Warriors of God (36 page)

In an apparent gesture of Israeli resolve, a convoy of armored personnel carriers and self-propelled artillery guns drove through the streets of Kiryat Shemona, slowly enough to be filmed by eager television crews, conveying the impression that the Israeli army was preparing to smash Hezbollah.

UNIFIL went on red alert, anticipating another Grapes of Wrath operation. Civilians in northern Israel hurried into their air-conditioned underground bomb shelters and civilians in southern Lebanon closed their front doors, lit cigarettes, and awaited Israel's latest punishment.

But after the initial half dozen air raids that night, nothing more happened.

As I stood the next morning on the rooftop ramparts of the Crusader castle in Tibnine with its panoramic views over the hills and ridges of the western and central sectors of the zone, nothing stirred. Not a bullet, shell, or bomb interrupted the pastoral calm.

Netanyahu's fist-shaking threats and vows of retaliation were becoming King Lear–like in their emptiness. Israeli columnist Alex Fishman cuttingly wrote of the one-night offensive, “It wasn't a lion that roared. It was a mouse crying before it wriggled back into its hole.”
¹²

The beleaguered Israeli prime minister was loath to undertake any action that risked more rockets on northern Israel and more unfavorable press headlines. He was fighting a tough electoral battle against
Ehud Barak, whose pledge to pull the troops out of Lebanon within a year of taking office had won broad public support.

Barak subsequently trounced his Likud rival in the general election in mid-May 1999. He had won a broad mandate to pursue peace with Syria, but the clock was ticking. He had promised the electorate that Israel would be out of Lebanon within a year. But the collapsing morale of the SLA militia in the Jezzine salient at the northern tip of the zone suggested that a major reconfiguration of the occupation zone was imminent and would not await diplomatic developments between Israel and Syria.

SIX
 

JEZZINE, south Lebanon
—The thunderclap of an explosion burst along the broad main street and echoed off the steep limestone mountains that flanked the town. A column of black smoke coiled swiftly into the air from behind pale gray stone houses on the northern edge of Jezzine, just around the corner from where we were chatting with a group of SLA militiamen. Hezbollah fighters hidden in the rocky slopes of Niha Mountain, which towered over Jezzine to the east, had detonated a roadside bomb. Militiamen in the stark gray cinder block fortress that housed the SLA's Jezzine battalion headquarters opened fire with heavy machine guns, raking the imposing slopes of the adjacent mountains in a hopeless attempt to hit the perpetrators of the bombing. Hezbollah mortar rounds pummeled an SLA outpost on a hill to the southwest of the town, each round sending up blossoms of yellow dust and gray smoke.

The roadside bomb had targeted a car driven by one of the SLA militiamen deployed at the checkpoint at the northern entrance of the
town. The blast killed the militiaman and knocked his car off the road onto the roof of a house in the valley below. Hezbollah had apparently earmarked the militiaman for assassination. A subsequent videotape of the bomb attack broadcast on Al-Manar showed a civilian car passing the hidden bomb. The audio just caught the faint voice of a Hezbollah man saying “No, no, no,” telling a colleague that it was not the correct target. Moments later the hapless militiaman's vehicle came into view and then disappeared in a puff of gray smoke as the bomb exploded.

“Are you coming?” a Lebanese reporter called to me, holding the door of his car open as other journalists crammed inside. I squeezed into the back and we tore down the road toward the scene of the bombing. But militiamen on the embankment above us fired their rifles in the air and yelled at us to go back. An M-113 armored personnel carrier clattered down the high street at high speed, swerving violently. A wild-eyed militiaman stood through the hatch and screamed at reporters not to take photographs. “
Mamnoua! Mamnoua!
(Forbidden! Forbidden!)” he yelled.

It was the second day of the SLA's pullout from the mountainous Jezzine salient, and it was not going well.

The SLA battalion in Jezzine had all but lost control of the enclave in the first few months of 1999, and it was clear that the militia could not hold on for another year while Ehud Barak tentatively explored the diplomatic track with Syria. At the beginning of January, seventeen men abruptly announced they were quitting the militia and requested asylum from the Lebanese government. In February, Hezbollah staged an unprecedented assault on the headquarters of the SLA in the center of Jezzine, pinning down SLA reinforcements in nearby hilltop outposts with accurate mortar fire while destroying armored vehicles and buildings inside the compound.

Emile Nasr had been replaced as commander of the SLA's Jezzine battalion the previous August after he suffered a nervous breakdown
brought on by the threat of assassination by Hezbollah. According to sources connected to Lebanese military intelligence as well as former SLA double agents, shortly before Nasr returned to his home village of Aishiyah, a few miles south of Jezzine, he brokered a deal through Ramzi Nohra in which he offered to provide intelligence from inside the zone in exchange for his life. The offer was accepted, and Nasr lived the last months of the occupation in peace. Nasr slipped out of the zone in May 2000, just days before the Israelis withdrew, and turned himself over to the Lebanese army.

Nasr's replacement, Joseph Karam, nicknamed “Alloush,” was critically wounded in an IED ambush in April, the third to target the SLA commander since he took over the Jezzine battalion. His driver was killed, and Karam was flown to Israel for treatment.

The Israelis struggled to find a replacement for Karam, but no one wanted a job that was little more than a suicide mission. Mouna Touma, the brother of Maher who had assisted Ramzi Nohra in the abduction of Ahmad Hallaq, was appointed acting SLA commander pending a full-time replacement. According to former intelligence sources, Hezbollah had warned Maher Touma that it was about to begin targeting senior SLA commanders and he should tell his brother to quit the militia before it was too late. If he stayed, he could end up dead. But Mouna Touma did not heed the advice. Two weeks after the IED ambush that ended Karam's tenure in Jezzine, Touma was killed in another roadside bomb ambush staged in almost exactly the same location.

