Warriors of God (74 page)

The Mlita project was undeniably slick—the organizers even hired a marketing consultant to design a logo and “corporate identity” for the facility.

“As the main center of the resistance from the 1980s, this place talks to the souls of the visitors,” said Sheikh Ali Daher, the head of Hezbollah's publicity department. “The whole project is to tell the story of resistance to the new generation.” He said that there were plans to expand the facility with a cable car and to open additional theme parks in the south. But Daher also cheerfully admitted that the Israelis were certain to bomb Mlita into dust in the next war.

The landscape of the south has changed little in the ten years since those tumultuous few days in May 2000 when the SLA collapsed and the last Israeli troops dashed for the border with Hezbollah fighters and Lebanese civilians at their heels. The hardy little hill villages remain the same, largely bereft of the young, who migrate to Beirut or travel overseas to find work, leaving the dusty streets to the ruminations of the elderly and the watchful eyes of the resistance. Most of those who remain follow the same ineluctable agrarian cycle as their ancestors, tilling the stony chocolate-colored soil for tobacco and wheat and picking citrus fruit in the coastal orchards and olives and apples on the cooler mountain slopes farther east.

The mementos of occupation fade a little more with each passing
year. The Israeli and SLA outposts, those menacing volcano cones silhouetted on the ridges and hills of the old front line, have gradually vanished, the overgrown earthen ramparts subsiding beneath eleven years of winter rains or leveled by the bulldozers of construction workers. One still remains relatively intact—the old SLA compound near the village of Talloussa, where I was once briefly detained by militants after stumbling across their antiaircraft gun hidden inside. The position was bombed by Israeli jets in 2006, leaving a gaping crater on one side and a sagging roof of reinforced concrete. It is still possible to walk up the cramped staircases and corridors that lead to the cinder-block-lined parapets and machine gun posts with their wide horizontal window slits and views over the old Wadi Salouqi front line. Here SLA militiamen once shivered in winter and baked in summer, doubtless mulling their ultimate fate while sheltering from Hezbollah's near-daily mortar bombardments. What ghosts must still linger in these darkened corridors and weed-ridden ramparts?

What ghosts, too, flit through the thickly wooded slopes of Wadi Salouqi, the scene of so many bloody clashes between Hezbollah fighters and Israeli troops? Once inaccessible, it is reachable today by a gleaming black asphalt road that winds along the valley floor, and if one knows where to look deep into the shadowed foliage on either side, there are fleeting glimpses to be obtained of ruined and abandoned Hezbollah facilities—the entrance to a bunker here, smashed cinder block huts and sandbagged steps there.

There are ghosts in the unsmiling faces of bygone martyrs whose portraits adorn electricity pylons and telephone poles, an ever-present reminder of past sacrifices and an inspiration for new generations of mujahideen. The sun-faded and rust-speckled tin-panel portraits of Mohammed Saad, with his scraggly beard and sharp eyes, still hang in the villages where this early resistance leader once lived, fought, and died.

There are ghosts here for me, too, having spent a third of my life chasing Hezbollah and watching the occupations, battles, massacres, victories, and defeats of war in the valleys and hills of the south.

I see them in the golden beams of sunlight that pierce the brooding
purple rain clouds of winter and spotlight tracts of gray stony hillside beneath Beaufort Castle. I see them in the hot, dry wind that blows up from Galilee in the heavy heat of August and buffets the Shebaa Farms mountains rising above the cool, limpid waters of the Wazzani springs. I see them in the poppies, cornflowers, and buttercups of spring in the meadows of the Litani River below Marjayoun, like some vast Impressionist canvas suffused with the scent of wild thyme and sage.

There are ghosts in the forest of umbrella pines and the forbidding mountains overlooking Jezzine where I once spent an evening with Johnny, the whisky-swigging SLA militiaman, his old wartime comrade Nimr, and Manny, the terrified teenager.

There are ghosts in Tyre at what was once UNIFIL's logistics base—and is today a parking lot—where I would sip morning coffee and chat with my friend Hassan Siklawi and his colleagues Rula and Joumana in their portacabin office before heading for a tour of “the area,” the volatile frontline district.

There are ghosts where the border road takes a sharp left turn near the village of Meiss al-Jabal, where Abed Taqqoush was murdered by an Israeli tank gunner. The rusted skeleton of his burned-out car was towed away for scrap many years ago, and for a long time the only physical reminder of what happened there was the melted patch of asphalt where Abed's car was engulfed in flames. Even that ugly cicatrix eventually disappeared beneath a fresh layer of asphalt, but the memory lingers and dampens my mood every time I pass by.

I see ghosts, too, in the faces of the southern Lebanese, whose stoicism and unbreakable sense of humor helped sustain them through decades of sacrifice, violence, and bloodshed. Scarcely a village along the old front line or in the border district does not hold some memory for me. Mansouri, to give one of many examples, where in August 1999 I met with the family of Mahmoud Zabad a few hours after an Israeli tank had fired antipersonnel rounds filled with thousands of steel darts into his home, knocking holes in a wall and nearly killing his children. As we sat chatting over tiny cups of coffee, Mahmoud reduced his family to hysterical laughter with a graphic account of how his seven-year-old son, Hassan, had urgently needed to visit the bathroom even as the tank
shells were exploding outside. Dozens of the vicious steel darts were still embedded in his ruined kitchen wall as Mahmoud clutched his behind and staggered in front of his family in imitation of the incontinent Hassan, to hoots of laughter that even a flare-trailing Israeli jet swooping over the village failed to diminish.

