Warriors of God (66 page)

An agent handed me my camera and asked me to run through the pictures. I scrolled through the shots I had taken of the diesel fuel smugglers that morning, which elicited no interest from the officer. Suddenly, a picture flicked up on the small screen showing me firing a 9 mm automatic pistol. It was from a couple of weeks earlier, when Dergham and I and another friend had lunched at a restaurant in the Bekaa frequented by Hezbollah men and then fired a few potshots at a watermelon with a pistol. I had foolishly forgotten to erase the pictures.

“This is you?” asked the astonished agent.

I nodded guiltily, and Dergham closed his eyes in resignation. It was going to be a long night.

Firing weapons is illegal in Lebanon, although it must be the most violated of all Lebanese laws. When Nasrallah begins his speeches, the crackle of celebratory gunfire is heard all over Beirut, despite frequent pleas by the Hezbollah leader for his followers to desist. During the height of the sectarian tensions in Lebanon in 2007 and 2008, the Shia residents of the southern suburbs would aim their celebratory fire toward the neighboring Sunni quarter of Tarikh Jdeide, the spent rounds tumbling out of the sky onto the roofs and streets of their political rivals. One enterprising individual even rented out his rocket-propelled grenade launcher so that people could fire grenades into the air for $30 a pop.

If the intelligence officers were looking for an excuse to detain us longer, now they had one. They refused to allow us to make any phone calls. Dergham suspected that they were deliberately stalling, knowing that our first call would set in motion the process of getting us released. In Lebanon, if you want to get something done, it helps to have
wasta
, connections with powerful people who can pull strings on your behalf. Both Dergham and I had sufficient
wasta
, if only we could contact them.

At midnight, we were handcuffed and driven to the cell block at one end of the barracks. Our cell stank of stale sweat and urine. The lights were switched off, plunging the prison block into darkness. I lay on a
smelly wool blanket, using my boots as a pillow, and breathed in the fetid stink from the cell's latrines. Dergham, lying on another reeking blanket, stirred in the darkness.

“Man, we really did it this time,” he muttered.

We later learned that we had been tracked down and that the phone lines were burning overnight with generals in the security services, cabinet ministers, prominent businessmen, politicians, and diplomats working to secure our release. The breakthrough came at nine o'clock the next morning when we were told we could leave military custody. The Lebanese military prosecutor presumably had concluded that it was not worth the trouble to charge a foreign journalist with brutally gunning down a defenseless watermelon.

Even before Hezbollah began constructing its new lines of defense north of the Litani River after the war, it was steadily restocking its depleted arsenal. Such was the apparent flow of weaponry into Lebanon that Nasrallah was able to declare just five weeks after the end of the war that Hezbollah had already restored its entire military organizational structure and its armaments. “Today, 22 September, 2006, the resistance is stronger than at any time since 1982,” he said.

Nasrallah's boast may have been rooted more in propaganda and reinforcing Hezbollah's deterrence against Israel than in reality. But there was little doubt that Hezbollah's arsenals were rapidly filling up with all manner of weaponry.

After a truck loaded with 122 mm Katyusha rockets and mortar shells was stopped by Lebanese customs police on the edge of Beirut in February 2007, Nasrallah candidly admitted that weapons were being transferred to Hezbollah's bases in the south. “The resistance declares now that it is transporting weapons to the front [south],” he said; “we have weapons of all kinds and quantities, as many as you want … we don't fight our enemies with swords of wood.”

In addition to the air corridor between Iran and Syria, the traditional conduit for the transfer of Iranian arms to Hezbollah, the Iranians may have taken advantage of the sea route to smuggle even larger quantities of basic weapons and ammunition. In 2009 alone, three suspected Iranian arms shipments were intercepted en route. The largest shipment was discovered in November when Israeli commandos stormed the Antigua-flagged
Francop
sailing between Egypt and Syria and found five hundred tons of Iranian-supplied weapons hidden in the hold. The armaments included twenty-nine-hundred 107 mm and 122 mm Katyusha rockets, three thousand antitank rounds for 106 mm recoilless rifles, and twenty thousand hand grenades.

“This could supply Hezbollah for a whole month of fighting,” said Rear Admiral Rani Ben-Yehuda, the Israeli navy chief of staff.

