Warriors of God (53 page)

Hezbollah's electronic intelligence gathering was supplemented by a visual reconnaissance infrastructure along the Blue Line. CCTV cameras and long-range thermal vision cameras capable of detecting humans at night at a distance of six miles were installed in Hezbollah
observation posts and other points along the Blue Line. In addition to the static observation posts, fighters reconnoitered the border from temporary camouflaged positions beside the security fence or even inside the Shebaa Farms, echoing the surveillance missions conducted by Hezbollah in the occupation zone in the 1990s.

In June 2005, Israeli troops stumbled across a three-man Hezbollah Special Forces squad that had established a camouflaged observation point in dense brush inside the Shebaa Farms, about three hundred yards from the Blue Line. In the ensuing firefight, one member of the squad was killed and his body left at the scene. Hezbollah fire support teams shelled Israeli outposts to cover the extraction of the two surviving squad members, killing one Israeli soldier and wounding three others. Israeli troops recovered equipment abandoned by the Hezbollah unit, including expensive digital SLR cameras with an array of lenses, video cameras, GPS devices, and night vision goggles.

The SIGINT and communications personnel are among the most highly trained and secretive operators within the Islamic Resistance. Each recruit undergoes a far more extensive vetting process than a normal newcomer into Hezbollah. Even after being accepted, they are kept under continual close scrutiny by security officers.

The information gleaned from SIGINT, spy rings in Israel, surveillance cameras, and reconnaissance patrols along the Blue Line was carefully collated and disseminated to unit commanders. In November 2009, Israel's
Yedioth Ahronoth
newspaper revealed that the Israeli army had obtained a 150-page book stamped “Top Secret” in which Hezbollah gave a highly detailed and accurate analysis of Israel's security infrastructure along the border.
²
The table of contents alone was four pages long. It included detailed descriptions of the ground radar, surveillance cameras, and UAVs used by the IDF to monitor the border and the area just to the north. It contained photographs of Israel's northern border taken from inside Israel as well as details of Israeli patrolling procedures, protection for maintenance crews operating along the border fence, security for border settlements, operational procedures of the IDF's tracking unit, and even techniques for fooling the trackers and their sniffer dogs.

“It is hard to believe, but the Hezbollah intelligence sources who wrote the document seem to have copied from internal documents belonging to the Northern Command,” wrote Ronen Bergman, the
Yedioth
correspondent.

Following Israel's troop withdrawal in 2000, Hezbollah reconfigured its administrative division of south Lebanon to include the newly liberated areas in the border district. The Islamic Resistance was divided into four territorial commands covering the south, southern Beirut, the Bekaa Valley, and the Mediterranean coastline.

The Nasr Unit (Wahadiyah Nasr) was positioned between the Blue Line and the Litani River and formed the operational core of the Islamic Resistance. Its total strength was estimated at a few thousand, of which some eight hundred to one thousand were Special Forces operatives and full-time regulars deployed in the rural “security pockets” and the rest, perhaps three thousand, were members of the
tabbiyya
, the “village guard” reservists.

The area under the command of the Nasr Unit was split into at least five
qita'at
, or sectors, of around twelve to fifteen villages each, the same system that Hezbollah introduced in 1985 following Israel's pullback to the occupation zone. The sectors were further divided into smaller components of two to three villages each. The headquarters of each sector was responsible for the military preparations within its area, from the construction of bunkers and the deployment of rocket-firing positions to the disposition of weapons arsenals and the organization of individual combat units.

Houses and apartments in villages were purchased or rented from landlords, after a vetting process by local Hezbollah security personnel, and used as storage facilities for arms and other items such as medical supplies, food, and water. Basic ammunition stocks such as Katyusha rockets, mortar rounds, and small arms ammunition were kept separately from more advanced weapons systems including antiarmor and
antiaircraft missiles. Hezbollah constructed houses specifically to store weapons and ammunition. In February 2004, a two-story building used as an ammunition dump near Shehabiyah village blew up when a lightning storm caused a short circuit. The arms dump was packed with mortar rounds and rocket-propelled grenades.

