Warriors of God (6 page)

In 1976, he and a group of friends arrived at a small Fatah training camp near Damour, a Christian village on the coastal highway south of Beirut whose residents had been massacred and driven out by Palestinian and leftist militias that January. The camp was run by Anis Naqqash, by then a legendary figure within PLO circles. Today, his ginger hair and beard having turned steely gray, the affable fifty-nine-year-old looks more like a retired university professor than a onetime revolutionary. A Sunni Muslim from Beirut, Naqqash joined Fatah in 1968 and was a confederate of Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, better known as Carlos the Jackal. He was a member of the team that boldly kidnapped a group of OPEC oil ministers meeting in Vienna in 1975.

After Damour fell to the PLO, Naqqash set up a small military training camp to teach basic weapons skills and tactics over a twenty-day period to a diverse array of small factions and individuals. “Imad Mughniyah came up to me and said that he and his friends were an Islamist group that wanted to be trained militarily but did not want to join Fatah,” Naqqash recalls. “Most of them were very young, just seventeen or eighteen years old. Imad stood out from the others because while everyone was looking forward to the end of the course when they would get to fire guns, Imad was more interested in learning about tactics. He was the only one, apart from a teacher and a Maoist, who wrote down notes during the course. He was not interested in shooting guns like the others.”

Naqqash drilled into his militant students the necessity of strategic and tactical planning. For resistance to be effective, he argued, it could not be merely reactive to developments, but had to be proactive in order to retain the element of surprise and to stay one step ahead of the enemy. “I used to make speeches,” he recalls, “about the need to think where we would be in a year, or two years or three years. What would be the enemy's movements by then? How would we be deployed? How would we be ready for whatever events might come? This is what I taught Imad from the beginning.”

“People honor me by saying that I was Imad's teacher,” Naqqash adds with a soft chuckle, “but all I did was to teach him the A's, B's, and C's. Imad later ‘graduated' from a ‘university of resistance' and then set up his own ‘school of resistance' to teach others.”

Another religious-minded youngster enamored by Fadlallah's sermons was Hassan Nasrallah. A shy, skinny boy with long, thick eyebrows and full lips who had yet to reach his tenth birthday when he began visiting the Usrat al-Taakhi mosque in Nabaa in the late 1960s, Nasrallah would later become the charismatic leader of Hezbollah and one of the most influential leaders in the Arab world, a figure adored by the party faithful and treated with wary respect by his enemies.

He was born in 1960, the eldest of nine siblings. His father, Abdel-Karim, was a greengrocer who sold fruit and vegetables from a street cart in the slum quarter of Karantina, near Nabaa. The young Hassan spent his time reading the Koran and studying religious tracts, and by his own account he was a fully observant Muslim by the age of nine.

With the beginning of the civil war in 1975, the Nasrallah family escaped Karantina just before it fell to Christian militias for the relative peace of Bazouriyah, their home village surrounded by dense orange orchards on the outskirts of Tyre in south Lebanon.

Bazouriyah was a Communist stronghold in the mid-1970s, and Nasrallah's political consciousness quickly developed as he set about organizing religious youths into a study group held at an Islamic library in the village. That same year, he joined Amal, and although only fifteen years old, he was appointed the group's representative for his village.

Yet, for the young Nasrallah, the seminaries of Najaf beckoned. With a letter of introduction from a cleric in Tyre, he traveled to Baghdad, then Najaf, hoping to meet Sayyed Mohammed Baqr as-Sadr, the Dawa party leader and Fadlallah's old friend. By the late 1970s, the Shia religious institutions were facing pressure from the Baathist regime in Baghdad. On arrival in Najaf, Nasrallah met with a friend from Lebanon,
who warned him that being seen with Baqr as-Sadr could cause him problems with the Iraqi authorities. The friend said he would introduce Nasrallah to someone close to Baqr as-Sadr who would arrange a meeting. The intermediary's name was Abbas Mussawi.

