Warriors of God (9 page)

Instead of taking advantage of Amal's anti-PLO attitude to forge a new security arrangement for the south, the Israelis resorted to their Christian ally, Saad Haddad, allowing him to expand his area of operations from the narrow buffer strip along the border to include the entire south up to the Awali River just north of Sidon. By mid-July, Haddad's
militia had recruited and armed hundreds of Shias and instituted a new tax regime that included levies on car registration, sand for building, and gasoline sales, which did little to endear the major from Marjayoun to the Shias.

The Israelis also established Al-Haras al-Watani li Qura al-Janoub, the National Guard for the Villages of the South, a mercenary force of locally recruited Shias that was supposed to operate independently of Haddad's Army of Free Lebanon militia. The units were given names such as the Partisans of the Army, the Forces of Karbala, or the Sons of the Cedars.

Those Shias who declined to accept the Israeli shekel risked falling afoul of the harsh security regime imposed by the IDF. Suspected militants or PLO sympathizers were rounded up, interrogated, and detained in one of several prison camps established in the south. The largest prison was a purpose-built internment camp constructed near the village of Ansar in the chalky hills midway between Sidon and Tyre.

The Israelis built new outposts, leveled ground for helicopter landing pads, consolidated their control of the main transport routes, and imposed a security regime on the south that looked set to stay. South Lebanon became known as the “North Bank” of the Jordan, an analogy with the West Bank captured by Israel in 1967 and subsequently colonized by Jewish settlers. The analogy was misleading—the Israelis were not intending to build settlements in south Lebanon. Yet although the southern Shias were glad to see the PLO gone, it was not long before they began to wonder whether they had simply exchanged one oppressor for another.

While the south simmered in the late summer of 1982, an organized resistance against the Israeli occupation was beginning to emerge farther north. Spearheaded by secular leftist groups, the National Resistance Movement was established in early September and was soon carrying out isolated attacks on Israeli troops in west Beirut and the mountains overlooking the capital. The resistance operations in and around Beirut caught the attention of those Shias in the south who were chafing at Amal's acquiescence toward the Israeli occupation. Among them was a skinny Amal recruit in his midteens from a small village near
Sidon, whom we shall call “the Kid.” He went to his local Amal commander and told him that resistance was a “religious duty and we have to fight.” His commander smiled benignly, congratulated him for his zeal, and told him to await orders. “Then I opened my eyes and saw that Amal was not willing to do anything. When I saw the operations [in Beirut] increasing, I decided to go ahead anyway.”

The Kid's first operation was typical of the period. He and three other friends hid in an orange grove on the southern edge of Sidon and shot up a passing Israeli jeep with AK-47s. Word of the ambush quickly spread, and the next day he was visited by a stranger who called himself Abu Hussein and said he had learned the Kid wished to join the resistance.

“I said, ‘Yes, we will do whatever you want.' He said, ‘Okay, but our resistance is different. We are the followers of Imam Khomeini. We believe in the
wilayat al-faqih.
' I said, ‘Of course! I am like this.' I believed in these things, but I didn't have a framework in which to practice this faith.”

The Kid formally recruited his three comrades and became the cell's sole link to Abu Hussein for security reasons. Slowly, more young Shias were brought into the network. Initially, there were about eighty members and ten commanders. The Kid soon developed a deadly proficiency for killing collaborators. “It was easy at the time. The collaborators were well known. I killed many persons,” the Kid says with a sheepish smile.

His first victim was a top agent for the Israelis. The Kid and a colleague slipped one evening into the collaborator's home but backed away when they heard the voices of his wife and children. The collaborator was marked for death, but there was no need to kill him in front of his family. Another opportunity soon arose when the Kid saw the collaborator walk into a shop.

“We opened the door and went inside the store. He was in front of me and I started firing at him. The bullets hit his body and shook him. Then my friend came in and also fired at him. He died straightaway. I was very professional at killing collaborators. I saw it as a duty. I never felt guilty.”

