunker beneath a minefield, but that the bunker began just a hundred yards from, and within full view of, the UNIFIL observation post on the border. It was only fifty yards from the lane used by UNIFIL traffic each day. The bunker was also in full view of an Israeli border position some four hundred yards to the west on the other side of the fence. How was it possible for Hezbollah to construct such a large facility with neither UNIFIL nor the Israelis having any idea of its existence?

“We never saw them build anything,” a UNIFIL officer told me. “They must have brought the cement in by the spoonful.”

The sight of the dynamited ruins at Labboune inspired me to find an intact bunker. Although the border district was littered with newly abandoned bunkers, finding them was difficult and hazardous given their remote locations, the presence of unexploded munitions, and the superbly camouflaged entrances, some of them covered by hollow fiberglass “rocks” similar to those used to hide IEDs. After several false leads, I acquired a set of map coordinates marking the locations of Hezbollah bunkers and rocket-firing posts near the village of Alma Shaab. Punching the coordinates into a handheld GPS device, I headed into a former Hezbollah security pocket accompanied by Ghaith Abdul-Ahad, an intrepid war correspondent for
The Guardian
and a photographer for the Getty agency.

We had walked along the track at the bottom of the valley for about ten minutes when the arrow on the GPS began to rotate to the right. We left the track and, once beneath the canopy of dense foliage, noticed numerous thin trails made by Hezbollah militants crisscrossing the hillside. Steps of rock-hard sandbags helped overcome the steeper sections. We scanned the footpath carefully, not only for cluster bombs but also for possible booby traps. Hezbollah had rigged some simple IEDs consisting
of trip wires attached to blocks of TNT around some of their old positions to deter snoopers.

After a five-minute climb, my GPS informed us that we had reached our destination. But there was no bunker entrance to be seen, just outcrops of rock, thickets of thorn bushes, scrub oak, and tree roots snaking across the bedrock beneath a carpet of dead leaves and dried twigs. Thinking the GPS must be off by a few feet, I moved away to examine the surrounding area for the entrance. But it was Ghaith who found it. He was tapping the ground with a stick when he struck something metallic and hollow-sounding. Together we brushed away the leaves and twigs to reveal a square matte black metal lid with two handles. Dragging the heavy lid to one side exposed a narrow steel-lined shaft that dropped vertically about fifteen feet into the bedrock. Dank, musty air rose from the gloom. It had taken seven months to finally discover one of Hezbollah's war bunkers; but any exhilaration was dampened by the dread of claustrophobia. “If we have to crawl when we're down there, I can't do it,” Ghaith said.

Wearing a headlamp and using metal footholds welded onto the side of the shaft, I climbed down into the shadows below and saw with some relief that the tunnel extending into the hillside at the bottom was taller than we had feared. We would have to crouch, but not crawl. It was still a tight squeeze as we inched cautiously along the damp, silent passageway, which ran for about seven yards before turning left and descending in a gradual slant. The rock sides of the tunnel were lined with a mesh of steel bars and girders painted white. Huge motionless brown spiders clung to the walls, watching the human intruders impassively. A side tunnel reinforced with walls and ceiling of glossy white-painted steel plates and girders led into a small steel-lined chamber. The room, which was bare apart from two empty five-gallon water containers, must have been at least ninety feet underground and probably could have withstood a direct hit by one of Israel's massive aerial bombs—assuming the Israelis had known where to drop it. An electric cable ran along the walls linking several bare bulbs. A black plastic bag hanging from a hook contained the remains of what seven months earlier could have been fresh oranges or apples. A second entrance lower down the hill had been
blocked with rocks and cement. It was not a large bunker, probably home to several fighters who manned the Katyusha firing positions nearby.

Weeks later, I had an opportunity to explore a much larger command bunker near Rshaf village in the western sector. I had to crawl over a pile of rocks partially blocking the narrow square access shaft, which was sunk horizontally into the side of a valley. After a couple of yards, the passageway opened up, allowing me to stand. The passage was little more than shoulder-width, and I had to stoop slightly to avoid hitting the ceiling with my head. For the first ten yards, the walls and ceiling were reinforced with steel plates and girders painted matte black to prevent stray reflections of sunlight from giving away the concealed entrance. Around a corner, the steel plates were painted glossy white to better reflect the electric lighting. Electric cables ran through white plastic tubes fixed to the walls leading to switches and glass-encased light sockets. A blue plastic hose running along the top of the wall carried the bunker's water supply. There was a small bathroom complete with an Arab-style latrine, a shower, a basin with taps, and a hot water boiler. A drainage system had even been constructed beneath the concrete floor. In two places along the main passage—which must have been more than forty yards long—were vertical ventilation shafts covered by metal grilles, ensuring a steady flow of fresh air. There was a kitchen with storage shelves and an aluminum sink with taps, its white metal walls mottled with brown rust. Every ten yards or so along the passage was a heavy steel blast door that could be bolted from the inside. I switched off my headlamp for a minute and the silent chilly subterranean blackness closed in around me. What must it have been like for the fighters living here in the war, waiting for the advancing Israeli troops?

At the far end of the bunker, the narrow steel-lined passage broadened out into a rock cavern. In a niche to one side were four metal water tanks with “
fidai,
” Arabic for “sacrifice,” painted across them. A twist of a tap at the bottom of one tank and icy water gushed out. Several steep steps cut into the rock at the end of the cavern led to an access shaft about fifteen feet high with rungs welded onto the lining of black metal
plates. This exit emerged into a thicket of stubby oak trees about forty yards from the entrance and farther up the hill.

