Warriors of God (64 page)

UNIFIL had long ago grown accustomed to the realities of peacekeeping in south Lebanon and had an acute understanding of the parameters within which it could function. Other than providing an international window onto the perennially tense Lebanon-Israel border, UNIFIL's most important role in the 2000–2006 period was to serve as interlocutor between Hezbollah and Israel. This discreet channel of communication allowed messages to be passed that helped allay misunderstandings about each other's moves along the border and defuse the occasional outbreaks of violence between the two sides. It was in some respects a cozy existence for the small peacekeeping force. But all that came to an end following the cease-fire. UNIFIL 2, as it was initially dubbed, was to be a more robust force composed of up to fifteen thousand troops, spearheaded by contingents from leading European nations—France, Italy, and Spain. The UN also sanctioned a Maritime Task Force to patrol some five thousand nautical square miles off the Lebanese coast, the first naval force built by the UN to support peacekeeping operations.

The first Spanish troops to arrive in south Lebanon were drawn from the elite Spanish Legion, the equivalent of the French Foreign Legion, tough commandos who sported goatees and had seen combat in Bosnia, Afghanistan, and Iraq. The Spanish were deployed in the eastern sector, facing the Shebaa Farms hills. A huge sprawling military compound was built over a hillside north of Marjayoun, dwarfing the old Indian battalion headquarters on a nearby hilltop. The new camp was ringed
with twelve-foot-high security fences and coils of razor wire. The entrances were heavily guarded, with concrete blast walls and chicanes to slow traffic.

“The UN of 2006 is not the UN of ten years ago,” Jean-Marie Guehenno, the UN undersecretary for peacekeeping operations, told me as we watched the Italians disembark at Tyre. “We have drawn lessons from past experience. We have robust rules of engagement so that we can defend ourselves and not be humiliated anymore.”

Those were bold words, given Lebanon's grim reputation as a graveyard for well-intentioned international peacekeeping missions. There was little appetite among European nations for seeing their troops caught in armed confrontations with Hezbollah and the Israelis; the initial deployment of the French peacekeepers was delayed until Paris was satisfied with the rules of engagement. Like UNIFIL's previous incarnation, the success of the newly reinforced mission would remain dependent on maintaining the goodwill of the local population. If Hezbollah and the residents of the south turned against the peacekeepers, no number of battle-hardened European troops would save UNIFIL.

Yet the first wave of European troops to arrive in Lebanon were mainly drawn from rapid reaction forces used to deploying quickly to hot spots around the world. These were elite soldiers trained to fight rather than to wave civilian traffic through checkpoints, hand out soccer balls to children, or spend hours gazing from an observation post at a tranquil frontier. Furthermore, having fought the Taliban in Afghanistan or Shia and Sunni insurgents in Iraq, many of these incoming soldiers were instinctively predisposed to regard Hezbollah as an enemy and a potential threat.

While tolerating UNIFIL's expanded presence, Hezbollah kept a wary eye on the activities of the peacekeepers. One internal UNIFIL intelligence report from early 2007 claimed that Hezbollah in Bint Jbeil had issued instructions to the residents to avoid talking to the peacekeepers,
to speak only Arabic in their presence, not to accept food or handouts from foreign NGOs, to report on UNIFIL's movements, and to constantly display the party's symbols, such as flags and posters.

Hezbollah had reduced its profile in the border district in grudging deference to Resolution 1701. The rural security pockets were abandoned in the days after the August cease-fire, with trucks packed with equipment spotted heading north. Most of the bunker networks and camouflaged rocket firing positions were no longer of use to Hezbollah now that their locations were compromised. But that did not mean Hezbollah welcomed UNIFIL troops rummaging through its former security pockets. Difficulties between Hezbollah and UNIFIL grew increasingly apparent when the Spanish battalion began staking out these abandoned military zones, spending days at a time monitoring movements and hunting for old weapons caches and bunker networks. Shepherds roaming the rural districts with their flocks were handed mobile phones and instructed to contact local Hezbollah officials if UNIFIL or strangers were seen tramping around near their facilities.

