Warriors of God (70 page)

“The next war will be the last war with Israel. We will liberate Palestine. We truly believe that,” said Khodr, the stocky, muscular young combatant we met in
chapter 3
, who by 2011 had attended multiple training sessions in Iran and was a fully qualified member of Hezbollah's antitank unit. He fixed me with an unflinching gaze to emphasize the import of what he had just said. “The mujahideen are completely focused on the next war, even ignoring families and friends,” he continued. “They are just waiting for the next war.”

But Khodr was a university student, an educated young man. How
could he relish the prospect of another war with Israel, one that promises to be the most destructive ever inflicted upon Lebanon?

Khodr took a sip from a can of cola and thought for a moment before replying slowly in English.

“I have two lives going in parallel. I have my studies at university and my family, but I also have the life of jihad and preparations for the coming war,” he said. “I consider my jihad duties as something joyful. You cannot understand the joy of jihad unless you are in Hezbollah. The atmosphere within Hezbollah is very spiritual. Jihad is a very pleasant state of mind.”

Sentiments such as these underline the yawning gulf that separates the Hezbollah combatant from most other Lebanese. Khodr yearns for the next war because he will be fulfilling his jihadist obligations and he believes that it will lead to the destruction of Israel. But Khodr's youthful non-Hezbollah contemporaries in Lebanon are more interested in finding decent jobs and homes and raising families as well as enjoying the sybaritic pleasures that the country offers with its golden beaches, snow-capped mountains, and frenetic nightlife. Did Khodr have any empathy with those Lebanese who are horrified at the prospect of another war with Israel?

“These people don't know what they are talking about,” he said with a dismissive wave of his hand. “They think all they have to do is work and enjoy life. Well, we work and enjoy life too, but they don't realize that Israel can do what it wants to the country unless we resist.”

This cold-blooded detachment from the prevailing sentiment in Lebanon is chilling and hard to fathom, but it underlines the single-minded dedication of the Hezbollah fighter. The “Chief,” the tall, gregarious unit commander we also encountered in
chapter 3
, took a car ride with me in early 2010, and as we passed through Beirut's southern suburbs with their bland concrete high-rises, he said nonchalantly, “Take a good look around you, because next time all this will be gone.”

This was his neighborhood, home to his family and friends. Was he not worried about the prospect of the area's being flattened by Israeli bombs in the next war?

“We can always rebuild,” he replied. “Our dignity is more important than roofs over our heads.”

Only Hezbollah's top level military commanders have a clear picture of how the organization will fight the next war. On the broader level, the strategy probably will remain much the same as in 2006: striking targets in Israel with accurate and sustained rocket fire while robustly confronting any ground invasion by the IDF. The chief difference is that Hezbollah will probably go on the offensive next time, rather than wage the defensive war it fought in 2006. Instead of reacting to Israeli actions, Hezbollah will attempt to seize the initiative and dictate the pace of the conflict.

Hezbollah officials and fighters repeatedly allude to “surprises” that they say will give the organization an edge in the next war, leaving analysts to ponder exactly what they have in mind. The obvious possible “surprises” are related to new weapons systems—guided surface-to-surface rockets capable of hitting specific military and infrastructure targets the length of Israel, extended-range antiship missiles, new air defense systems to dent Israel's aerial superiority.

But Hezbollah may be planning to “surprise” Israel not only with new weapons but also with innovative tactics. Since 2006, Hezbollah fighters have repeatedly hinted to me that they are being trained to launch commando raids into northern Israel.

“God willing, we will go into Palestine next. No more south Lebanon. That's why training is so intense and there is so much of it,” said one fighter. He added that the training included learning how to seize and hold ground, a tactic not normally found within the canon of traditional guerrilla warfare, which tends to emphasize hit-and-run operations.

Another fighter told me that the next war “will be fought more in Israel than in Lebanon.” Abu Khalil, the shaven-headed veteran unit commander from the 1990s, once quipped, “You will see that next time
maybe the UN will ask us to withdraw from northern Israel rather than Israel withdraw from south Lebanon.”

