Warriors of God (2 page)

Syria, however, seemed to be the one country that would not succumb to the Arab Spring phenomenon. Assad appeared quite relaxed as he watched his counterparts fall and chaos engulf other countries. He even dispensed some advice to other leaders clinging to power, telling
The Wall Street Journal
in early February that Syria was immune from popular rage because his regime was “very closely linked to the beliefs of the people.”

However, Assad's confidence was premature. In mid-March, demonstrations began in the southern town of Deraa and quickly spread. The regime sent in troops and security forces to crush the protests, but a rising death toll and countless reports of brutality and torture simply galvanized the opposition protest movement even more. As the weeks turned into months and the uprising showed no sign of diminishing, analysts began to ponder whether the Assad regime could possibly survive. Meanwhile, Iran and Hezbollah could only wring their hands and watch helplessly as the future of a strategic alliance—the so-called Axis of Resistance—that has endured for three decades suddenly was cast into doubt.

Syria is the vital geo-strategic lynchpin connecting Iran to Hezbollah. It grants Hezbollah strategic depth and political backing, and serves as a conduit for the transfer of heavy weapons across the rugged border with Lebanon. If Assad's Alawite-dominated regime falls and is replaced by an administration better reflecting the majority Sunni population, Hezbollah's stature in Lebanon inevitably will diminish, even if it remains the dominant political and military domestic actor.

In the five years since the last war between Hezbollah and Israel in 2006, a cautious calm has settled along the traditionally volatile Lebanon-Israel frontier. It is evident that both sides are acutely aware that the next confrontation will be of a magnitude unprecedented in the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Hezbollah's stockpile of weapons includes rockets with sufficient range to accurately strike all major urban centers in Israel, placing the Jewish state's heartland on the front line for
the first time since the 1948 war. And if the reports that it has acquired Syrian Scud D missiles are confirmed, then nowhere in Israel is immune from Hezbollah's reach. By the same token, Israel promises to bring massive destruction onto Lebanon in the event of another war.

The “balance of terror” that has preserved a modicum of stability remains inherently unstable and still subject to miscalculation by either side. It has become customary since the 2006 war for pundits and politicians in Lebanon and Israel to begin speculating in late spring on whether the next war is imminent (tradition dictates that Arab-Israeli wars tend to be fought in the dry summer and fall months). So far Lebanon and Israel have survived five summers. But barring a major region-shaping development such as comprehensive Middle East peace or an entente between the U.S. and Iran, another war is all but inevitable.

In 2001, when I began to learn the scale of the military preparations being undertaken by Hezbollah in south Lebanon, I knew that a war was just a matter of time. The only questions were when and the catalyst. We found that out on July 12, 2006, when Hezbollah fighters abducted two Israeli soldiers.

The stakes this time around are far greater than in 2006, but none of the drivers that led to war five years ago have been resolved, and only the fragile “balance of terror” separates peace from disaster. Like my grim conclusion in 2001, I fear the next war is drawing ever closer, and only the timing and the trigger remain unknown.

Nicholas Blanford
Beirut, Lebanon   
July 2011            

Northern Israel
—The old general's desk was bare except for a telephone, a stack of loose papers, and a yellow legal pad. He twisted off the cap of a pen and pulled the pad toward him. With the pen hovering above a clean sheet of paper, the general paused a moment to collect his thoughts. Then he began to write a letter to a man he had not seen in twenty-seven years.

“I hope you still remember me from our conversations at your home,” he wrote.

The last time they had met was during the hot summer of 1982. The Israeli army had charged up from the south, encircled and then occupied west Beirut, forcing Yasser Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organization out of the Lebanese capital. It was a fleeting moment of triumph for the IDF and for Israel's ruthless and ambitious defense minister, Ariel Sharon.

In south Lebanon, Israeli soldiers openly walked the streets of Sidon and Tyre, shopping in the markets and watching movies in cinemas. Even some Israeli tourists and businessmen had come to admire the sights and explore possible commercial opportunities in the newly pacified region. The Shias of southern Lebanon had greeted the invading Israeli troops with handfuls of rice and cheers, thankful that the detested Palestinians had been forced out. The Israelis had basked in the goodwill.

But it soon became evident that the Israelis were in no hurry to leave. Temporary military positions were reinforced and began to take on a
look of permanence. Gradually, the smiles of the southerners at their Israeli “liberators” grew less frequent.

One morning, the general had met a local Lebanese and heard some advice—and a warning that would stay with him for almost three decades.

“Thank you for kicking out the PLO, but go home quickly,” the Lebanese man had told him. “If you stay, two things will happen. First, we will corrupt you because we know how to corrupt foreign invading armies. Second, we will create a guerrilla movement that will make you miss the Palestinians. Please, go home quickly.”

The pen jerked rapidly across the yellow sheet as the general continued to write.

After that brief lull in late summer 1982, it had all started to go wrong. A local Shia resistance emerged in the villages around Tyre and steadily intensified. By 1985, the Israeli army had pulled back to a border strip and was facing a newly ferocious enemy of grim, bearded Shia militants who took their lead from Iran's Islamic revolutionaries and sought inspiration from the martyrdom of the sect's founders 1,400 years earlier. By the mid-1990s, Israel was fighting a losing battle against these determined guerrillas, and finally withdrew from Lebanon in 2000. But the conflict continued to simmer; in 2006 it exploded into a brutal monthlong war.

Even as the general was writing his letter, these two bitter foes were making preparations for another encounter that promised to be even more destructive than the last.

