MB Civic

By Thanassis Cambanis | August 1, 2006 | The Boston Globe

BINT JBAIL, Lebanon — The Hezbollah fighter who called himself Hussein foraged yesterday in the wreckage of a hilltop home where just a week ago his unit had fought with an Israeli assault force in one of the deadliest clashes of the nearly three-week-old war.

Triumphantly, he hoisted a pair of Israeli night-vision goggles from the rubble.

“These are precious,” Hussein said. “We don’t have much night-vision.”

Hussein and another Hezbollah commander, Hamid, offered a rare glimpse yesterday into the Shi’ite militia’s operations to a few reporters at the battleground of Bint Jbail, which has fast risen to the status of myth among Hezbollah’s followers.

It was here, a week ago, that Hezbollah fighters stopped several Israeli tanks and turned back an Israeli ground advance that sought to rout them from this strategic Hezbollah stronghold in southern Lebanon. Israeli soldiers have given vivid accounts of hand-to-hand combat, sneak ambushes, and fighters who sprang from a network of tunnels to surprise the Israelis.

The two Hezbollah fighters described a discipline modeled on the Viet Cong, in which fighters live off the land, scavenge vegetables and canned food, and do battle in autonomous groups with little need for command supervision.

Hussein and Hamid credited their devotion to Islam for their success against the Israelis, but they described a meticulous blueprint for guerrilla warfare built around a carefully selected force, whose members begin training at age 14.

Hezbollah means “Party of God,” and it is considered a terrorist group by the United States. During the conflict, it has fired several thousand rockets into Israel and engaged in ground combat with Israeli troops in southern Lebanon.

The two fighters saw each other for the first time in 20 days yesterday, kissing each other on the head and shoulders after a chance meeting outside a mosque in downtown Bint Jbail, a town of 30,000 located two miles north of the border with Israel.

The downtown itself was an apocalyptic landscape. In the winding streets of the old city — recently a vibrant downtown market where villagers from the entire region came to shop — not a single home or shop had escaped shelling or bombing. Entire blocks of dwellings had collapsed onto the street, exposing the traces of life still standing — a bed frame, half a wall with a family portrait, the rear stockroom of a shoe shop.

A shell casing, labeled with Hebrew print, lay in the middle of the street.

The Hezbollah fighters took advantage of yesterday’s partial cease-fire to rest, stockpile supplies, plan for battles, and gather intelligence from the Bint Jbail battlefield.

Hussein, 42, speaking in fluent English, described his role as “battlefield support,” which he said includes firing artillery and managing logistics for the fighters. Hamid, 30, declined to describe his combat role, but he said he was senior to Hussein. Their names were nicknames, the two said; they would give no personal details that could allow them to be identified.

Hamid said two of his brothers were killed in a night-long battle in one neighborhood a week ago.

According to the men’s account, Israeli soldiers infiltrated and eventually took up positions in a large house on Tel Masoud, the high ground overlooking Bint Jbail from the west. The two-story house was surrounded by a tomato patch and a high wall.

“Immediately, we started to attack,” Hussein said. The Hezbollah fighters had Kalashnikov machine guns, rocket-propelled grenade launchers, and a few antitank missiles, he said, to confront the heavily armed Israelis and their armored vehicles.

But Hussein said their fervor made Hezbollah a fair match for the Israelis.

“This is the strategy of Hezbollah. It is the matter that we are not afraid of death,” Hussein said. “This is the center of the training of the fighter, to make him unafraid of death, so you prefer to die rather than live humiliated.”

Fighters communicated by hand-held radio, ordering strikes from Hezbollah mortar crews, Hussein said. He estimates that about 35 Israeli soldiers and 30 Hezbollah militiamen took part in the battle for the hilltop. Hezbollah attacked, he said, before Israel had time to send in more soldiers.

According to the two men, six Israelis were killed in the fight on Tel Masoud hill. Israel has said at least eight soldiers died in fighting around Bint Jbail. The Hezbollah fighters said they knew of four Hezbollah deaths from the clash, but said they didn’t know the total death toll from their side.

As they roamed over the hilltop of Tel Masoud, the two men pointed out the shell casings from a gunfight; hundreds of cartridges were scattered over the ground, narrower ones from Hezbollah’s Kalashnikovs, and fatter casings from Israeli M-16s.

Hamid picked up a small unexploded Israeli mortar on the road leading up to the house. Inside the walls of the position, known locally as “The Castle,” Hussein picked three tomatoes off a vine and offered them around.

“This is how we eat,” he said.

After a day of fighting, they said, the Israelis withdrew from the house, and then bombed it to destroy any equipment they left behind.

Constant chatter from a Hezbollah control room in the Bint Jbail sector came from the men’s radios. At one point, the radio operator said an Israeli helicopter had been spotted heading toward Tel Masoud. The fighters decided it was time to leave.

“We will come back later to look for more,” Hussein said, grinning as he examined the still-functional Israeli night-vision goggles.

“When we show these on television, all the people will be happy,” Hamid said. “This is our prize, the people’s happiness.”

Hezbollah’s tactical goal in the broader war with Israel, Hussein said, is to inflict maximum casualties on Israelis, and to capture soldiers dead or alive to trade for Hezbollah prisoners held in Israeli jails.

“If we captured an Israeli soldier, we wouldn’t announce it until we had him in Beirut in a safe place,” Hussein said.

The battlefield fighters said they felt confident after repelling the Israeli ground advance.

“We buried the Israelis. They ran like rats,” Hussein said. He pointed to a valley below Tel Masoud. “We launch rockets from there,” he said.

Added Hamid: “At the moment we are winning. We have many cards we have not yet played. By the grace of God, we will eat them on the battlefield.”

Only experienced fighters are allowed into front-line combat, Hussein said. Children are trained from a young age even if they aren’t selected as Hezbollah fighters. “How do you think our children are raised? To fight the Israelis. My son is 13 years old and knows how to fire a mortar.”

Yesterday afternoon, downtown below Tel Masoud, Hussein was praying alone in a mosque whose rear wall had been blasted away by a shell, giving a view of the battleground above.

The fighter was by turns angry, mystical, and emotional. One day, he said, he gave his only food, a can of tuna, to a dog so hungry that its tongue was hanging contorted from its mouth.

“If I showed mercy on the dog, maybe God would show mercy on me,” he said.

After scouring the battleground, Hussein returned with journalists to the hospital at the edge of Bint Jbail to visit friends. He put his head in his hands and started to weep.

“I’m not crying for the fighters. The fighters can handle it. I’m crying for the ordinary people,” Hussein said.