Even Nasrallah eventually referred to a cross-border campaign by Hezbollah as a highlight of one of his periodic “deterrence” speeches. “I tell the resistance fighters to be prepared for the day when war is imposed on Lebanon. Then the resistance leadership might ask you to lead the resistance to liberate Galilee,” he said in February 2011.

Taking the fight across Lebanon's southern border into Israel in some respects is the next logical step in Hezbollah's military evolution. Hezbollah would be forcing the Israelis to fight on their own territory, reversing the established Israeli doctrine of fighting its wars on the soil of its neighbors. The number of targets available to small squads of well-armed Hezbollah fighters is limited only by the imagination. Bridges and roads could be dynamited or booby-trapped with IEDs, ambushes conducted against military convoys, electricity and telephone pylons toppled, gas stations blown up. Israel's air control base atop Mount Meron lies only nine miles south of the border, separated by a rugged terrain of wooded valleys that could provide ample cover for infiltrating commando units. Other military facilities, such as the Israeli Air Force base at Kiryat Shemona, are within easy reach of the border. The Israeli frontier settlements are even more vulnerable, especially those such as Manara and Misgav Am that abut the boundary fence. Imagine the reaction in the Israeli defense ministry when senior IDF officers following the progress of their armored columns charging into Lebanon suddenly learn that Hezbollah has stormed a settlement and taken hostage a dozen or more households. Imagine, too, the electrifying effect on public opinion in the Arab and Muslim worlds if combat cameramen accompany the commando squads and beam out images of Hezbollah fighters brandishing yellow party flags surging through Israeli towns and villages.

Dispatching commando units into Israel will not win the war for Hezbollah—most, if not all, of the fighters slipping across the border will surely not make it back. But the tactic is more than justified from Hezbollah's perspective as an element of psychological warfare—causing
chaos and panic in northern Israel and rallying popular support for Hezbollah throughout the region.

This tactic, in fact, may not be that new. I first heard about it from sources in south Lebanon as long ago as 2002 and wrote in
The Daily Star
that Hezbollah might be planning to storm border settlements and seize hostages in the event of a full-scale war with Israel. The revelation raised some eyebrows at the time, but not anymore.

As for the feasibility of infiltrating Israel, Hezbollah secretly built a network of tunnels between 2000 and 2006 along the border from east to west. Who is to say that they did not also dig some tunnels running south, beneath the fence? Taking the idea a step further, could Hezbollah have borrowed a terrifying and destructive tactic of trench warfare from World War I and tunneled beneath Israeli positions in order to blow them up at a later date with a large quantity of explosives? The former battlefields of northern France are still scarred by massive craters left over from the detonation of trench mines, some resulting from as much as forty thousand pounds of dynamite packed beneath the German front line. There is a precedent for such a tactic in the Middle East. In December 2004, five Israeli soldiers were killed when part of an IDF outpost near Rafah in the Gaza Strip was blown up after Palestinian militants tunneled beneath the position and planted an explosive charge.

The IDF may have discovered one such Hezbollah tunnel during the 2006 war. An Israeli TV news crew reportedly caught on microphone a conversation between an IDF officer and a wounded soldier. The soldier told the officer that a tunnel discovered north of the border in Lebanon ran south to beneath an IDF outpost. Nothing more was heard about the revelation.
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Other than ground infiltrations of Israel, Hezbollah's amphibious warfare unit could launch seaborne incursions along the coast of northern Israel. According to a private briefing paper I obtained, compiled by the IDF's Operational Theory Research Institute, Hezbollah's amphibious warfare unit includes a “divers unit” of combat frogmen and a “vessels unit” responsible for “attack craft” and training on the systems. It is unclear what sea vessels, if any, have been transferred to Hezbollah beyond Zodiac inflatable boats. However, Iran and North Korea operate
midget submarines and a number of torpedo-armed semisubmersible and submersible fast attack craft. Iran also manufactures a Swimmer Delivery Vehicle (SDV), a twenty-four-foot torpedo-shaped submersible that is operated by a crew of two and can carry up to seven additional divers. Small fast attack craft, mini-submarines, and SDVs would suit Hezbollah's operational needs for sabotage operations in Israeli harbors or for infiltrating commando teams onto the beaches of northern Israel.