“I met Sayyed Abbas Mussawi for the first time in the street while we were on our way to see him, and, maybe because of his dark skin, I thought he was an Iraqi at first,” Nasrallah later recalled. “I had already spent two days in Baghdad and Najaf and had become accustomed to the Iraqi accent, so I started talking to Sayyed Abbas in an Iraqi-tinged Lebanese accent; but he laughed and said, ‘I am Lebanese, not Iraqi, you can relax.' ”
¹⁰

It was the beginning of a long and fruitful relationship between the two young men. Originally from Nabi Sheet, a small village scattered over a barren mountainside in the eastern Bekaa, Mussawi was eight years Nasrallah's senior and had been studying in Najaf with Baqr as-Sadr since 1970. On meeting Nasrallah, Baqr as-Sadr instructed Mussawi to take the Lebanese youngster under his wing and serve as his mentor and tutor.

Nasrallah spent the next eighteen months immersed in studies alongside a handful of other students under the guidance of Mussawi, whom the future Hezbollah leader considered as “a father, an educator, a friend.”

“Under Sayyed Abbas, our group broke all routines, never took time off, and never rested, because Sayyed Abbas converted us into an active beehive and made us thirsty for learning,” Nasrallah said.
¹¹

But his studies were cut short in early 1978 when the Iraqi regime launched a crackdown on the Najaf seminaries, arresting and expelling Lebanese clerical students. Nasrallah slipped out of Iraq avoiding arrest and returned to Lebanon, where he enrolled in a new
hawza
established by Mussawi in Baalbek.

Nasrallah's return to Lebanon in mid-1978 coincided with several pivotal developments that were to have a profound impact on Lebanon's Shia community.

On March 11, a dozen armed Fatah fighters infiltrated northern Israel by sea, hijacked a bus with its passengers, and embarked on a shooting spree along the highway toward Tel Aviv. By the time the fighting had ended, all but two of the Palestinians were dead, along with thirty-seven Israelis, twenty-five of whom burned to death when the Fatah fighters blew up the bus with hand grenades.

The Israelis had been looking for an excuse to move into south Lebanon to drive out the PLO and consolidate Saad Haddad's militia. Now they had one. On the night of March 14, the Israelis invaded south Lebanon, punching north along four main axes between the coastal road in the west and the mountainous Arkoub district in the east. The Israeli government said it had no intention of occupying the area, but General Mordechai Gur, the IDF chief of staff, said that the goal was to link up Haddad's militia-controlled Christian enclaves and establish a “security belt” along the length of the border. The PLO had been expecting a major operation by the Israelis after the bus hijacking, but they underestimated the scale of the attack and were driven northward.

On March 19, the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 425, which called for “strict respect” of Lebanon's “territorial integrity, sovereignty and political independence” and demanded of Israel “immediately to cease its military action” against Lebanon and “withdraw forthwith its forces from all Lebanese territory.” It also agreed to establish a UN Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) to oversee the Israeli withdrawal and help the Lebanese government restore its authority over the area.

The Israelis agreed to a cease-fire on March 21, by which time the IDF had occupied much of the area between the border and the Litani River. On May 22, Israel announced that it would withdraw its forces from Lebanon by June 13. But on the scheduled day of withdrawal, the departing Israelis handed over the border strip to its ally Saad Haddad rather than to UNIFIL, a move that simultaneously prevented the peacekeeping force from deploying along the border and fulfilled General Gur's pledge to establish a “security zone” in the south.

The Israelis refused to implement Resolution 425, and there was a lack of international will to force Israel to comply. The peacekeepers of
UNIFIL suddenly found themselves uncomfortably sandwiched between two enemies—Haddad's militia to the south and the PLO factions to the north. As the stalemate hardened, the “Interim” of UNIFIL's name soon became ironic; by 2011, the peacekeeping force was more than double the size of the six thousand peacekeepers that originally deployed in south Lebanon thirty-three years earlier.

Hemmed in on both sides, it was not long before UNIFIL was coming under regular attack from PLO fighters attempting to infiltrate its area and from Haddad's militia, which routinely harassed the peacekeepers with artillery and heavy machine gun fire.

Just over two months after Israel's purported withdrawal from Lebanon, Musa Sadr vanished, along with his two companions, while on a visit to Libya. The Libyan authorities said that Sadr had left the country on an Alitalia flight bound for Rome, but the cleric and his two colleagues failed to arrive in Italy, and they have never been seen since.