For the Kid and his confederates, nothing mattered except the “holy
cause” of resistance. Families and peacetime friendships were neglected. No thought was given to money or the enjoyments of life. “We didn't have salaries for years. We were paying from our own pockets. The first time they talked about salaries for us, I felt it was shameful. We all wanted to be martyrs.… We believed in the
wilayat al-faqih
. If [Abu Hussein] told me to do something, I would obey. If I didn't it would be like disobeying God. We called ourselves Al-Shabab al-Aamel [the Men of Work]. This was the very beginning.”

The Shia followers of Khomeini were not the only Islamists in south Lebanon looking to launch resistance operations against the Israelis. In Sidon, a mainly Sunni city, militants belonging to the Muslim Brotherhood were pondering how to strike at the Israeli soldiers wandering carefree around the port city.

Abdullah Tiryaki, a prominent member of the Brotherhood, was eager to begin a resistance campaign, but the leadership in Sidon was hesitant. Tiring of the procrastination, Tiryaki and some of his friends split from the Brotherhood and began scavenging rubbish dumps for discarded weapons and old mortar shells they could turn into bombs. Like the Kid and the emerging Shia resistance network, the Sunni Islamists formed close-knit cells of three volunteers each. Their first military operation was in October 1982, detonating an old mortar shell they had found in the street against a passing Israeli patrol. Other attacks followed, but they evaded capture by the Israelis, partly by adopting bland secular names for their group—the Interior Forces, the Patriotic People's Party—so that the Israelis would not focus on the Islamists.

After one of their number was caught, Tiryaki and several colleagues escaped to Beirut, where they could train and organize themselves. They changed their name to Quwat al-Fajr, the Dawn Forces, and soon caught the attention of Sayyed Abbas Mussawi, then a key leader in the nascent Hezbollah resistance. Mussawi provided Quwat al-Fajr with logistical assistance and sent its cadres to the Sheikh Abdullah barracks in Baalbek
for training. “Our relationship with Mussawi was very special, so we began working with the Shias and gaining from their presence,” Tiryaki recalls.

Although Hezbollah is a Shia organization, throughout its existence it has actively sought to build ties with Sunnis with the goal of uniting the Muslim community of believers, the
umma
, in resistance against Israel. While Khomeini's doctrine of
wilayat al-faqih
is anathema to most Sunni Islamists, the Iranian leader's staunch and sustained support for the Palestinian cause helped blur the distinctions between Sunnis and Shias. In 1982, the Iranians helped set up the Tajammu al-Ulama al-Muslimeen, the Congregation of Muslim Ulama [Islamic scholars], which brought together Lebanese and Palestinian clerics, both Shias and Sunnis, with the aim of encouraging Islamic observance and smoothing over sectarian differences between the two Muslim sects. “The Islamic revolution in Iran made our dreams come true,” says Sheikh Maher Hammoud, a prominent Sunni cleric from Sidon who was a founder of the Tajammu.

In Tripoli in north Lebanon, the Iranians cultivated close contacts with Saeed Shaaban, the head of Harakat Tawheed Islami, the Islamic Unification Movement, also a supporter of the Islamic revolution in Iran. Shaaban, who established an Islamic fief in Tripoli in the mid-1980s and fought against the Syrians, was among those attending the fateful Islamic conference in Tehran in June 1982 when Sheikh Sobhi Tufayli and Sheikh Ragheb Harb won support for the creation of an anti-Israel resistance. His son, Bilal, who heads the Tawheed today, still maintains the group's alliance with Hezbollah.

The Khomeini-inspired Shia resistance in south Lebanon had no formal organizational moniker in the first two years after the Israeli invasion. According to Abdullah Tiryaki, the future name of Hezbollah's military wing arose out of a series of conversations he held with Mussawi. “Mussawi liked our name Quwat al-Fajr because the Iranians were using the word
Fajr
[Dawn] as the code name for some of their offensives against Iraq,” he recalls.

But Tiryaki told Mussawi that the name was “too small,” and after a few meetings together, “I came up with the idea that we should call it the
Islamic Resistance.” Mussawi consulted with his colleagues and a week later told Tiryaki that the name had been approved.

While the Iranians steadily mobilized the Shias of the Bekaa Valley and Lebanese members of freshly departed Palestinian groups pondered their options, some militants were impatient to begin the campaign of resistance against the Israelis.

