Arabs (88 page)

Though a superpower, the United States was at a disadvantage in Lebanon. Its local allies, the isolated government of Amin Gemayel and the Israeli occupation forces, were more vulnerable than its enemies: Soviet-backed Syria, Iran, and the Shiite Islamic resistance movements. Like the Israelis, the Americans believed they could achieve their objectives in Lebanon through use of overwhelming force. They were soon to discover how the deployment of their military to Lebanon left the superpower exposed and vulnerable to its many regional enemies.

 

More than any other event in the years of conflict, the Israeli invasion brought the Islamic movement to Lebanon. Islamist parties had faced isolation and condemnation for their actions against their own governments and societies in Egypt and Syria. However, the Lebanon conflict provided external enemies for the Islamist movement to fight. Any party that inflicted pain and humiliation on the United States and Israel would gain mass support in Lebanon and the broader Arab world. These were perfect conditions for the emergence of a new Shiite Islamist movement that would develop into the scourge of Israel and the United States—a militia that called itself the Party of God, or Hizbullah.

Hizbullah emerged from the training camps set up by the Iranian revolutionary guards in the largely Shiite town of Baalbek in the central Bekaa Valley in the early 1980s. Hundreds of young Lebanese Shiites flocked to Baalbek for religious and political education and advanced military training. They came to share the ideology of the Islamic Revolution and grew to hate Iran’s enemies as their own.

Ironically, Hizbullah owes its creation as much to Israel as to Iran. The Shiites of South Lebanon had not felt particularly hostile toward Israel in June 1982. PLO operations against Israel since 1969 had brought untold suffering to the inhabitants of the south, and by 1982 the Shiites of South Lebanon were glad to see the backs of the PLO fighters and initially received the invading Israeli forces as liberators. “As a reaction to the hostility towards Palestinians that had engulfed some inhabitants of South Lebanon,” Hizbullah deputy secretary general Naim Qassem recalled, “the [Israeli] invaders were welcomed with trilling cries of joy and the spraying of rice.”
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Shiite opposition to Israel intensified, however, in response to the siege of Beirut, the enormity of the casualty toll, and the arrogance of Israeli occupation troops in South Lebanon. Iranian propaganda exacerbated this emerging hostility, nurturing
rage against Israel and the United States, and their common project in Lebanon, the May 17 Agreement.

From its very inception, Hizbullah was an organization distinguished by the courage of its convictions. Its members were united in their unswerving faith in the message of Islam and their willingness to make any sacrifice to achieve God’s will on earth. Their role model was Imam Husayn, the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, whose death in the southern Iraqi town of Karbala fighting the ruling Umayyad dynasty in A.D. 680 still stands for Shiite Muslims as the ultimate example of martyrdom against tyranny. The example of Imam Husayn gave rise to a culture of martyrdom within Hizbullah that it turned into a lethal weapon against its enemies. Hizbullah’s prolific use of suicide bombers have led many analysts to try to link Islamic Jihad, the shadowy organization that claimed responsibility for the suicide bombing of the American and French barracks, to the embryonic Hizbullah movement that took shape between 1982 and 1985—though Hizbullah itself has always denied any involvement in those attacks.

The struggle against Israel and the United States were but the means to a greater end. Ultimately, Hizbullah’s goal was to create an Islamic state in Lebanon. However, the party has always maintained its unwillingness to impose such a government against the will of the diverse population of Lebanon. “We do not want Islam to rule in Lebanon by force, as the political Maronism is ruling at present,” Hizbullah leaders asserted in the February 1985 Open Letter declaring the establishment of the party. “But we stress that we are convinced of Islam as a faith, system, thought, and rule and we urge all to recognize it and to resort to its law.”
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Like the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and Syria, Hizbullah hoped to replace man’s law with God’s law. The leaders of Hizbullah were convinced that the vast majority of the people of Lebanon—even the country’s large Christian communities—would willingly opt for the greater justice of God’s law once the Islamic system of government had proven its superiority to secular nationalism. The Hizbullah leadership believed that nothing could better demonstrate the superiority of Islamic government than a victory over Israel and the United States. Young Shiite men were willing to sacrifice their lives, like their role model the Imam Husayn, to achieve this goal.

