Hezbollah Battles to Shed Extremist Image in Lebanon

Sheik Hassan Nasrallah’s bearded but cherubic face appeared on the front pages of Lebanese newspapers, launching a guerrilla recruitment drive with a smile that seemed to say, “Hezbollah wants you!”

Nasrallah, secretary-general of Hezbollah, announced that the Shiite Muslim ranks are now open to all Lebanese citizens. Christians, Sunni Muslims and Druze also could apply to join the Iranian-backed resistance to Israel’s occupation of southern Lebanon.

“The person should have the mental, psychological and physical ability to join in military operations for tasks such as planting bombs and attacking outposts,” Nasrallah said. “Some people can give us two days a week or three days a month or even split their annual vacation between the unit and their family.”

Interested parties were encouraged to call one of three mobile telephone numbers published in the press earlier this month.

No one expects a mad rush to enroll in an Islamic movement with a terrorist history. Nonetheless, the campaign reflects a successful two-pronged strategy on the part of Hezbollah, or the Party of God, to improve its political and military standing.

In the more than 19 months since Israel launched its massive “Grapes of Wrath” assault in southern Lebanon, Hezbollah has been working overtime to shed its extremist image and join the Lebanese mainstream. Its popularity has increased through charity, social service programs and the hard work of its seven members of the Lebanese parliament. The movement’s Jihad (Holy War) Construction crews won especially high praise for rebuilding houses destroyed by Israel, quickly and free of charge.

At the same time, Hezbollah combatants have taken the initiative against Israeli soldiers in southern Lebanon with new weapons, training and tactics, and with what many military observers consider to be a run of good luck--an essential ingredient in guerrilla warfare.

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Some Lebanese intellectuals express concern that Hezbollah’s long-term goal is to establish an Islamic state in Lebanon, noting that its inspiration is Iran’s late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. But meanwhile, they have only good words for the movement’s schools, hospitals and guerrilla resistance.

“Hezbollah has come of age,” said Jamil Mroue, a political analyst and publisher of the Daily Star, an English-language newspaper. “They have gained experience. They’re systematic. They’re good at management, and they don’t waste time trying to make themselves popular with the usual propaganda. Their advantage is that their hand is in the purse of the Iranians, and they use this intelligently.”

For most Lebanese, adds political scientist Adnan Iskandar, Hezbollah has “succeeded in becoming a resistance movement and not a terrorist group.”

Israel has lost 39 soldiers in the battle against Hezbollah this year, more than in any other year since withdrawing from Beirut and occupying the 440-square-mile self-declared “security zone” in 1985. And 73 Israeli soldiers died in February when two military helicopters collided in midair on the way to southern Lebanon.

With the casualties, Hezbollah has dealt major psychological blows to Israel. In September, Hezbollah guerrillas hit one of Israel’s revered elite units, a naval commando force trying to carry out an operation north of the occupied zone under cover of darkness. Twelve of the 13 Israelis on the mission in Insariyeh died--the highest Israeli toll for any single clash in southern Lebanon.

In early October, a Hezbollah patrol made its way deep inside the Israeli-occupied zone to fire on troops from a house just 300 yards from the border of Israel. Two soldiers were killed, and the guerrillas escaped “unnoticed” by civilians in the area. The operation revealed serious intelligence-gathering problems for Israel.

Later that month, a guerrilla missile pierced one of Israel’s famed Merkava tanks--considered one of the safest tanks in the world--and killed the driver. It was the third time in two months that specially trained Hezbollah units had hit the tanks with rocket fire. Israel declared that this was proof the guerrillas had obtained sophisticated antitank weapons from Iran; Hezbollah denied this and claimed, instead, to have detailed blueprints of the Merkava, allowing the militants to discover its weak points.

Even Israel’s successes have backfired of late. An operation in August that left five guerrillas dead and lifted Israeli morale was quickly overshadowed by the loss of four soldiers who burned to death in a brush fire set by Israel’s own mortars.

During a nighttime ambush in September, Israeli forces killed four Hezbollah guerrillas, including Nasrallah’s 18-year-old son Hadi, whose fatigue-clad body was captured. Israel celebrated the hit, but Nasrallah turned the loss to his political advantage.

Impressed by the fact that the sheik had put his eldest son’s life on the line for the country, leaders of all sectors of Lebanese society paid their condolences to Nasrallah and offered their support. Nasrallah decided to mobilize this broad-based support and so kicked off the drive to recruit non-Muslims.

“The phones are ringing,” Khodr Nureddine, a member of the Hezbollah politburo, said in an interview. “People are calling to join.”

Magnus Ranstorp, an expert on Hezbollah at St. Andrews University in Scotland, believes the recruitment is a move to beef up Hezbollah in the event Israel pulls out of Lebanon.

“This reflects a worry among Hezbollah about being disarmed in the long run. If Israel were to withdraw, Hezbollah would face losing its armed side and much of what makes them unique. This [recruitment] would make it harder to disarm them because they would be larger and more popular,” Ranstorp said.

For Israel’s powerful army, the effort to mass-market a fundamentalist guerrilla group adds insult to injury. This has been “the worst year so far” for Israel in the war against Hezbollah, according to Uri Lubrani, the Israeli Defense Ministry’s civilian expert on Lebanon.

The military setbacks and high casualties have spawned calls for a unilateral withdrawal from southern Lebanon from mothers of Israeli soldiers and some opposition political leaders, and a poll taken after the Insariyeh debacle showed a majority of Israelis supporting the idea.

