Warriors of God (65 page)

When a hill near the mixed Shia-Christian village of Kfar Houne caught Tajieddine's attention, Jumblatt tried to enlist the financial support of Carlos Slim, the Mexican business tycoon listed by
Forbes
magazine in 2010 as the richest man in the world. Slim, whose father was born in Kfar Houne, told the Druze leader he was uninterested in outbidding Tajieddine and purchasing the hill. “I may have to fly to Mexico and persuade him face-to-face,” Jumblatt mused.

Sheikh Naim Qassem dismissed Jumblatt's allegations that Hezbollah was building a Shia state in the south as unfounded, saying that the Druze leader “likes to stir calm waters.”

I interviewed Ali Tajieddine one Saturday morning in his bustling office on the outskirts of Tyre. A short, dapper man, Tajieddine calmly explained that he was simply a businessman who had sensed that money could be made quarrying the limestone mountains for construction material and cement production. The houses in Ahmadiyah were intended to mask the quarry and “enhance the appearance of the area.” The homes would be inhabited by his employees, he said. “I have employees who are Shias, Druze, Sunnis, and Christians,” he told me. “The people who are making these allegations know better. They are just spreading rumors.”

I wanted to see for myself if there were Hezbollah fighters operating in the hills and valleys north of the Litani. But hiking up a mountainside with a notebook and camera in search of the Islamic Resistance was not advisable. However, a clue to their possible whereabouts lay in the maps
produced after 2000 by the UN demining agency showing the mined areas of south Lebanon. The maps had been updated since the 2006 war with the locations of cluster bomb strikes, which were marked with a rash of red circles across much of the UNIFIL-patrolled border district. There were fewer cluster bomb strikes north of the Litani River, but one valley in the heart of Hezbollah's new frontline area had been hit by as many as nine separate bombardments. The concentration of hits suggested it had been a source of Hezbollah rocket fire during the war. Perhaps Hezbollah's fighters were still there.

I attempted to reach the valley by following a potholed lane that wound past a ruined stone farmhouse that before 2000 was used for target practice by Israeli tank gunners. The lane petered out and turned into a rough track that disappeared into a small olive grove. As I was hesitating about proceeding farther, two men in camouflage uniforms, wearing floppy bush hats and carrying AK-47 rifles, silently emerged from behind the trees and walked up to my car. They were polite and seemed more bemused than suspicious at meeting a foreigner in this remote corner of Lebanon. They told me I was in a military zone and jotted down my license plate number before letting me go.

Later the same day, I followed another track that curved around the top of the valley. On turning a corner, I noticed the track was blocked by a chain suspended between two concrete posts. Hanging from the chain was a metal sign with the stenciled Arabic words “Warning. Access to this area is forbidden. Hezbollah.” Beside the entrance to this security pocket stood a small sentry box. A burly Hezbollah man in a camouflage uniform and wearing an incongruous pair of green rubber boots emerged from the sentry box and inquired what I was doing. I explained I was working on a story on cluster bombs and knew that the valley had been hit heavily. Could I pass through and have a look? Taken aback by my sudden appearance and unexpected request, he hurried into his sentry hut and spoke into a field telephone. For a fleeting moment, I wondered if they would actually let me enter the security pocket. I could see more uniformed Hezbollah fighters moving around on a nearby hill studded with pine trees. The green-rubber-booted fighter returned. Access was denied. I had to leave at once.

Over the following months, Hezbollah increased its presence in these hills, placing further tracts of land off-limits. Demining and cluster bomb removal teams contracted by the UN were required to coordinate with Hezbollah all clearance operations north of the Litani River. When a demining team requested to enter a certain sector, Hezbollah typically either gave permission immediately, granted it after a few days, or denied access outright. The restricted areas were dubbed “orange” zones by the deminers. As the months progressed, access was increasingly tightened until by early 2008, the entire area was classified as an orange zone. One deminer told me that the hills were “crawling with armed and uniformed Hezbollah fighters” and the sound of explosions and automatic weapons fire was a near-daily occurrence.