SLA militiamen from farther south were deployed to the salient to help reinforce the dwindling battalion, which now numbered fewer than two hundred militiamen, most of whom stayed at home and refused to travel along the bomb-lined roads. Armed Hezbollah fighters began roaming the district in broad daylight, twice setting up checkpoints on main roads and abducting militiamen. “Collaborators! Watch and learn what your fate will be if you don't repent,” Al-Manar television said in a commentary accompanying one of the filmed abductions.

Two weeks after Touma's death, Antoine Lahd, the SLA chief, finally gave up. He informed the IDF that the situation in Jezzine was no longer tenable and that the militia would have to be withdrawn from the salient.

The pullout began on May 27 when families of SLA militiamen living in Jezzine packed their belongings into cars and drove south toward Marjayoun. Three days later, the SLA abandoned outposts to the west of Jezzine and pulled back to the mountain town. A convoy of T-55 tanks and armored personnel carriers transported militiamen and equipment from Jezzine along a winding mountain road toward the new frontline positions nearly six miles to the south. Hezbollah was waiting for them, however. An hour after the convoy departed, a series of flashes lit up the night sky to the south, followed seconds later by the thump of explosions as Hezbollah fighters, hidden in the hills flanking the road, detonated a string of IEDs. One militiaman was killed and another wounded in the attacks, which bogged down the retreat and left several bomb-damaged vehicles abandoned on the side of the road. A nervous militiaman in Jezzine fired a burst from his .50 caliber machine gun into the mountains to the east where Hezbollah had its hidden observation posts overlooking the town. A T-55 tank parked on the edge of the town fired a few shells into the hills, orange bubbles of flame from each exploding round pricking the blackness of the night.

The next morning, bored militiamen sat in the shade beside the high street waiting for the order to pull out. A T-55 tank, a towed artillery cannon, and two trucks laden with household goods were parked nearby. One teenage militiaman, called Manny, dressed in an olive-green Israeli uniform, said he had been forced to join the SLA only four months earlier. “I keep asking them if I can leave, but they won't let me,” Manny said quietly so his comrades could not overhear.

Why didn't he simply defect?

“If they catch me they would put me in the trunk of the car and drive me to Khiam,” he said, referring to the SLA-run prison.

Another veteran militiaman observed sourly, “We're leaving because the people don't want us here anymore. Many of them are collaborators with Hezbollah.”

Another nodded in agreement. “You see someone in the street and you say ‘hi.' He says ‘hi' and then he goes around a corner and plants a bomb,” he said.

In a newly abandoned SLA outpost in the Christian village of Roum, west of Jezzine, children collected ammunition boxes and brass cartridge cases as other residents wandered around the empty bunkers and offices. The outpost overlooked the coastal hills to the west all the way to Sidon and the silvery sun-speckled Mediterranean.

On a wall at the rear of the outpost, an SLA militiaman had written in English the heartfelt plea, “Jesus, save me!”

That night, the SLA prepared to pull out of its last remaining positions in Jezzine and withdraw to the new front line just south of Kfar Houne village. The SLA expelled reporters from the town as they prepared for the southbound retreat. We congregated at Jezzine's western entrance, where an M-113 armored personnel carrier, painted pale green and covered in scratches and rust spots, blocked the road beneath the town's landmark statue of the Virgin Mary. The crew of the APC was tasked with bringing up the rear of the last SLA column to leave Jezzine that night. They knew there was a strong chance that they would be hit by roadside bombs on the journey.

“The worst thing that can happen to us is that we get killed,” said Johnny, the thick-set and unshaven APC commander, with war-weary bravado as he swigged from a bottle of whisky. Johnny and his comrade Nimr, a skinny militiaman with unkempt hair and a straggly beard, were both former Lebanese Forces militiamen and veterans of the civil war. They had joined the SLA in 1990 at the war's end and had served in frontline positions such as Sojod in the northern sector, one of Hezbollah's favorite targets.

“The fighting in Sojod is a good war,” Johnny observed as he fed a belt of ammunition into his .50 caliber machine gun mounted on top of the APC. “Hezbollah come up the hill to us and we kill them. But here in Jezzine, they are like cats. We never see them.”

Manny, the young SLA recruit who wanted to leave, was clearly unnerved
at what Hezbollah might have in store for them in a few hours' time. He fiddled with the strap of his AK-47 rifle and tried to smile for the cameras. He personified the predicament facing many SLA militiamen: he wanted to quit, but feared the prospect of arrest and imprisonment by the Lebanese authorities or the wrath of the SLA if caught deserting. Staying in the militia, however, he risked injury or death in combat with Hezbollah and an uncertain future if, or when, Israel withdrew from Lebanon.

Just before 2:00
A.M.
, two Mercedes cars pulled up beside the checkpoint and Johnny was ordered to pull out. Nimr handed us tiny pictures of the Virgin Mary and Saint Charbel with short prayers inscribed on the back. Manny's face was frozen in a rictus of fear as he hauled himself through the rear hatch of the APC. Nimr followed him and gave us a brief, fleeting smile and wave before slamming the steel door.

A somber-looking Johnny politely shook our hands and thanked us for keeping him and his crew company that evening. The bluster and fiery rhetoric were gone, dampened by whisky and trepidation for the journey ahead.

“Our fate is now in the hands of God,” he said quietly as he climbed in through the rooftop hatch of the APC. Taking a final slug of whisky and a deep drag on his cigarette, Johnny gunned the engine, and without a backward glance he steered the APC into the darkness of the road leading south from Jezzine.