The effort that went into building it was extraordinary, and yet it, like the bunkers at Labboune and Alma Shaab, was constructed in complete secrecy, remaining undetected by satellite surveillance, Israeli aerial reconnaissance, intelligence assets on the ground, and UNIFIL peacekeepers, let alone nosy journalists. Every piece of equipment, including the steel plates, girders, and doors, had had to be carried by hand up the side of the valley and fitted into place inside the bunker. The hundreds of tons of quarried rock were removed, also in secrecy, from the site of each tunnel and bunker, presumably to be scattered carefully beneath the trees of the surrounding hillside—the same technique Hezbollah had used when constructing the prototype tunnels in Mlita on the mountainous edge of the Israeli-occupied Jezzine enclave in the mid-1980s. Certainly, there were no fantails or spoil for patrolling Israeli jets and drones to detect.

This small wadi near Rshaf was home to at least seven other bunkers and rocket-firing positions. A larger valley system a few miles to the east contained more than thirty different positions consisting of at least one command bunker similar to the one I explored near Rshaf, Katyusha-firing positions, one- or two-room huts of cinder block walls draped in camouflage netting, bivouacs, checkpoints at the entrances, observation posts, and expanded natural caves. In all there may have been more than a thousand positions of one type or another covering the southern border district.

Once again, Hezbollah had absorbed and improved upon the earlier experiences of the Palestinians in south Lebanon. Ahmad Jibril, the head of the PFLP-GC and a onetime military engineer, had built in the late 1970s several tunnels sunk into mountainsides in the southern half of Lebanon, large enough to accommodate trucks and tons of armaments. There was nothing discreet about the construction of the tunnels; everyone knew where they were, and the engineers and laborers who built them were regularly subjected to Israeli air raids. While the tunnels were the PFLP-GC's trademark, other Palestinian groups had
eschewed underground fortifications, believing them vulnerable to Israeli commando assaults and preferring instead the low-signature mobility of guerrilla warfare.

Hezbollah, however, had developed a tactic that selected the best elements from both schools. It used the bunker-and-tunnel system to strengthen its defensive posture in the border district in the event of an Israeli ground invasion, while constructing the facilities in total secrecy and limiting their size to retain the element of surprise.

A visitor to the southern border district in those early months of 2000 following Israel's withdrawal and the onset of Hezbollah's campaign in the Shebaa Farms would likely have witnessed pastoral routine rather than a war zone. Even as Hezbollah was quietly sealing off tracts of land and drawing up blueprints for its underground bunker networks, farmers continued to plant, nurture, and harvest their fields of bright green tobacco and golden wheat in the stony valleys. In the early fall, families moved slowly through olive groves, picking the fruit and sorting it on wool blankets spread on the ground. Wrinkled old ladies smothered in thick, colorful cotton dresses and headscarves sold seasonal fruit from roadside stalls—shiny strawberries in the spring, green or purple figs bursting with sweetness in the late summer heat, crisp apples and watermelons in the fall. Wiry mahogany-skinned goatherds tossed stones at errant members of their flock while rangy dogs slumbered in the shade of oak trees. In the dusty villages, children played in the potholed lanes that passed for roads in south Lebanon. New villas and mansions built of stone and marble and surrounded by verdant watered lawns—ostentatious flauntings of Africa-generated wealth—sprouted on once-barren hillsides to accommodate long-absent residents during the summer holiday months.

It was easy to be lulled into a feeling that the military confrontation between Hezbollah and Israel was relatively straightforward and limited.
If Israel reacted disproportionately to an attack in the Shebaa Farms, then yes, it could expect Hezbollah to unleash salvos of Katyusha rockets from the olive groves of south Lebanon into Galilee. But there was no obvious reason to assume that the balance was fundamentally different from that of the 1990s.

But by the second half of 2001, it was dawning on me that out of sight, something of far greater scale and significance was taking place in the remoter wadis and hilltop villages of south Lebanon. One of my sources referred to “truck[load] after truckload” of weapons arriving in the border district between May 2000 and December 2001. Another source told me that Hezbollah had “more weapons now than they know what to do with.” Hezbollah fighters boasted of their psychological readiness to confront Israel and the training that continued despite the Israeli withdrawal. Gradually, the information gleaned from my sources in south Lebanon, observations in the field, interviews with Hezbollah officials, and conversations with fighters left only one conclusion to be drawn—Hezbollah was not contenting itself by simply needling Israel along the Blue Line from time to time, but was engaged in a massive, wide-ranging military buildup in preparation for a possible war with Israel—a war it had every intention of winning.

The arms floodgate to Hezbollah opened after Bashar al-Assad became president of Syria. His father, Hafez, had imposed controls on the quantity and variety of arms he allowed Iran to send to Hezbollah via Damascus airport. Hafez al-Assad preferred to maintain a tactical alliance with Hezbollah and permitted a sufficient flow of arms to the Shia group to resist the Israelis in south Lebanon, but he drew the line at delivering game-changing weapons that could destabilize the Lebanon-Israel theater, possibly at Syria's expense. Under Bashar al-Assad, however, the relationship grew more strategic, with greater quantities of weapons and more advanced systems dispatched across the border into Hezbollah's arms depots. Significantly, Syria for the first time became a major supplier of weaponry to Hezbollah. The Syrians delivered large quantities of 220 mm Uragan rockets, with a forty-two-mile range, and B-302 rockets, which are a Syrian version of a Chinese multiple-launch
rocket system. Some of the rockets were fitted with antipersonnel warheads that spray hundreds of ball bearings on detonation. A few rockets were filled with Chinese cluster submunitions.