Steep, wooded valleys west of the Jezzine salient were also placed off-limits, even on the edges of Christian-populated villages. The number of sealed-off areas expanded farther northward along the sharp mountain peaks until nudging the Druze-populated Chouf Mountains. In April 2010, I learned that a group of hikers had stumbled across a Hezbollah outpost on a windswept ridge at the southern end of the Chouf. The outpost had been inadvertently positioned alongside the Lebanon Mountain Trail, a newly established 275-mile hiker's path from the forested mountains of north Lebanon to Marjayoun in the south. I decided to see the outpost for myself and clambered up the mountain with two friends on a damp, cloudy day. The Hezbollah position was in a small depression surrounded by limestone outcrops and had been used by the Israelis before 1985, judging from the old bulldozed emplacements where Israeli tanks and armored personnel carriers once rested. A fire-blackened cooking pot and a plastic bag of potatoes lay beside a fireplace containing cold, rain-dampened ashes. We could see the concrete entrance of a bunker sunk into the side of the valley. One of my companions said she saw a head momentarily bob out of the entrance before disappearing inside again. But there was no one else to be seen. As we were about to move on, there came a startled shout from the rocks above us. A lithe young man with greasy, lanky hair wearing a camouflage jacket and jeans and carrying an AK-47 rifle bounded down the side of the valley. As he approached, he cocked the rifle with a dramatic flourish. “What
are you doing here?” he asked, his face a mix of anger and astonishment. “This is a military zone. You should not be here.”

We explained to him that we were hiking across the mountain and that we were following an established trail. I showed him the map marking the path running through his position. He stared at it without comment, then checked the contents of our backpacks before instructing us to move off the mountain. We headed north on the old Israeli dirt track running along the crest. The outpost behind us swiftly disappeared in the mist shrouding the mountaintop. Minutes later, the fighter came running up behind us clutching a walkie-talkie along with his rifle. We had to get off the mountain at once, he said. We were not permitted to continue following the trail. Clearly, he had received instructions from his superiors. There was no sense arguing. We headed east down the mountainside, the fighter watching us from a rocky outcrop until we were swallowed up by the dense thickets of scrub oak.

By summer 2007, it was common knowledge that Hezbollah was operating in the mountains north of the Litani River, but as with its previous security pockets in the border district, it remained unclear exactly what Hezbollah was up to. Perhaps new bunkers were under construction; one Hezbollah fighter told me that the bunkers built after the war are larger and more sophisticated than those from before 2006, with electrical wiring and water pipes embedded in cement-lined walls rather than strung along the ceiling in plastic tubes.

One intelligence source told me that parked UAVs had been spotted in these hills. The UK-based
Jane's Intelligence Review
obtained commercially available satellite imagery of the area dated January and February 2008 and discovered a series of peculiar markings on the side of a sealed-off hill.
Jane's
concluded that the configuration suggested possible use for training or rocket activity. Still, given Hezbollah's custom of operating in strict secrecy inside its security pockets and the near-daily reconnaissance sorties by Israeli jets, UAVs, and AWACS aircraft, it would have been unusual for the organization to construct a site of significant military value in the open, thus raising the possibility that it was simply a decoy to keep Israeli imagery analysts baffled.

In 2008, I learned that similar unusual ground markings had been detected in the area of Hezbollah's original training camp near Janta on the border with Syria. The site included what appeared to be an IED range, a building assault course, a small arms firing range, a driver training track, and bunkers and tunnels dug into the sides of hills.
Jane's
acquired satellite images of the area dated July 2008 and September 2009. When compared, they confirmed substantial construction activity during the fourteen-month period. If the site was genuine and not a decoy, the facilities suggested it was intended for specialist training rather than instruction in regular guerrilla warfare techniques taught at conventional training camps in wooded areas of the Bekaa Valley. The lack of ground cover at the Janta camp made it vulnerable to Israeli aerial observance, and therefore it was probably used on an intermittent basis and for short durations only.