Most probably Colonel Moammar Qaddafi, Libya's leader, had Sadr killed, for any number of possible reasons, and the cleric's body lies buried somewhere in the Libyan desert. Yet many Shias openly cling to the hope that Sadr is still alive (although he was already fifty years old in 1978) and will one day return to resume his role as champion of the community.

Inevitably, his mysterious disappearance evoked comparisons to the “hidden Imam” who vanished in the ninth century and whose return, the Twelver Shias believe, will herald the end of the world, and their salvation. It was an appropriately ambiguous end for a cleric who had so skillfully exploited the Shia motifs of Karbala and the martyrdom of Imams Ali and Hussein to mobilize the Shias from their communal languor.

The leadership of Amal fell in 1980 to Nabih Berri, a lawyer who had recently returned from the United States and who would emerge as one of Lebanon's most enduring and wily political players. Under Berri,
Amal moved in a secular direction, to the dismay of the religious cadres. In response, several prominent Dawa activists joined Amal, including Hassan Nasrallah, in a covert attempt to subtly influence the group along radical Islamic lines. Nasrallah became an official for Amal in the Bekaa Valley, organizing seminars, cultural meetings, and lectures in
husseiniyah
s and mosques to raise Islamic awareness among the local population.

Nonetheless, for the bulk of Lebanese Shias, the disappearance of Musa Sadr left a gaping void at the level of the community's leadership that could not be filled by the relatively colorless Berri and the secretive activities of a handful of Islamic activists. The vanished imam left many Shias hungry for a new leader who would inspire them and in whom they could invest their hopes for the future.

That figurehead emerged within months of Sadr's disappearance in the form of Ruhollah Khomeini, an Iranian Grand Ayatollah who by 1978 was regarded by many Iranians as the spiritual and political leader of the opposition to Mohammed Reza Shah Pahlavi, the ruler of Iran.

Khomeini had been a persistent critic of the Shah for many years and was exiled in 1964 for his verbal attacks against the Pahlavi regime. He settled in Najaf the following year, where he became known to a wider audience of Shia students and clerics.

In early 1970, Khomeini gave a landmark series of lectures in which he outlined his theories of an Islamic government, known as the
wilayat al-faqih
—the guardianship of the jurisprudent. Khomeini postulated that the laws of a nation should be the laws of God, the Sharia, and therefore those holding power should possess a full knowledge and understanding of the holy laws. The ruler of an Islamic state should be the preeminent
faqih
, or jurist, who “surpasses all others in knowledge” and whose ordinances must be obeyed because “the law of Islam, divine command, has absolute authority over all individuals and the Islamic government.”

His theory was not unique but was a distillation of ideas propounded by earlier prominent clerics. But it was controversial and many Shia clerics opposed it, believing that the clergy's role was to provide guidance and advice on religious and moral matters, not running the daily affairs of a state.

By the beginning of 1978, unrest against the Shah in Iran had erupted into street demonstrations drawing tens of thousands of protesters, which turned into revolution as the months progressed. In January 1979, the Shah fled Iran, and two weeks later Khomeini set foot on Iranian soil for the first time in fourteen years.

The establishment of a theocratic Shia state in Iran was greeted with silent dismay among most Arab states. Syria, however, was the first Arab nation to offer congratulations to Khomeini, followed by the PLO, Algeria, and Libya. Despite Khomeini's absorption with Iranian politics during his long years of exile, he was a committed supporter of the Palestinian cause. Since the early 1970s, Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement had provided military training in camps in Lebanon to Iranian anti-Shah revolutionaries, including one of Khomeini's sons. Arafat had craftily cultivated public displays of support for Khomeini (even putting up posters of the Iranian ayatollah in PLO-controlled areas of Beirut) in an attempt to soften the hostility of southern Lebanese Shias toward the Palestinians. Arafat was the first foreign official to travel to Iran following Khomeini's return, and he was rewarded with the newly vacated Israeli embassy in Tehran to house the Palestinian diplomatic mission.

For Lebanon's Shias, the Islamic revolution had an electrifying effect. Khomeini and his fellow revolutionaries had boldly demonstrated the benefits of organized religious action and given a new sense of empowerment and pride to Shias in general. Khomeini quickly became the new inspiration and leader for Lebanese Shias lamenting the vanished Musa Sadr and for those who considered the Islamic revolution an exemplar of action against one's oppressors and enemies.