The mission of the Nasr Unit was to pound Israel with a steady barrage of short- and medium-range rockets to pressure the Israeli civilian population (and, by extension, the Israeli government) and to vigorously confront any ground invasion by Israeli troops. Maintaining the flow of rockets into Israel was critical to Hezbollah's strategic thinking, which is why so much effort went into the deployment and camouflaging of the rocket-firing posts to make them as hard as possible to detect and destroy. If Israeli forces were on the ground in sizable numbers and met with limited opposition, they would soon neutralize the rocket-firing positions, denying Hezbollah its main leverage to influence the outcome of the war. Therefore, Hezbollah had to mount a far more robust defense of the border district than the fleeting hit-and-run tactics of classical guerrilla warfare, a requirement that led to the construction of the secret and extensive underground fortifications and static-firing points where ground could be defended.

Targets in northern Israel, both civilian and military, were carefully selected. Some of the targeting data was provided by agents in northern Israel through military maps and photographs. Hezbollah may have been able to acquire satellite photographs of northern Israel from commercial companies. The introduction of the Google Earth global satellite imagery program in 2005 may have also helped facilitate the collation of targeting data. Most of northern Israel is covered by satellite images with a resolution of two meters, clearly showing useful military sites such as the air traffic control base on Mount Meron, six miles south of the border.

The Nasr Unit's artillery section prepared ranging cards for each rocket-firing position listing the target number, the target name, and aiming data such as range and angle of elevation. Meticulously detailed battle plans were drawn up in which each combat unit (
al-tashkeel al-qutali
), numbering from five to a dozen fighters each, depending on
the task, was given precise instructions on their respective missions, whether laying IEDs and antitank mines, manning antiaircraft defenses, providing fire support, or preparing ambushes. The orders also analyzed potential actions by the Israelis and listed the required responses by the combat units. Battle plans were coded in conformity with Hezbollah's communications security. UNIFIL peacekeepers overheard conversations between fighters during the 2006 war, when Hezbollah sometimes broke in to UNIFIL's radio frequencies to communicate. “They say, ‘This is Brother 13. We are going to carry out operation seven. Hope you are all safe,' ” a senior UNIFIL officer in Naqoura told me at the time.

The topography of south Lebanon, with its steep hills and ravines, is not suited to armored warfare, as the Israelis had discovered during two decades of occupation. The Islamic Resistance took advantage of the terrain to form tank “hunter-killer” teams of around five fighters each, armed with half a dozen missiles seeking targets of opportunity as well as laying ambushes at natural choke points. The numerous munitions bunkers dotting the landscape ensured that the antitank teams could maintain mobility without worrying about straying too far from sources of resupply. Fighting bunkers and firing points were also constructed specifically along axes of anticipated Israeli advance. The generally east-west orientation of the road network between the border and the Litani River limited the number of possible northbound routes for advancing Israeli forces, allowing Hezbollah's battle planners to narrow down the best locations to construct fortified permanent ambush sites. One of them was the Wadi Salouqi–Wadi Hojeir valley system, the occupation zone's front line between 1985 and 2000. The valley begins near Bint Jbeil beside the border and runs north for eleven miles before joining the Litani River, a convenient axis of northbound advance for Israeli armored columns. Hezbollah constructed numerous firing posts and ambush positions in the dense undergrowth on the side of the valley
and its tributaries to which fighters could quickly deploy if Israeli forces entered the valley system.

A dedicated sniper unit was created after 2000 with marksmen equipped with Russian semiautomatic 7.62 mm Dragunov rifles and possibly Austrian Steyr HS50 12.7 mm rifles, eight hundred of which were sold to Iran in 2004. The sniper teams are among the most heavily trained members of the Islamic Resistance. Not only must they develop expert marksmanship skills, they have to learn the arts of camouflage, stealth, and patience when lying prone for long periods of time in search of targets.