I gained a sharp understanding of Hezbollah's sensitivity toward the Janta area in July 2007 while reporting a story on cross-border smuggling of commercial goods from Syria to Lebanon. I planned to visit a remote village called Tufayl, which lies at the tip of a fingerlike extension of Lebanese territory poking into Syria. To reach Tufayl requires following a rutted dirt track for about sixteen miles over barren mountain ridges before dropping into the arid approaches to the Syrian desert. For the trip, I took along my usual notebook and camera, but also a GPS device, compass, maps, and satellite phone as a contingency in case our vehicle broke down en route and we had to walk out. My colleague, Dergham Dergham, and I had been told that we needed permission from the army to visit Tufayl and had to apply at the military barracks in Ablah in the Bekaa Valley. But the military intelligence officers in Ablah said they could not help us and that we would need to visit the defense ministry in Beirut. It was midmorning Saturday, and the defense ministry would be closed. Dergham and I decided to forget Tufayl
and instead report the smuggling story from another border village. We selected Yahfoufah, a pretty little hamlet tucked into a steep valley of craggy limestone about half a mile beyond Janta. A shallow river flanked by walnut and poplar trees splashed along the valley floor. We found a group of diesel smugglers pumping Syrian fuel from a tank on the back of a truck. They told us how the illegal border trade worked and allowed me to snap a few pictures.

As we were leaving the village, a white van swerved in front of us, blocking the road, and three unsmiling bearded men climbed out. They were obviously Hezbollah. They asked us who we were and what we were doing in Yahfoufah and then instructed us to follow them. We arrived at a small house beside the river. Instead of asking questions as I expected, the Hezbollah men invited us to sit down while a demure young headscarfed girl served us tiny cups of coffee. It soon became evident from our taciturn hosts that this was not a gesture of Bekaa hospitality. After half an hour, several more unsmiling Hezbollah men arrived in a fleet of SUVs. Dergham and I were split up for the drive to the nearby village of Nabi Sheet. We parked beside a mosque and were marched up a flight of stairs into an office at the back of the building. The moment I had dreaded came when they inspected the contents of my backpack. Out came the camera, GPS, compass, maps, and satellite phone. It really did not look very good. I was made to wait in a conference room while Dergham was grilled separately. He later told me that the Hezbollah men had insisted to him that I was a spy. A slim middle-aged man with a broad, friendly smile beaming through his thick black beard wandered into the conference room and shook my hand.

“Hello. It is good to see you again,” he said in English.

Had I met him before? It was possible, although I did not recognize him.

“You were here last year in Nabi Sheet with some Australian journalists,” he explained.

Clearly a case of mistaken identity. I assured him I had not stopped in Nabi Sheet for at least five or six years. No, no, he insisted, he remembered me well.

He placed a notepad on the table and began asking me questions about my background, such as where I was raised in England. He even threw in a couple of questions about English soccer teams. Each answer was carefully written down. Dergham joined me and we were served strong sweet tea in tiny glasses—“to help you stay awake,” one of the Hezbollah men joked.

I gave them a list of Hezbollah officials they could contact who would verify my identity. Dergham, a Shia who lived in Beirut's southern suburbs, had his own contacts within Hezbollah. But our captors did not bother to make a single phone call. Instead, one of them politely asked us whether we would mind being handed over to military intelligence. We said that was fine, but I groaned inwardly. It meant that we would be entering a nightmare of slow-paced bureaucracy, ensuring that there would be no swift return to Beirut for either of us. In retrospect, Dergham and I concluded that the Hezbollah men probably did not believe we were spies but calculated that interrogating and temporarily detaining us would send a message that foreigners, especially journalists, were not welcome in this corner of the Bekaa.

We were bundled out of the mosque and driven in two separate vehicles at high speed through Nabi Sheet's narrow, winding streets and out into the open countryside. We rendezvoused with two cars full of plainclothes military intelligence agents who were waiting for us at a farm in the middle of the valley. The officers took custody of us and we continued our journey in their vehicles, arriving minutes later at the Ablah military barracks.

For the next eight hours Dergham and I were questioned repeatedly on who we were and where we had been, while a muscled officer with a shaved head and wearing a grubby white vest slowly wrote down our answers, his face frowning with concentration. Writing, it seemed, did not come easily to our interrogator, who looked as though he would have been much happier extracting answers from us with the aid of a car battery and crocodile clips. They probably believed we were innocent as well, but as we'd been handed to them by Hezbollah, they could not let us slip out the back door immediately. It is no secret that Lebanese military intelligence cooperates closely with Hezbollah, especially in sensitive
areas like the Bekaa. One of the officers even had a clip from a Nasrallah speech as the ringtone on his cell phone.