The general finished his letter and began to sign his name at the bottom, before scribbling it out and writing instead his old Arabic nom de guerre. He folded the sheet three times and inserted his business card into the crease.

Later, in south Lebanon, the recipient of the general's letter unfolded the yellow sheet and read, his eyes darting across the handwritten lines. He smiled thoughtfully.

“He should have listened to me back in 1982,” he said, handing over the note.

The letter was short and reflective in tone, but one sentence stood out, a simple but rueful acknowledgment.

The general had written, “All your predictions were right.”

ONE
 

BAALBEK, Bekaa Valley
—They had waited for hours, a noisy, tumultuous throng jamming the narrow streets of this ancient town sprawling across the flatlands of the northern Bekaa Valley. From all the Shia territories in Lebanon they had come. From the cramped cinder block homes in the squalid slums of southern Beirut, from the banana plantations and citrus orchards of Tyre on the Mediterranean coast, from the olive groves and tobacco fields set among the steep stony hills of Bint Jbeil and Nabatiyah in the south, from the dusty villages clinging to the arid mountain slopes flanking the northern Bekaa Valley. Some had traveled for more than a day, filling buses and shared taxis and private vehicles as they navigated over the mountains separating the Bekaa from the coast and then bounced along the rutted roads that led toward Baalbek.

To the west, sinuous fingers of snow stroked the sepia peaks of
Mount Lebanon, fading remnants of the bitter winter months. A cool breeze wafted through Baalbek, rustling the branches of the poplar trees shading the shallow crystal waters of the Ras al-Ain spring.

It was a religious occasion, the fortieth day after Ashoura, marking the end of the traditional period of mourning for Imam Hussein, whose seventh-century martyrdom is the defining motif for the Shia faithful. But it was not the commemoration of Imam Hussein that had compelled such a multitude, perhaps seventy-five thousand people in all, to descend upon Baalbek this day. Nor was it Imam Hussein's sacrifice in the sands of Mesopotamia that had emboldened the men gathered in Baalbek to bring with them their weapons, bolt-action rifles passed from father to son or the more modern AK-47 assault rifle carried in hand or slung over shoulder. Instead, they had come to Baalbek to hear the words of one man—a tall, charismatic Iranian-born cleric whose soft smile and kindly eyes had won many admirers, Muslim and Christian alike, since he had arrived on Lebanese shores a decade and a half earlier. Known for his humility and the gentle timbre of his voice, Sayyed Musa Sadr, “Imam Musa” to his followers, had lately begun injecting steel into his oratory, preaching a bold new discourse of revolt and defiance. One month earlier, in the village of Bidnayil, a few miles south of Baalbek, Sadr had electrified his audience with an angry denunciation of the government's neglect of Lebanon's backwater regions and of the failure of the state to protect the southern Lebanese from Israel's destructive incursions. For too long, he proclaimed, the Shias of Lebanon had been marginalized and crushed, denigrated as “Mitwali.”
¹
Now was the time for “revolution and weapons.”

“Starting from today,” vowed Sadr in Bidnayil, “we will no longer complain nor cry. Our name is not Mitwali; our name is ‘men of refusal,' ‘men of vengeance,' ‘men who revolt against tyranny' even though this costs us our blood and our lives.”

On this fortieth day after Ashoura, the Shia faithful had chosen to answer Sadr's call by brandishing their weapons, a physical manifestation of their latent collective power and a stern warning to the Lebanese state that the Mitwali would be silent and submissive no more.

Sadr and his companions were making slow progress up the Bekaa
Valley toward Baalbek. As they passed through the Shia villages north of Shtaura, they found their route blocked by crowds bubbling with anticipation and excitement. Sadr was obliged to step out of his car, to greet the local dignitaries, to listen patiently to their warm welcomes and expressions of loyalty. Sheep were slaughtered on the road before him, a traditional gesture of respect for the honored visitor. Then, politely declining the entreaties of the villagers to linger a little longer, Sadr proceeded to the next village, where the same scene would be repeated.

As Sadr's entourage finally entered the southern outskirts of Baalbek, loudspeakers attached to the minarets of the town's mosques broadcast the news of the imam's arrival. As the word spread throughout the town, thousands of rifles were pointed skyward and the deafening clatter of gunfire erupted, almost drowning out the chants of “
Allah u-Akbar
(God is greater).” There were perhaps fifty thousand rifles firing all at once, a true Bekaa welcome for the venerated Sadr. The hail of falling bullets stripped leaves from trees. Ejected cartridge cases flew in through the open windows of the cars in Sadr's cortege.

As the imam climbed out of his vehicle, he was enveloped in a churning, unruly mob that bundled him toward the small platform where he would make his address. Outstretched hands snatched at his cloak, and his black turban was knocked off his head. It took twenty minutes for him to reach the podium, while the celebratory shooting continued unabated.

“I have words harsher than bullets, so spare your bullets,” he exhorted the crowd, urging silence so that he could begin.

He castigated the government for its failure to meet the most basic needs of the people, noting that Baalbek itself, with a population of ten thousand, had only one government school, which dated back more than three decades to the French mandate era. He spoke of the south, battered by Israel, abused by the Palestinian armed factions that had taken root there, its people scorned, its waters plundered by the Lebanese authorities. The Shias, he thundered, were underrepresented in the civil service, industry, and academia. Thousands of Lebanese in the impoverished north and south were without identity cards, denying them basic state services as well as the right to vote.