The Blood of Lambs: A Former Terrorist's Memoir of Death and Redemption (19 page)

Abu Yousef had issued orders that we were to take no prisoners. I passed this to my unit as we rolled off the hilltop in a Jeep to launch a building-by-building urban assault.

Imagine your own neighborhood overrun by a huge citizen militia, trained in camps on the outskirts of your town, now armed with a full array of military weapons including artillery, mortars, grenades, C–4, and automatic weapons. Imagine that militia storming every apartment house and business—
your
business,
your
apartment house—and putting a bullet in the head of anyone not like them.

That is what we did.

The Lebanese Civil War did not have a traditional battlefield of the kind Americans study in school. No: as on the day of the lighthouse battle, I often sent men and young boys into apartment houses to place timer-rigged explosives in an attempt to kill every infidel inside. After each blast, fifty to sixty men from my PLO unit and others flooded the interior and shot every survivor dead. It was not war. It was a religious cleansing. It was
jihad.

The PLO did not act alone that day. Al-Morabitun, the Nasseriyeen, and other factions sent their own fighters. Their orders concerning prisoners were different than ours. Six hours after we entered the
manara
neighborhood, the combined forces of the Muslim
fedayeen
had mostly annihilated the Christian fighters. Now, instead of the thunder of regular explosions, only scattered small-arms fire echoed through the streets. I rolled up in a Jeep to a central roundabout, a large concrete driveway visible from many directions, and saw that the Nasseriyeen had rounded up about twenty Christian fighters. The Phalangists looked ragged and beaten, some of their uniforms already stained crimson.

My driver pulled to a stop about twenty meters from the Nasseriyeen
and their prisoners. As I stepped out, one of the Muslim fighters lofted his AK–47 and sprayed an arc of bullets over the prisoners’ heads.

“Line up!” he shouted. “Hands behind your head! Do it now!”

Limping and stumbling, the Christians formed a jagged line, standing side by side in the driveway, facing the street. “On your knees!” another Nasseriyeen shouted, this one also armed with an AK. “On your knees, now!”

Awkwardly and off balance, hands behind their heads, the Christians knelt on the pavement. Then, without pause or ceremony, two Muslim fighters wielding 9 mm pistols marched down the line behind them and put a bullet in the back of each Phalangist’s head. With each pistol report, the Muslims cheered and another Christian fell onto his face and surrendered his soul. The sound of each round was somehow louder in my ears than the C–4 I had been using all day to fight through the streets. More personal. As I watched, each of the first seven men collapsed in a bloodless heap. But on the eighth, one of the Nasseriyeen aimed poorly. The left side of the soldier’s head sprayed forward, landing on the pavement before he did.

Justice,
I thought with satisfaction, and a line from the
hadith
threaded through my mind:
An eye for an eye.

3

In prewar Beirut, the Christian population was concentrated in the east, toward the mountains, while most Muslim neighborhoods perched in the west, nearer the sea. But by 1976, the Christian militia, aided by the Lebanese army, had advanced into our neighborhoods in West Beirut, carving the city into bits. The PLO and other Muslim factions feared that without a massive counteroffensive, the Christians would completely overrun the Muslim areas and wipe our people out. We decided not only to push them back, but to push into their eastern neighborhoods and take them for ourselves.

Already, the Phalangists had taken over a portion of the district surrounding the St. George Hotel. An elite resort before the war, the entire area now looked like Armageddon. Where rows of swanky boutiques had once bustled with wealthy tourists, now lay heaps of rubble and twisted wreckage, burned-out cars, and low walls of snaking sandbags. The facades of historic buildings bore the scars of artillery and small-arms fire, and in the windows jagged remains of shattered glass hung like broken teeth.

The Christian militias had entrenched in the area, fortifying many buildings with sandbags and, for even more protection, with water-soaked bags of concrete, creating a maze of bunkers and gun emplacements. Their most strategic position was a new hotel under construction near the St. George. When complete, the soaring tower with a swimming pool on the roof would have dwarfed every other hotel in the city and boasted commanding views of the sapphire sea. The Phalangists had turned it into a sniper’s nest, and used it to pick off any Muslim fighters trying to push east across the open road. For weeks, the strategy was effective. From their high ground in the tower, using 120 mm rockets, RPGs, Quad .50s, and sniper rifles, the Christians kept twenty-four-hour watch on the street and simply mowed down any Muslim fighters who showed their heads. Sometimes, their strategy was even more evil. If the Phalangists detected our fighters lurking in the area, their snipers would fire on civilians, intentionally wounding them. Then, when a Muslim fighter rushed to aid the victim, the Phalangists would take off his head.

