Dreams and Shadows: The Future of the Middle East (25 page)

“If we were to wait, Lebanon would become another Palestine,” Nasrallah said. “So I, just like many thousands of Lebanese youth, had to leave schools and classes, and we had to take up arms to liberate our land from Israeli occupation, because we had no other way.”

Hezbollah thus took root.

Most political movements in the Middle East carry huge baggage from history. Some are now tapping into centuries-old traditions in the quest for future rights.

Sheikh Nasrallah had three brothers and five sisters, all younger. His next younger brother remained in Amal’s militia. His nom de guerre was Jihad al Husseini—or “holy war of Hussein.” The name reflected the essence of Shiism.

Among Shiites, a parable from the origins of the faith, in the seventh century, still guides dozens of movements in the Middle East 1,400 years later. It grew out of a political dispute, but it sparked enduring and divisive passions over the issue of injustice.

Shiite means “follower of Ali.” In the greatest schism ever within Islam, the Shiites broke away within thirty years of the Prophet Mohammed’s death. At the time, as in many parts of the world, leadership descended through a family. The prophet had no sons, so many in the family believed that the next leader of the new Islamic faith should be his cousin Ali, who had married the Prophet’s daughter Fatima. (Marriage among cousins remains a common practice to this day in the Middle East—in Lebanon, among Christians as well as Muslims. Some countries, such as Iran, now provide genetic testing for cousins.) Ali, who is famously portrayed among Shiites in pictures, posters, tapestries, and even silk carpets as a handsome young man with penetrating eyes, had been an early convert to the new faith that emerged from the sands of the Arabian Peninsula.

But the Prophet had left no instructions. And many of his early advisers believed that the caliph of the new Omayyad Dynasty—a position deemed to be God’s representative on earth—should instead be selected from among them. The Prophet’s circle of advisers was the nucleus of what became the mainstream Sunni.

Ali did eventually become the fourth caliph, briefly. But after his murder in 661, the issue of political succession came up once again: The emerging Shiites wanted the new leader to be Ali’s son and the Prophet’s grandson, Hussein. The more numerous Sunnis again wanted to pick from outside the family—and again they did. The breach has never been healed.

What happened next set the stage for the Shiite tradition of resistance still practiced in the twenty-first century.

Hussein believed that the new faith had been usurped, that its fate was at stake. So he challenged the new rulers. The battle played out in Karbala, in today’s Iraq. The odds were overwhelmingly against the Shiites. The Omayyad dynasty had thousands of troops; Hussein had less than 100 fighters and a handful of women and children. The showdown was the Shiite version of David and Goliath, but Goliath won. The prophet’s grandson was willing to take the risk because he believed that it was more honorable to die for belief than to live with injustice. Hussein and his followers were all slaughtered.

Hussein’s ultimate protest left an enduring legacy. He became the supreme martyr. Each year since his death, for fourteen centuries, Shiites have reenacted his struggle during the ten days of Ashura. Street parades in Lebanon’s crowded
dahiya
and in many Iranian cities include long lines of men rhythmically flagellating themselves with chains, knives, or swords, replicating the act of self-sacrifice. Most Sunni governments ban the commemoration—with its themes of victimization of minorities and their resistance—among their own Shiites.

Ashura climaxes with the “passion play” of Hussein’s death. It is not unlike the Christian reenactment of Jesus’s stations of the cross and the agony among his followers on Good Friday. Ashura is the most important holy period of the year for devout Shiites—a constant reminder of the duty to resist injustice and tyranny in the name of God. Martyrdom has also remained the most honored defense of the faith.

Nasrallah often invoked Hussein. Among his fighters and his followers, he trumpeted “the weapon of martyrdom” as the only edge over the major powers’ military superiority. In a 2002 speech aired on Hezbollah TV, he told a crowd,

Since Nasrallah and his Shiite peers mobilized under Hezbollah’s umbrella in 1982, the movement has evolved through four phases—each heavily influenced by Shiite origins. The first phase was the pure extremist era, from 1982 through 1991.

Nasrallah’s first major job was as chief of operations against Israel at the new Iranian-run camps.

“After the invasion in June 1982, we started establishing camps in Bekaa, near the city of Baalbek, to take volunteers from the Lebanese youth, to train them, to mobilize them,” Nasrallah told me. “During the first stage, my role was to receive these young men, to study their files, to give my OK, so that they can join the training camps. After that, we organized them as cells within the framework of the resistance, and then they returned to their occupied cities or towns.”

“I didn’t have the role of a militant, meaning to bear arms and shoot,” he added. “I didn’t have the honor of taking part in direct combat. But I shouldered different leadership posts. I commanded combat operations.”

Hezbollah transformed the landscape, literally.