Indeed, while Ghaith Abdul-Ahad and I were wandering through the small Hezbollah bunker near Alma Shaab in March 2007, we both thought we heard the sound of whispered voices coming from above. Ghaith was shooting pictures, so I said I would climb up the vertical steel-lined access shaft and check. In deference to Ghaith's claustrophobia, I refrained from voicing my paranoid thought that someone might replace the steel cover over the shaft and weigh it down with a large rock, leaving us entombed below. However, there was no one to be seen or heard once I had scrambled up the ladder.

I suspected Hezbollah would not be happy if they had known that I was prowling their former security pockets, obsessively hunting for one of their bunkers. A few weeks after the article about the bunker appeared on
Time
magazine's website, I had an interview with Nawaf Mussawi, then the head of Hezbollah's international relations department. We had not met before, but I knew that he closely followed foreign media coverage of Hezbollah. We met at a café in the southern suburbs of Beirut. Looking slightly disheveled in a tracksuit with dark, tousled hair
and carrying a plastic shopping bag, he shook my hand and sat down opposite me. Then he leaned across the table and said, “So, what do you think of our bunkers?”

Taken aback, I replied that I had found them impressive. Mussawi chuckled and, turning to his assistant, said, “This guy went to the south, found one of our bunkers, and wrote this beautiful story about it in
Time.
”

It occurred to me then that if a foreign journalist could write an article about the ingenuity of the Islamic Resistance in building elaborate bunkers in south Lebanon without anyone's ever having noticed, then why should Hezbollah complain?

But special forces units from European countries reconnoitering old Hezbollah security pockets was a different proposition. In early December 2006, Spanish troops accompanied by Lebanese soldiers spent a night encamped near Kfar Shuba village. The next morning they discovered, three hundred yards from where they had slept, that someone overnight had planted several trip-wire-connected IEDs consisting of Claymore antipersonnel mines and an old 81mm mortar shell. An internal UNIFIL memo noted that the IEDs were laid by “experts with a lot of technical experience” and that “this situation suggests a change in the threat that UNIFIL may have to face.”

It was later learned that the bombs were planted on the orders of a local Hezbollah commander who had grown irritated at the Spanish activities in his area. Hezbollah subsequently informed UNIFIL that the planting of IEDs was unauthorized and that the commander had been replaced.

The main focus of UNIFIL's force protection efforts was on the threat posed by al-Qaeda, not Hezbollah. UNIFIL headquarters in Naqoura and the various contingents each day received raw and unverified intelligence data warning of possible attacks against the peacekeepers. Ayman
al-Zawahiri, al-Qaeda's deputy leader, several times had called on Lebanese to ignore Resolution 1701 and encouraged attacks on the peacekeeping force.

The threats against UNIFIL led to a paradoxical cooperation between some European contingents and Hezbollah, both viewing Sunni jihadists as a threat. In April 2007, Italian, French, and Spanish intelligence officers secretly met with Hezbollah representatives in Sidon to enlist the organization's assistance in helping protect the peacekeepers. Afterward, Hezbollah men in civilian clothes occasionally “escorted” Spanish UNIFIL patrols.

The long-feared attack came on June 24, 2007. Six soldiers from the Spanish battalion, three of them Colombian nationals, were killed when their patrol of two armored personnel carriers was struck by a powerful car bomb between Marjayoun and Khiam. It was the deadliest single attack against UNIFIL since the force first arrived in Lebanon in 1978. Investigators later discovered that the bomb was “extraordinarily sophisticated,” and the attack must have taken months to prepare. According to UNIFIL's internal investigation, the bomb consisted of an estimated 132 pounds of PETN military-grade explosive packed with aluminum powder to augment the fireball effect and hidden inside a Renault Rapide van parked on the side of the road. The bomb was detonated by an infrared beam and had a shaped-charge configuration directing the blast laterally against the targeted vehicle. The fourteen-ton six-wheeled APC was spun 180 degrees and knocked off the road. Two soldiers standing in the rear hatches were blown clear and survived. There was no claim of responsibility for the attack, although Zawahiri days later released a taped video message in which he praised the bombing as a “blessed operation.”

Initial suspicions fell on Sunni jihadists, possibly from one of the Palestinian camps. There were a handful of other isolated attacks against UNIFIL in the weeks that followed, all of them by al-Qaeda sympathizers based in the Palestinian camps or in Sunni-populated areas of south Lebanon. But they were amateurish affairs, involving sticks of dynamite and faulty detonators, claiming no victims. They did not even come close to the deadly proficiency of the Spanish bombing.