The first Shiite suicide bombing in Lebanon was organized by the Islamic Resistance, a progenitor of Hizbullah, in November 1982. A young man named Ahmad Qasir conducted the first “martyrdom operation” when he drove a car laden with explosives into the Israeli army headquarters in the southern Lebanese city of Tyre, killing seventy-five Israelis and wounding many others. Journalist Robert Fisk went to Tyre to investigate the bombing. He was shocked by the number of Israeli casualties pulled from the wreckage of the eight-story building, but it was the method of the bombing that he found hardest to accept. “A
suicide
bomber? The idea seemed
inconceivable.”
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A number of attacks following the bombing of the Israeli headquarters confirmed suicide bombing as a dangerous new weapon in the arsenal of the enemies of America and Israel: the U.S. Embassy bombing in April 1983, the attacks on the American and French barracks in October 1983, and a second attack on Israeli headquarters in Tyre in November 1983, killing sixty more Israelis.

Israeli intelligence was quick to identify the threat posed by the Islamic Resistance and struck back with targeted assassinations against Shiite clerics. Far from subduing the Shiite resistance, the assassinations only served to escalate the violence. “By 1984,” one analyst noted, “the pace of [Shiite] attacks was so intense that an Israeli soldier was dying every third day” in Lebanon.
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In the course of that year, the Shiite militias also diversified their tactics and began to kidnap Westerners in a bid to drive the foreigners out of Lebanon. By the time Hizbullah emerged on the scene in 1985, their enemies were already on the retreat.

The first defeat the Shiite insurgency dealt Israel was the destruction of the May 17 Agreement. The besieged government of Amin Gemayel had been unable to implement any part of the agreement and, within a year of its signing, the Lebanese Council of Ministers abrogated the treaty with Israel. The Islamic Resistance’s next victory was to drive the U.S. and European armies out of Lebanon. As American casualties in Lebanon mounted, President Reagan came under growing pressure to withdraw his troops. Italian and American troops evacuated Lebanon in February 1984, and the last French soldiers pulled out at the end of March. The Israelis also found their position in Lebanon increasingly untenable, and in January 1985 Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir’s cabinet agreed to withdraw from the urban centers in South Lebanon to what they termed the South Lebanon Security Zone, a strip of land along the Israel-Lebanon border that ranged from 5–25 kilometers (3–15 miles) in depth.

The Security Zone was to prove the most enduring legacy of the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon. The idea behind the South Lebanon Security Zone was to create a buffer to protect northern Israel from attack. Instead, it created a shooting gallery for Hizbullah and other Lebanese militias to carry on the fight against the Israeli occupier. For the next fifteen years, Hizbullah gained support from Lebanese of all religions, if not for an Islamic state, then at least as the national resistance movement against a much-hated occupation.

For Israel, the 1982 invasion ultimately replaced one enemy—the PLO—with a yet more determined adversary. Unlike the Palestinian fighters in Lebanon, Hizbullah and the Shiites of South Lebanon were fighting for their own land.

In Cold War terms, the Lebanon conflict had proved a major defeat for the United States in its rivalry with the Soviet Union. However, the Soviets were in no position to celebrate. Their 1979 invasion of Afghanistan had provoked a sustained insurgency, attracting a growing number of devout Muslims to join the ranks of the
Afghan mujahidin fighting to expel the “atheist Communists.” If Lebanon was the Shiite school for jihad, Afghanistan became the training ground for a new generation of Sunni Muslim militants.