Lebanon’s ancient city of Baalbek—or City of the Sun—became one of the most feared places on earth. Two thousand years earlier, Julius Caesar had constructed the largest temple in the Roman Empire to the god Jupiter in Baalbek. Its colossal walls and columns still stand. Baalbek’s temple to Bacchus, which was larger than the Parthenon in Greece, was the most beautifully decorated temple in the Roman world. Finished in 150
A.D.
, much of it is preserved today. In the mid-1950s, Lebanon launched the Baalbek Festival, which drew the likes of Miles Davis, Rudolf Nureyev, and Ella Fitzgerald to perform amid the mammoth ruins in the Middle East’s finest summer arts series.

But in 1982, Iran set up training camps in Baalbek and the surrounding Bekaa Valley, a fertile plain near the Syrian border. The area became off-limits.

I witnessed the birth of Shiite militancy in the 1980s. It emerged in extremist spectaculars that were an extension of Iran’s revolution, mixed with the pent-up anger of Lebanon’s poorest sect, spurred by the inherited Shiite sense of persecution, and inflamed by Israel’s lingering occupation of Shiite land.

The rage was compounded by the deployment of American and European troops in Lebanon. They originally arrived in 1982 as peacekeepers to oversee the exodus of Palestinian guerrillas. But within a year, they ended up as participants in the local strife, especially after American warships opened fire on a Muslim faction. The American Marines and their French, Italian, and British counterparts came to be seen as part of a larger package—foreign intervention in Lebanon. Hezbollah’s early targets were all foreigners.

The new Shiite radicalism literally exploded on the scene in 1983. Its tactics and impact were startling even in the context of Lebanon’s vicious civil war.

In one day alone, on a sultry Sunday morning in October 1983, a suicide bomber in a yellow Mercedes truck set off the largest non-nuclear explosion since World War II at Beirut’s International Airport. The four-story airport building housing American peacekeepers collapsed into a grotesque pile of concrete and twisted steel. Most of the Marines were crushed in their beds. The final death toll was 241, the largest American loss in a single attack since Iwo Jima in 1945.
¹⁰

Twenty seconds later and four miles down the road, a second truck rammed into an eight-story building used by French paratroopers. The entire structure blew over on its side, killing fifty-eight. It was the worst death toll for France since the Algerian war twenty-two years earlier.

The blasts stunned me out of bed many miles away. The explosions were so close together that they sounded like a single long roar bellowing through Beirut. I was down at the Marine compound for days reporting on the attack—and watching rescuers pull out the dead and wounded from under tons of rubble.

“We are the soldiers of God,” an anonymous caller from Islamic Jihad told Agence France Presse. The same group had claimed the attack on the United States Embassy six months earlier, when sixty-three had been killed. “We said after that [embassy bombing] that we would strike more violently still. Now they understand what they are dealing with,” he added. “Violence will remain our way.”
¹¹

Ten days later, another bomb-laden truck plowed its way into an Israeli command center in southern Lebanon. It killed twenty-nine Israeli troops, as well as thirty Palestinian and Lebanese prisoners. Islamic Jihad again claimed credit. It was the first of dozens of suicide attacks against Israeli targets.

The strategy produced the desired effect.

In February 1984, four months after the Marines were attacked, the world’s mightiest power withdrew its most elite fighting force from tiny Lebanon. French troops pulled out a month later. Their mission was unaccomplished.

In June 1985, Israel withdrew most of its troops to a protected buffer zone in southern Lebanon. Hezbollah had forced its hand.

Yitzhak Rabin, Israel’s defense minister at the time and later prime minister, reflected,

Indeed. The Shiite movement from little Lebanon redefined modern extremist tactics. Its terrorist trademarks—including the human bomb and simultaneous attacks for multiple impact—were later copied with deadly effect by Palestinian nationalists, Iraqi insurgents, Saudi dissidents, Egyptian extremists, Moroccan militants, Algerian rebels, Jordanian renegades, Kuwaiti fanatics, Yemeni zealots, and, in the most spectacular schemes, by Osama bin Laden’s multinational movement, al Qaeda.

For the first time, small unconventional groups could effectively challenge their own well-armed governments, occupation forces, regional powerhouses, and even a global superpower. The trend soon spread well beyond the Middle East, from Pakistan to the Philippines and from Chechnya to Indonesia.

The Shiite movement’s use of the first Islamic suicide bombers in modern times can be traced to the eleventh century. The practice was perfected by a Shiite offshoot sect that dispatched young soldiers on a single fatal mission against Christian Crusaders and Sunni opponents. According to legend and the Oxford English Dictionary, the word “assassin” comes from
hashashin,
the name for young devotees administered hashish to induce a state of euphoria before those missions. By the thirteenth century, courtesy of terrified Crusaders, the word “assassin” had entered the Western vernacular.

In a rare visit, Marco Polo toured the Hashashins’ fortress near the Caspian Sea.
¹³
He wrote of an early leader,

Nasrallah once used a similar description to explain the appeal of becoming a modern martyr—or
shahid
in Arabic. In the
dahiya,
many streets and Hezbollah facilities have been named after specific martyrs, with
shahid
added, as if a conferred title.