In May 2010, Israel leaked to
The Times
of London satellite photographs of a military base eighteen miles east of Damascus near the town of Adra with tunnels sunk into the flanks of the valley where rockets and missiles were stored. Hezbollah militants allegedly had their own living quarters on site and access to a fleet of trucks to ferry the weapons across the border. Western and Lebanese intelligence sources say Hezbollah usually transfers weapons at night and in adverse weather conditions to hinder aerial and satellite reconnaissance. Following the 2006 war, some of the dirt tracks traditionally used by Hezbollah in the Janta area were graded and hardened and in some cases asphalted, according to commercially available satellite imagery.

As an additional security measure, Hezbollah switches off the local electricity supply and jams communications during the transfer of weapons across the border. When local residents suddenly lose the picture on their televisions and their phone lines go dead, they know that the arms convoys are on the move.

Yossi Baidatz, a top Israeli military intelligence officer, told Israel's Knesset in early May 2010 that the huge quantity of arms being sent to Hezbollah by Iran and Syria could no longer be described as smuggling, but was an “organized and official transfer” of weapons.

Hezbollah was also seeking specific weapons systems to burnish the Islamic Resistance with a new qualitative edge against Israel in the next
war. Like Israel, top Hezbollah military officials and the leadership of the IRGC's Quds Force undertook a comprehensive after-action review to assess which weapons and tactics worked, discover where shortcomings lay, and prepare fresh battle plans for the next encounter. The main findings appear to have placed a priority on acquiring improved air defense systems and new rockets of increased range and fitted with guidance systems enabling Hezbollah to strike specific strategic targets in Israel such as government, industrial, and military facilities.

The Zelzal-2 was the largest rocket in Hezbollah's arsenal during the 2006 war, but by 2010 the organization was thought to have acquired the Syrian-manufactured M-600 short-range ballistic missile. Little is known about the M-600. Some analysts believe it is an indigenous Syrian-designed system, others that it is a version of the Iranian Fateh-110 rocket upgraded by the Syrian Scientific Research Council, the state-run weapons development authority. The solid-propellant rocket can carry an eleven-hundred-pound warhead, has a range of around 150 miles, and, according to some analysts, is fitted with an inertial guidance system allowing the weapon to strike within five hundred yards of its target at maximum range. Israel believes the M-600 was transferred to Lebanon in the latter half of 2009. The range of the M-600 allows Hezbollah to deploy the rocket well to the north of the UNIFIL-patrolled southern border district. To strike the oil refinery at Ashkelon, for example, the rocket could be launched from just south of Beirut. To hit targets in Tel Aviv, Hezbollah can deploy M-600 batteries in its hidden strongholds in the central and northern Bekaa Valley.

At almost 27 feet in length, the M-600 is harder to camouflage than smaller rockets systems. To overcome the problem, the rockets are fired from the same specially adapted shipping containers used to launch the Zelzals. The container is fitted on the back of a flatbed truck and the hinged top flips open to reveal a launch rail that can be elevated to the angle necessary for firing.

In April 2010, reports surfaced that Syria had transferred Scud ballistic missiles to Hezbollah. Unlike the relatively unknown M-600s, Scuds evoke among Israelis grim memories of the 1991 Gulf War, when Saddam Hussein fired several of the missiles at Tel Aviv. The notion that Hezbollah was now deploying these weapons along Israel's northern border caused a storm of controversy and recrimination in Washington, Damascus, Beirut, and Jerusalem.

The allegations threatened to undermine the cautious attempts by President Barack Obama's administration to reengage Damascus after the policy of isolation under President George W. Bush. The State Department summoned a Syrian diplomat for the fourth dressing-down in as many months, warning Syria against its “provocative behavior” and that Scuds in Hezbollah's hands “can only have a destabilizing effect on the region.”

Sheikh Naim Qassem gave a typically noncommittal response, telling
Ash-Sharq al-Awsat
newspaper that the fuss “passes over us like a drizzle of light rain.”

Possession of the high signature Scud presents significant logistical challenges. Unlike the solid-fueled M-600, the Scud uses liquid propellant, a mixture of two highly toxic substances that must be stored and handled by trained operators and entail a lengthier launch preparation time. Smuggling the forty-foot missiles into Lebanon would be a formidable undertaking given the intelligence scrutiny of the Lebanon-Syria border. The dedicated transporter-erector-launcher required to fire the missiles is even larger, and presumably more difficult to sneak into Lebanon, than the missiles themselves.