There are ghosts—too many ghosts—in Qana, once famous in Lebanon for being the place where the Lebanese believe Christ performed the wedding miracle of turning water into wine, but today synonymous with bloody massacre.

It was this village that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the diminutive, narrow-eyed Iranian president who seems to take puckish delight in pricking Western sensibilities, chose to visit in October 2010 on his inaugural trip to Lebanon as president. He had held a triumphal rally in Beirut the evening before, attended by the Hezbollah faithful. Nasrallah, who since 2006 has delivered nearly all his speeches by video screen for security reasons, disappointed his supporters by not standing in person beside Ahmadinejad at the Beirut rally. But the Hezbollah leader doubtless anticipated that his rare appearance in the flesh would completely overshadow the presence of his Iranian guest.

There was another huge crowd awaiting Ahmadinejad in Bint Jbeil the next day. Hezbollah security men clutching the ubiquitous walkie-talkies marshaled the throng along the streets to the sports stadium, which was bedecked with Lebanese and Iranian flags. A giant banner reading “Welcome” in Arabic and Farsi hung by the stage. The sun had dropped below the stadium walls by the time Ahmadinejad arrived on the floodlit stage. To one side of him stood Sheikh Nabil Qawq, Hezbollah's tall southern commander, who was dressed in his customary brown cloak and white turban. The crowd roared their greeting and Ahmadinejad smiled, waved his hand, and gave V for Victory signs. He stood less than two miles from the border with archenemy Israel, a country he has insisted must be destroyed—an ambition that Hezbollah's faithful hope to fulfill.

Thousands of balloons in red, white, and green—by happy coincidence, the colors of both the Iranian and the Lebanese flags—were released in the town center. The cloud of balloons drifted southward on
the gentle evening breeze, toward the Israeli border. Some Israeli activists also released balloons of their own, inscribed with anti-Iranian messages; the wind, however, seemed to be in Lebanon's favor, blowing those messages back at their senders.

In his address, Ahmadinejad praised the resolve of the southern Lebanese and heaped extravagantly phrased plaudits on the Islamic Resistance. “You are a solid mountain,” he said, speaking in Farsi, his words translated into Arabic for the audience. “We are proud of you and will remain forever by your side.… You have proved that your jihad is stronger than armadas and tanks.”

After ten minutes I had to leave. My story was due and I had yet to write and file it. The audience, too, seemed to have heard enough. They were streaming out of the stadium and hurrying home even as Ahmadinejad continued to deliver praise for their steadfastness. The good folk of Bint Jbeil had done their duty, waved a flag, and cheered the visiting head of state, and now it was time to go home.

It was dark by the time Ahmadinejad's entourage raced out of Bint Jbeil toward his next engagement in Qana, sirens blaring and police on motorcycles furiously waving traffic aside. Dergham drove in hot pursuit as I wrote my story in the passenger seat, the laptop computer bouncing on my knees. By the time we arrived at Qana, the village had been sealed off and there was nowhere close enough to the center to park. Lights flashed and police and soldiers directed the clogged traffic, yelling at the impatient and laughing with passing friends. I could not obtain an Internet connection, so for the first time in years I had to dictate my story by phone to the
Times
copytaker, just as I had done a decade earlier before reliable Internet service arrived in Lebanon. Ahmadinejad's voice boomed over loudspeakers from the center of the village as I read my story into the phone.

By the time I had finished, Ahmadinejad was gone. We drove into Qana and parked beside the newly constructed mausoleum where the victims of the April 1996 massacre lie. Qana was strangely subdued now that the Ahmadinejad cavalcade had passed through. A few locals loitered on the street, others stacked chairs where the ceremony had been held. I stepped into the hushed hall of the mausoleum. Flowers had been
placed on the tombs in the cordoned-off center of the hall. Red roses lay on the ground, thrown by Ahmadinejad and his entourage minutes before when they had entered to say a prayer for the dead. The only sound breaking the quiet was the gentle helicopter-like thwack of the ceiling fans. I thought of Saadallah Balhas, who had joined his deceased family here upon his death two years earlier, of Fatmeh Balhas, who had seen her children blown to pieces in front of her eyes, of Ibrahim Taqi, whose near-decapitated corpse is forever seared into my memory.

“From Karbala to Qana, the blood meets,” read a banner strung along one wall. Another banner featured the kindly face of Imam Musa Sadr, the gentle cleric whose tireless efforts half a century earlier had helped lift the Shias of Lebanon from their communal torpor.

A man with jangling keys stepped into the hall and closed one of two heavy steel doors, bolting it in place.

“You're closing?” I asked.

“Yes,” he replied with a smile. “We're closing.”

I walked out into the cool evening air as the caretaker flicked off the lights, swung shut the second door, and locked it carefully behind him.

And inside, darkness fell over the cold silent tombs.