I
n 1983, a twenty-four-year-old Algerian named Abdullah Anas took the bus from his native village of Ben Badis to the market town of Sidi Bel Abbès, where there was a newsstand, so that he could catch up on world events.
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Anas had been one of the founders of the Islamist movement in western Algeria, and he continued to follow political developments in the Islamic world with great interest.

On that day, Anas remembered buying a copy of a Kuwaiti magazine that had captured his attention with a fatwa (legal opinion by Islamic scholars) signed by a number of religious scholars. It declared that support for the jihad in Afghanistan was a personal duty for all Muslims. Anas went to a nearby coffee house and settled down to read the fatwa in detail. He was impressed by the long list of famous clerics who had signed the declaration, including leading muftis from the Arab Gulf states and Egypt. One name in particular stood out: Shaykh Abdullah ’Azzam, whose publications and tape-recorded sermons circulated widely in Islamist circles.

Born to a conservative religious family in a village near the Palestinian town of Jenin in 1941, Abdullah ‘Azzam had joined the Muslim Brotherhood as a teenager in the mid-1950s.
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After completing his high school studies, he went on to study Islamic law at the University of Damascus. Following the June 1967 War, ’Azzam spent a year and a half fighting against the Israeli occupation in the West Bank in what he called his “Palestinian jihad.” He then moved to Cairo, where he took his masters and doctorate from al-Azhar University. While in Egypt, ’Azzam came to know Muhammad and Amina Qutb, the brother and sister of the late Sayyid Qutb, who had been executed by Nasser’s government in 1966. ’Azzam was profoundly influenced by the writings of Qutb.

With his academic credentials, ’Azzam joined the faculty of Islamic studies at the University of Jordan in Amman, where he taught for seven years before his inflammatory publications and sermons landed him in trouble with the Jordanian authorities. He left Jordan for Saudi Arabia in 1980, taking a post at the King Abdulaziz University in Jeddah.

Just before ‘Azzam moved to Jeddah, the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. The Communist government in Afghanistan and its Soviet ally had proven their hostility to Islam, and the Afghans were fighting “in the path of God.” ’Azzam gave their cause his full support, confident that victory in Afghanistan would revive the spirit of jihad in Islam.

As his later writings attest, ’Azzam saw victory in Afghanistan as a way to mobilize Muslims to action in other conflict zones. A native of Palestine, he saw Afghanistan as the training ground for future action against Israel. “Do not think we forget Palestine,” he wrote:

’Azzam’s message of jihad and sacrifice gained wide circulation both through his writings and recordings of his fiery sermons. He awakened the spirit of jihad in Muslim men across the world, reaching even remote market towns like Sidi Bel Abbès in Algeria.

The more Anas read the text of the fatwa ’Azzam had signed, and weighed its arguments, the more he was convinced that Afghanistan’s fight against Soviet occupation was the responsibility of all Muslims. “If a stretch of Muslim territory is attacked, jihad is an individual duty for those who inhabit that territory and those who are neighbours,” the fatwa asserted. “If there are too few of them, or if they are incapable or reticent, then this duty is incumbent upon those who are nearby, and so on until it spreads throughout the world.”
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Given the gravity of the situation in Afghanistan, Anas felt that the duty of jihad had reached him in rural Algeria. This was all the more remarkable for, as Anas confessed, he didn’t know a thing about Afghanistan at the time—he couldn’t even place it on the map.

As Anas would soon learn, Afghanistan is a country of rich cultural diversity and a tragic modern history. Its population is composed of seven main ethnic groups, the largest of which are the Pashtun (roughly 40 percent of the population) and the Tajiks (30 percent), with a Sunni Muslim majority, a large Shiite minority, and two official languages (Persian and Pashto). The country’s diversity reflects its geographic location, situated between Iran in the west, Pakistan to the south and east, and China and the (then Soviet) Central Asian republics of Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan to the north. Diversity and geography have not afforded much stability to land-locked Afghanistan, and since 1973 the country has been wracked with political turmoil and wars.