Soon, Abu Yousef had had enough. He sent a force of about three hundred fighters to the hotel district to take it back. My unit of seven men was embedded with a larger force of about thirty more. We had one objective: take out the tower.

To get across the open boulevard that was the Christians’ killing field, we devised a plan: our large force of warriors would build a thick, moving wall of sandbags, dousing them with water from portable tanks as we went to make them denser.

In my unit, I assigned a man named Ali to deal with what we came to think of as the “fish bait strategy”—the Phalangists’ intentional wounding of civilians.

“If you see a civilian injured and it appears they are going to die anyway, shoot them in the head,” I said. “You will put them out of their misery, and then no one will be tempted to try to be a hero and get themselves killed.”

Ali, a Shia who fought with the Sunnis, was an intimidator, a gambler. I knew he would have no problem raising his head from cover to take care of this job.

It was a cool day with clear skies. We started in the underground garage of a warehouse and began building our sandbag wall toward the wide four-lane road. Once we crossed the road, we would have to fight our way through the neighborhood to the tower, about half a kilometer away. Working in teams of two and three, we built the wall column by column, stacking the bags five feet high and three feet thick. Behind us, a team of about thirty men advanced with caches of armaments drawn from a large pool in the garage: 120 mm rockets, grenades, assault rifles, and hundreds of kilos of TNT. Snipers advanced with their Seminovs. The most deadly was Ahmed, the man who had helped me with the Verdan Street job. By now he could put a bullet in an enemy’s eye from a kilometer away.

The Phalangists quickly caught on to our strategy, and before our wall had extended five meters, the sky began raining lead. I did not hesitate, but directed traffic: “Keep moving! Keep moving! You can die advancing or die standing still!”

Bullets sizzled and snapped over my head. Our wall-building teams scurried like ants on a hill, carrying bags from the rear position to the forward tip of our barrier. Spinning on their fins, RPGs seared in, slicing through the air with a high-pitched whine. Miraculously, the Phalangists kept missing. Grenades exploded around us, but did not hit our wall. At least twice, grenades landed on the street in front of us and clinked harmlessly to a stop, their fuses defective.

Within ninety minutes we had reached the middle of the boulevard. Suddenly, I heard a booming thunder and the sound of the heavens cracking: the Phalangists had called in an artillery strike.

“Incoming!” Ali shouted.

I could hear the high scream of a 155 mm shell bearing down on our position. The PLO-trained fighters hit the pavement, then lifted our
selves on our elbows and toes to prevent being blown skyward by the force of the shell’s impact with the ground. We covered our ears with our hands and yelled as loudly as we could to stop our eardrums from breaking. When the shell hit about one hundred meters away, the sound was like the sky crashing to earth. As a hail of shrapnel and concrete peppered down, I looked up to see two of our fighters from another faction lying dead in the open street. They had not known how to brace for artillery fire, and the bucking pavement had coughed them over the sandbag wall.

Seconds later, the Phalangists began firing on the exposed corpses with a .50 caliber anti-aircraft gun. The huge rounds quickly shredded their bodies into gore. The assault on our dead infuriated Ali. Crouching low, he scuttled back toward the group carrying our weapons forward behind the sandbags and armed himself with two RPGs.

Then, abruptly, he popped above the wall holding a launch tube on each shoulder.

“Ali, no!” I yelled.

As he fired the RPG on his right shoulder, a long plume of flame scorched the ground behind him. I did not see where the grenade hit, but saw Ali’s upper body disintegrate as three .50 caliber rounds hit him in the head, chest, and shoulder. He collapsed behind the wall in a bloody heap.

“He is in
jannah
!” I cried instantly, not wanting the others to shrink back. “Move! Keep moving!”