Given that the Scud and M-600 carry warheads of similar size, the only real advantage for Hezbollah is the former's extended range—three times the distance of the latter. However, there are few targets that would elicit Hezbollah's interest south of the Tel Aviv area lying beyond the reach of the M-600. Perhaps the only target worthy of the Scud's logistical complications is the nuclear reactor at Dimona in southern Israel, 140 miles south of the Lebanese border. How much damage would be caused by a direct hit by a Scud on the nuclear facility is uncertain, but it would have enormous propaganda value, especially if the strike came in retaliation to an Israeli attack on Iran's nuclear sites.

The concept of reciprocity against Israel is a cornerstone of Hezbollah's strategy. In a speech in February 2010, Nasrallah warned that if Israel hit Hezbollah's stronghold in the southern suburbs of Beirut, known as Dahiyah, the Islamic Resistance had the appropriate weapons to accurately target and destroy buildings in Tel Aviv:

The strategy of reciprocity is not confined to the land theater, but has expanded to the Mediterranean front. In May 2010, Nasrallah indicated that Hezbollah now has the ability to target shipping along Israel's entire coastline. “If you blockade our coastline, shores, and ports, all military and commercial ships heading toward Palestine throughout the Mediterranean Sea will be targeted by the rockets of the Islamic Resistance,” he said.

Hezbollah fighters have hinted to me that they have acquired longer-range antiship missiles beyond the C-802/Noor system used in the 2006 war. Iran fields several reverse-engineered antiship missiles other than the Noor. The largest is the Raad, based on the Chinese HY-2 Silkworm, which can carry a seven-hundred-pound shaped-charge warhead a distance of 225 miles. If Hezbollah has received the Raad, it could theoretically target Israeli shipping off the coast of southern Israel from launch sites as far north from the border as Beirut.

As for new air defense weapons, another key priority for the Islamic Resistance, news reports in mid-2009 claimed that Hezbollah's cadres
were receiving training in Syria on the SA-8 Gecko radar-guided mobile antiaircraft system. At the time, the SA-8 units were not thought to be deployed inside Lebanon, possibly due to Israeli warnings that the transfer of improved air defense systems to Hezbollah would constitute a “red line.”

Other reports claimed that Hezbollah had received the SA-24 Grinch shoulder-fired antiaircraft missile system, a more advanced version of the SA-18 Grouse on which it is based. Hezbollah also may have acquired the Misagh-2 shoulder-fired missile produced by Iran and based on Chinese technology.

As usual, Hezbollah refuses to confirm such allegations, and the truth of the claims will probably only become clear in the next war with Israel. But the acquisition of the SA-8 and SA-24 systems would raise the threat profile to Israeli aircraft operating in Lebanese skies, especially to low-flying helicopters and UAVs, necessitating a change in operational procedure.

In 2007, some Israeli media outlets claimed that Hezbollah had installed radars and antiaircraft missiles on top of Mount Sannine, at almost eight thousand feet Lebanon's third highest mountain. DEBKAfile, an Israeli “intelligence” website that is suspected of being used sometimes to propagate disinformation, said that Hezbollah had “commandeered” the summit at the behest of Iran and Syria. Its radar and air defense systems on the mountaintop “are capable of monitoring and threatening U.S. Sixth Fleet movements in the eastern Mediterranean and Israeli Air Force flights,” it said.
¹

The top of Sannine is completely exposed. There is no vegetation, only sheets of frost-shattered limestone and rocky outcrops, so any permanent radar structure erected on Sannine would be vulnerable to attack. Indeed, anyone attempting to erect anything larger than a sand castle would soon be spotted by shepherds, hikers, hunters, and not least by Israeli aerial reconnaissance patrols, which frequently fly over the summit. I climbed up the mountain shortly after the DEBKAfile story was published in order to confirm my doubts. As expected, the summit of Sannine had changed not one bit since I was last there a year earlier.
Beyond my fellow hikers and the odd lone eagle riding the thermals, nothing stirred within sight of the peak.