Other than missiles, antiarmor tactics included preparing “explosive pits” dug beneath roads near the border, at intersections, and along main north-south axes. The pits were each packed with three hundred to six hundred pounds of TNT, to be detonated by remote control beneath armored vehicles, especially tanks, such as the Merkava Mark 4, one of the most heavily protected tanks in the world in 2006 but still vulnerable to such a large explosive charge.

In June 2002, a shepherd accidentally stumbled across one of Hezbollah's explosive pits while guiding his flock along a lane near the Shebaa gate, scene of the abduction of the three Israeli soldiers in October 2000. Thinking he had found an Israeli bomb, he alerted the local police. Initial reports, encouraged by Hezbollah officials irritated at the discovery of the pit, claimed the bomb consisted of three explosive charges weighing about two pounds each and may have been an Israeli assassination attempt against Sheikh Nabil Qawq, who was hosting an Iranian delegation on a tour of the border district the same day. But a local source who saw the bomb told me that it consisted of four hundred pounds of TNT split into sixteen separate blocks.

The region north of the Litani River, which included the Nabatiyah district, the southern Bekaa Valley, and the mountains lying between the two, was the domain of the Badr Unit, the operational rear of the Islamic Resistance. The Badr Unit's principal role was to launch longer-range rockets into Israel, provide reinforcements if necessary to the Nasr Unit, and confront any Israeli penetration north of the Litani.

A coastal defense command operating alongside the Nasr and Badr units was responsible for maritime surveillance and oversaw the activities of Hezbollah's amphibious warfare unit. The coastal surveillance included radar-fitted observation posts to monitor for Israeli naval commando infiltrations and shipping movements. The amphibious warfare unit was established in the 1990s, but details of its activities are scarce. Although its cadres fought in south Lebanon during the 1990s as regular combatants, according to Hezbollah sources, the party leadership has never formally mentioned the existence of the unit. Recruits receive training in Iran, probably at the IRGC underwater combat school in Bandar Abbas, as well as learning basic frogman skills in a camp near the Assi River in the northern Bekaa Valley. Training is thought to include beach landings and underwater demolition skills.

The logistical command was located in the northern Bekaa and was principally responsible for training and the storage of armaments arriving from Syria. Tunnels sunk into the sides of sealed-off valleys near Janta in the jagged and barren limestone peaks close to the Syrian border were the initial repositories for Hezbollah's smuggled rockets. The logistical unit then organized the transfer of the rockets to arms warehouses and bunkers farther south.

The command and control center of the Islamic Resistance was based in the “security quarter” in Beirut's southern suburbs. Before the 2006 war, armed guards wearing black uniforms and berets controlled heavy steel sliding gates that barred access into Hezbollah's nerve center and home to the leadership, an otherwise nondescript cluster of drab concrete apartment buildings looking much like any other part of the city. Secondary locations, known as “the points,” were selected and equipped for almost all Hezbollah's offices and facilities in the southern suburbs, including a fully functioning mirror facility for the Al-Manar television channel. In the event of war, if the southern suburbs came under attack, Hezbollah personnel could abandon their normal offices and relocate to the safety of the points, allowing them to continue with their tasks. “We are now highly prepared to face Israel. We are more highly prepared than at any previous time,” Sheikh Naim Qassem told me in August 2004.

While Hezbollah's main focus between 2000 and 2006 was on building its military capabilities in Lebanon and waging its campaign of brinkmanship along the Blue Line, the organization also played a support role in the Palestinian Al-Aqsa intifada. The destruction of Israel and the liberation of Jerusalem remain core ideological goals for Hezbollah. But the party tempers such ambitions by declaring that although it is willing to lend assistance when possible, the Palestinians must take the lead in securing their own emancipation from Israel.

As the Al-Aqsa intifada gained momentum, Hezbollah established a unit to expedite assistance to the Palestinians on behalf of Iran. The unit oversaw the creation of cells and networks in the occupied Palestinian territories as well as in Israel, trained Palestinian militants at camps in the Bekaa Valley, or sent them on to Iran for advanced training.