Quickly, our warriors started building again, extending our protective barrier across the boulevard, moving closer to the Phalangists meter by meter. Now we had perfected our movements, and it took only an hour to extend the sandbag wall across the boulevard. Once it was complete, hundreds of
fedayeen
poured across in a furious stream. Now we would take down the neighborhood—one alleyway, one building, at a time.

As always, my job was demolition, blowing holes in buildings that were Phalangist strongholds, clearing them, marking them cleansed with a painted code, and pushing forward. The deeper we penetrated toward the tower, the more the retreating Christians strafed us with
panic fire. Heavy fire came in from snipers embedded in the hotels, bullets chipping away the concrete on building corners.

I had ducked into an alleyway, preparing to move my team up the next block with Ahmed providing cover fire, when a rocket whistled in, smashed into the corner of the building, and sent a shard of shrapnel winging into the back of my head. I did not fall, but my hand flew to the wound, and my eyes watered as the hot metal burned in my scalp.

Ahmed stepped forward, brushed my hand aside, and plucked the metal from my head.

“It is not deep!” he yelled as the sound of more incoming echoed in the alley. “Just a cut!”

For two blocks, we pushed the Christians back, fighting our way up the street through a metal storm, returning fire with RPGs, rockets, and sniper fire. By the time we reached the tower we had lost at least twenty men. The Phalangists guarding the base of the tower had already retreated inside, but they pounded us from above with .50 caliber guns. I dashed for cover behind a building column. Above, about fifteen floors up, I could see two fighters, their heads popping into view and quickly gone again.

“Fareed! RPG,” I yelled to one of the
fedayeen
bearing weapons. Crouching low, he scuttled forward with grenades and a preloaded launcher. I took aim on the fifteenth floor and fired. I drew back in surprise when the entire floor erupted in a flash of fire that splashed out of both sides of the building. There must have been stored ammunition barrels there.

In all, seven groups—some PLO, some Muslim factions—entered the building. The Christians who had not already retreated had no place to go but up. We pushed them higher and higher with small-arms fire and RPGs, blowing men off the floors still under construction and into the street below. We also cleared floors using “sticky sacks,” bags filled with a pasty explosive compound and shrapnel, and fitted with a short fuse: light the fuse, fling the bag up to the next floor. When the bag exploded, it cut everyone in range to ribbons.

The fight raged for two hours before we had pushed the Christians to the tower’s roof. Now they had no place left to run. But the roof pro
vided them with a great advantage: it was split into two levels, with the still-dry swimming pool on the lower portion and the hotel’s utility sheds and giant air-conditioning units on the higher. From that metal maze of cover, the Phalangists were able to pick off three of our fighters as soon as they emerged on the roof. We knew they would be able to hold out there as long as their ammo lasted, which could be days since we had no cover on the lower level.

The only solution: blow the roof.

Working quickly with a team of two other demolitions experts, I wired massive amounts of TNT to the support columns of the floor just underneath the roof, fusing it all to Russian-made military batteries that would serve as detonators. It was the most TNT I had ever used for an operation; between the three of us, we used hundreds of kilos. We only had one chance, and we wanted to ensure complete destruction.

We ran the wire down four floors, hoping that would put enough distance between us and the explosives so that we would live and the Christians would die. Helpfully, the Phalangists had already built a kind of sandbag bunker on that floor, perfect for us to take cover behind. Even so, most of the
fedayeen
descended several floors lower in case the operation went wrong and the whole building collapsed. Only I and the two other triggermen stayed high.

On a three count, we pushed the buttons. For a long second, an eerie silence enveloped us as the current sped up the long lead wires to its destination.

Then hell came to earth.

The explosion that ripped down from above sounded like the collision of planets. It was the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, Everest in an avalanche, a roaring tidal wave crashing through an earthquake. A thick cocktail of black smoke, white dust, and rubble blew down through the stairwell, turning us all instantly white. The gargantuan blast distorted the air into violent, undulating waves that sucked my breath away, deflated my chest, and seemed to scramble my internal organs. Spontaneously, I vomited and dimly noticed the other fighters doing the same. A storm of devastation raged over our heads, the squeal of twisting steel, the roar of massive concrete slabs breaking loose, tumbling, thundering
closer and closer as accumulating tons of wreckage broke through floor by floor.