A retired Israeli intelligence officer once told me that at least one attempted operation inside Israel had been mounted by Hezbollah's amphibious warfare unit. This incident, the details of which are still classified, occurred sometime between 2000 and 2006 and involved an underwater sabotage operation against Israeli shipping in Haifa's port. According to the Israeli officer, Hezbollah frogmen planned to attach limpet mines to the hulls of docked ships. Evidently, the mission was unsuccessful, as no ships were blown up. The fate of the frogmen was not revealed, although it can be assumed that they went to a watery grave.

Despite the feverish war preparations undertaken by both sides beginning in 2006, the residents of southern Lebanon and northern Israel were enjoying their most prolonged period of calm in more than four decades. There were a handful of isolated cross-border Katyusha rocket attacks, believed to be the work of Islamist radicals or Palestinian renegades. But Hezbollah had not fired a shot across the border since August 2006. Even the Shebaa Farms remained quiet, despite Israel's continued occupation of the area. Sheikh Naim Qassem explained that the reality of Resolution 1701 precluded a resumption of the Shebaa Farms campaign. Instead, Hezbollah was using the time to prepare “in case Israel decides to launch an aggression against us.”

“This is the shape of the resistance at this stage,” he told me in July 2009.

But there was no letup in the shadowy covert intelligence war waged between Israel and Hezbollah. Since 2006, the Lebanese security services have had an unprecedented success in breaking up Israeli-run spy rings, arresting more than a hundred people, some of whom have been collaborating with the Israelis for decades. They included retired generals, several active-duty colonels in the army, a deputy mayor of a town in the Bekaa Valley, a butcher from south Lebanon, telecoms engineers, and former SLA militiamen. Their diverse social and sectarian backgrounds—Shia, Sunni, Christian, Druze, and Palestinian—testify to the extent of Israel's intelligence penetration of Lebanon.

One of the most potentially damaging cases was that of Marwan Faqih, a Shia from the southern town of Nabatiyah who owned a car dealership and garage. Faqih was close to Hezbollah and a major supplier of vehicles to the organization. But on each new vehicle for Hezbollah, he installed a GPS tracking device and voice recorder. The GPS device recorded the route taken by each vehicle, and the information was sent via satellite. Over time, the recorded GPS “tracks” presumably allowed the Israelis to construct a computerized map not only of homes and offices inhabited by Hezbollah men, but possibly military positions and arms depots and other sensitive locations scattered around the country.

According to Hezbollah's official account, Faqih was unmasked when a garage assistant noticed some unusual wiring sticking out from the bottom of a vehicle he was servicing. When he informed the owner of the car, a Hezbollah member, the party launched an investigation. Another version, however, suggests that the GPS trackers were discovered after the Iranians handed Hezbollah powerful surveillance monitors and it was discovered that their vehicles were beaming a stream of data to satellites.
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The spate of arrests and the collapse of several spy networks were due in large part to the serendipitous provision by France and the United States of sophisticated phone-tapping equipment and data-processing programs to the intelligence bureau of the Lebanese police, according to Lebanese security sources. The equipment was supposed to assist the police in tracing the killers of Rafik Hariri by analyzing phone records
of suspects, but the police discovered that it was equally useful in finding and disrupting Israeli spy rings.

But Hezbollah's enemies also had their successes, most notably on the evening of February 12, 2008, when a heavy-set bearded man climbed into his Mitsubishi Pajero in a narrow street in a Damascus suburb seconds before a bomb exploded inside the vehicle.

I was told the news early the next morning by a friend who called me as I sipped my first cup of coffee of the day and asked, “Have you heard? Imad Mughniyah's been killed.”

My immediate response was skepticism. But that changed when I switched on Hezbollah's Al-Manar television channel. On the screen was a photograph of a chubby-faced man with a full beard streaked with gray, wearing wire-rimmed spectacles, a dark green baseball cap, and a camouflage uniform. A slight smile played around his lips. It had taken the death of Imad Mughniyah for the world to finally get a glimpse of what this most elusive and cunning of Islamic militants actually looked like. Throughout the ranks of Hezbollah, astonished fighters realized that the military commander many of them knew only as “Hajj Radwan” was in fact none other than the fabled Imad Mughniyah.