The culprit has never been identified, and the separate Lebanese, Spanish, and UNIFIL investigations officially remain open. But I later learned that the Spanish legionnaires were engaged in activities far more sensitive than staking out Hezbollah's old security pockets in the UNIFIL area of operations. They were also monitoring the hilly terrain north of the Litani River outside the UNIFIL area where Hezbollah was building a new line of defense. According to conversations with numerous UNIFIL officers, the Spaniards had conducted reconnaissance missions from camouflaged observation points on the southern bank of the Litani. They may even have slipped across the narrow, shallow river to infiltrate Hezbollah's new domain. Several UNIFIL officers said they had seen video footage and still photographs shot by the Spanish soldiers showing the movement of vehicles and Hezbollah personnel and newly built positions north of the Litani. “We are already watching out for al-Qaeda, and the last thing we need is some gung-ho soldiers stirring up problems with Hezbollah,” one UNIFIL officer grumbled to me at the time.

Did Hezbollah detect the Spanish surveillance and choose to inflict a sharp, painful slap? The potentially provocative reconnaissance of the area north of the Litani, the absence of further sophisticated bomb attacks against the peacekeepers, and the amateurish attacks carried out by known al-Qaeda-inspired jihadists have left more than one observer concluding that they did. If it was a blunt message from Hezbollah, it was received and understood by the Spanish, for the surveillance of the north bank of the Litani came to a halt after the bombing.

In the immediate months after the war, with Hezbollah having abandoned its old security pockets in the border district, I began hearing vague rumors of unusual activity occurring in the mountains between the Litani River—UNIFIL's northern perimeter—and Jezzine. The area approximated the northern sector of Israel's former occupation zone, a region of sharp limestone mountains and thick undergrowth, dotted
with tiny villages and farms. It was a strategic location, affording sweeping views to the Mediterranean in the west and across the lower reaches of the Bekaa Valley to the east—both traditional axes of advance for armies invading from the south.

Local residents told me in hushed tones that “the boys” had increased their presence in the area, sealing off remote hills and valleys and preventing anyone from entering, mimicking the security pockets Hezbollah established in the border area starting in 2000. Mysterious new dirt tracks materialized, snaking across hillsides before abruptly terminating in thickets of oak and umbrella pines. As the months passed, some of the tracks were hardened with asphalt. An Iran-funded NGO, the Iranian Organization for Sharing the Building of Lebanon, which was contracted to repair war-damaged roads in the south, turned a little-used, potholed lane that crossed the mountains between Jezzine and the southern Bekaa Valley into a gleaming asphalt highway. I began hearing stories of vast tracts of land in the area being snapped up by Ali Tajieddine, a Shia businessman who had made a fortune in Africa and whose alleged connections to Hezbollah in December 2010 earned him a designation on the U.S. Treasury Department's list of terrorist financiers. In the tiny Druze hamlet of Sraireh, squeezed onto the side of a narrow valley above the Litani, a resident told me that Tajieddine was paying between $2 and $4 per square meter of land, often accepting the seller's initial asking price and paying in cash.

Houses and shops decorated with posters of Nasrallah and yellow Hezbollah flags were built beside the “Iranian road” at the southern end of Qotrani, a Christian-populated hamlet just west of Sraireh. On a barren, windswept hillside overlooking the Litani River, a new village was constructed from scratch on land purchased by Tajieddine from Druze owners. The new village was called Ahmadiyah, and laborers there told me that it would be populated by Shias from the Tyre area as well as neighboring Shia villages in the southern Bekaa.

Inevitably, the land purchases aroused the sectarian suspicions of local Christian and Druze politicians, especially Walid Jumblatt, the paramount leader of the Druze and in 2007, the archcritic of Hezbollah. The area in which Hezbollah was consolidating its presence lay at the
confluence of several Shia, Christian, and Druze villages, hamlets, and farms. Tajieddine's land purchases appeared to Hezbollah's opponents to be a blatant attempt to build a demographic bridge to connect Shia-populated Nabatiyah in the west to the Shia villages of the southern Bekaa Valley in the east. Such a belt, inhabited by Hezbollah supporters, would improve communications between the two strongholds and allow the Islamic Resistance to consolidate its new front line in a more secure environment.