“Imad Mughniyah came to me and said he had someone willing to blow himself up against the Israelis,” recalls Bilal Sharara, then a prominent Lebanese member of Fatah. “He wanted some explosives and wondered whether I had some for him. I laughed and thought he was crazy. Who would want to blow themselves up? No one had done anything like that at the time. Mughniyah went to other people and asked for explosives, but they did not believe him either.”

But one man did believe Mughniyah—Khalil Wazir, better known as Abu Jihad, Arafat's popular second in command. Abu Jihad provided the explosives for Mughniyah's planned operation, according to Sharara.

Mughniyah's volunteer suicide bomber was a childhood friend, Ahmad Qassir, a seventeen-year-old from Deir Qanoun an-Nahr near Tyre with thick, dark hair, soulful eyes, and a wispy adolescent moustache. Devout from an early age, Qassir passed messages between cells of fighters and transferred weapons in his pickup truck in the fall of 1982, as the Israelis were feeling the first pinpricks of resistance in the south.

In early November, he left home, telling his family he was going to Beirut, and that was the last they saw of him. Shortly before seven o'clock on the morning of November 11, Qassir drove a white Peugeot sedan packed with explosives into the entrance of a seven-story building on the edge of Tyre that served as the IDF headquarters. The massive blast ignited an ammunition storeroom, pancaking the building and killing 75 Israeli soldiers, border police, and intelligence personnel. Additionally, 15 Lebanese and Palestinians who were being detained for questioning were killed.

Mughniyah had planned the attack carefully, having personally reconnoitered the IDF headquarters in Tyre. The operation aimed to cause the maximum casualties by timing the bomb attack to coincide with the return to the headquarters of IDF night patrols, but before the morning patrols had departed. Also, the building was fuller than usual because Israeli troops had relocated to the headquarters after heavy rains had damaged their tents in a nearby encampment.

There were two telephoned claims of responsibility—one of them by a previously unknown group called Islamic Jihad, which claimed that it had infiltrated bombs set to a timer into the building. No mention was made of a suicide bomb attack. Days later, the Israelis announced that an investigation had concluded it was an accident caused by leaky gas bottles in the kitchen.

Among Qassir's final requests was that his identity as the perpetrator of the attack remain secret until after the withdrawal of the Israelis so that his family in Deir Qanoun would not face reprisals. Hezbollah honored his dying wish, and Qassir's role in the first ever suicide attack against the Israelis in Lebanon was not revealed until two and a half years later, on May 19, 1985, just after the Israelis had withdrawn from the Tyre district.

The suicide bombing of the IDF headquarters in Tyre was the first major attack against the Israelis since the invasion. The Israelis thought—or hoped—it was an isolated incident. But even as the bodies were being pulled from the rubble of the IDF headquarters in Tyre, the Iranian Revolutionary Guards in the Bekaa were planning to introduce military training programs alongside the religious lessons to build a new Shia resistance force whose cadres would soon be making their way to the front lines in Beirut and the south.

The first IRGC-run military camp was located in a valley near Janta village. The recruitment process was surprisingly slow and meticulous in the beginning. Volunteers were required to submit a written request to join the resistance, along with a reference from two Shia clerics. The wait could be as long as six months while the volunteer was vetted for security purposes.

Once an application had been approved, the recruit would be picked
up, blindfolded, and transported with other volunteers to the Janta camp. Hezbollah expanded upon the camp's meager facilities by sinking several large tunnels into the side of the narrow 900-foot-deep valley. The tunnel roofs were around 18 feet high, and they were equipped with generators for light and electricity and running water. Antiaircraft guns were positioned on the craggy peaks surrounding the site.

The first intake consisted of 150 recruits, including Sayyed Abbas Mussawi, drawn from villages and towns in the Bekaa. Their training consisted of basic fitness, weapons handling, and religious instruction. They slept in tents fully clothed in uniforms and boots and were frequently tested for their reactions. “They would fire flares and antiaircraft guns into the air in the middle of the night to wake us up. If we didn't wake up, they would come to our tents and throw cold water over us,” recalls Hussein Hamiyah, the university student who was among the third intake of volunteers at Janta.