This, in turn, is hurting Israeli troop morale and fostering concern among members of Israel’s proxy force, the South Lebanon Army, that Israel will abandon them. It also apparently is affecting the willingness of the residents of southern Lebanon to cooperate with Israeli soldiers.

“This is a long, hard, very frustrating process. They [Hezbollah] are becoming more and more sophisticated,” Lubrani said. “The men [soldiers] are disturbed by the fact that they have become the object of controversy and a pawn in the hand of politicians.”

Israel’s military establishment opposes a unilateral withdrawal from the hills of southern Lebanon, arguing that Hezbollah would continue to fight, but in the towns of northern Israel. They say only negotiations with Syria, the de facto power in Lebanon, can bring about a pullout with lasting peace. Syria sees the guerrilla force as a club in its battle with Israel for the return of the Golan Heights, which Israel captured from Syria in the 1967 Mideast War.

Hezbollah has long declined to say whether it would keep fighting Israel if the Jewish state’s soldiers were to withdraw from southern Lebanon, although in an interview with the German magazine Der Spiegel after his son’s death, Nasrallah seemed to go further than before toward saying his forces would continue their battle.

“We do not recognize any northern Israel. It is occupied northern Palestine,” Nasrallah is quoted as saying. “There will be no peace or reconciliation as long as Palestine is occupied by the Zionist enemy.”

The events of the last few months prompted the Israeli military to reexamine its position, but it has determined that the current war of attrition with Hezbollah is the only viable option in Lebanon.

“There is no way of winning this war. The purpose is to give the northern Galilee the freedom to live a normal life,” Lubrani said. Given the options of intensified warfare or a unilateral withdrawal, he added, “as costly as the present deployment is, it is the best route.”

The two sides are continuing the cat-and-mouse game in the craggy hills and steep wadis of southern Lebanon, with Hezbollah using mobile phones to coordinate attacks and roadside bombs camouflaged as rocks to ambush the Israelis. Israel appears to be searching for new responses, while relying on stepped-up air attacks to keep Hezbollah and its supporters on the run.

Hezbollah keeps Lebanese apprised of the military situation on its television station or on the Web site that opened early this year and quickly became a front of “cyber-warfare.” In March, Hezbollah television reported that Israel was sending tens of thousands of messages to Hezbollah’s mailbox to try to shut down the system. Israel responded that Hezbollah had sent a computer virus in return.

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By most accounts, Hezbollah has a military force of 3,000 to 5,000 fighters, about 10% of them full time. The rest live with their families in the towns and villages north of the occupied zone, work and join in combat when needed. That may mean running out to the edge of town to launch a rocket and disappearing before Israeli troops can pinpoint them.

Israel’s ability to respond to such attacks has been restricted by the “April understandings,” negotiated at the end of the 16-day Grapes of Wrath offensive in April 1996, which left 150 Lebanese dead, most of them civilians.

Under the accord, designed to prevent civilian casualties in the conflict, Hezbollah is not supposed to fire rockets into northern Israel, and Israel is not supposed to hit civilians in Lebanon.

The accord breaks down on occasion, on both sides. When Lebanon is the target, Hezbollah is there to help--with its public works, health and social service programs. “Together we resist, together we build,” is the motto on Jihad Construction’s full-color, English-language brochure with before and after photographs of houses destroyed in Grapes of Wrath and rebuilt by Hezbollah.

At the Jihad Construction office in Nabatiyeh, north of the occupied zone, civil engineer Malik Saad said he keeps a permanent team of technicians on staff and employs crews when needed to repair damage from Israeli raids. These days, Saad said, the crews in bright yellow vests are patching up about 15 houses a month and have built five shelters as protection against rocket fire.

“We do this to help the people and to make them feel we are not the problem, that Israel is the problem,” Saad said.

Likewise, Al Janoub Hospital in Nabatiyeh is available “to heal the wounds of the resistance fighters . . . and to support the inhabitants of the areas close to the front lines,” according to Deputy Director Ahmad Saad.

Both institutions help ensure that civilians remain in the towns within shooting distance of the occupied zone--and do not leave the guerrillas without cover. Hezbollah says it helps any family that needs it, regardless of religion or political affiliation. But most of the population in those parts is Muslim, and Hezbollah’s influence is visible in banners with its logo of a raised Kalashnikov assault rifle and murals of Ayatollah Khomeini.

According to Nabatiyeh resident Um Mahdi Dabsheh, the widow of a Hezbollah combatant who died last year, “Everybody is Hezbollah here because everyone suffers from the Israeli occupation, and everyone looks to Hezbollah to get rid of the Israelis.”

BACKGROUND

Hezbollah was founded in 1982 by Shiite Muslim leaders who broke away from the rival Amal militia and trained in Lebanon with Iranian Revolutionary Guards. During the 1980s, the group operated under a number of names to carry out attacks, including the suicide bombing of a U.S. Marine compound, the abduction of Associated Press reporter Terry Anderson and the kidnapping of nearly 100 other foreigners in Lebanon, according to Magnus Ranstorp, a Hezbollah expert at St. Andrews University in Scotland. Israel invaded Beirut in 1982, then pulled its forces back to Tyre. From 1983 to 1985, Hezbollah launched suicide bombings and other attacks that eventually forced Israel south into the current 9-mile-wide occupied zone. Sheik Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, one of the highest religious authorities of the Shiite community in Lebanon, is the spiritual leader of Hezbollah but has no formal role in the organization. Sheik Hassan Nasrallah has been secretary-general of Hezbollah since February 1992 and is the one responsible for forging Hezbollah’s more temperate image. His tenure is to expire in April. He is not supposed to fill another term, but Hezbollah leaders say they have no one of equal stature to replace him.