Warriors of God by Nicholas Blanford

in, and in early April, Harb returned to Jibsheet, where he unabashedly continued to encourage resistance. A few months later, he was summoned to Tehran, where he told the Iranians that his home in Lebanon was “the embassy of the Islamic Republic of Iran.” Having impressed the Iranians with his commitment, Harb returned to Jibsheet to continue his mobilization efforts, knowing that he was unlikely to live much longer. Indeed, he frequently forecast his own death to his followers, predicting that the Israelis would “shed my blood.”
The “Shia Genie”
    Opposition against the Israelis had been building for months in south Lebanon, but the catalyst that turned hostility into rebellion came on October 16, 1983, during the Ashoura commemoration marking the martyrdom of Imam Hussein. As many as sixty thousand Shias had converged upon the southern market town of Nabatiyah for the ceremony when an Israeli patrol of jeeps and trucks made the mistake of barging through the throng. The Israeli soldiers probably had no idea of the significance of their blunder, although the patrol commander had been warned by his superiors to stay away from the town that day. But the enraged celebrants saw the Israeli intrusion on their holiest of days as sacrilege and reacted with fury. The crowd mobbed the vehicles and threw stones. Shots were fired at the patrol, and someone tossed a hand grenade at a jeep, the explosion setting it alight. The frightened Israelis opened fire on the crowd, killing one man and wounding up to ten.
    IDF commanders realized immediately the seriousness of the incident and arrested the patrol commander. But the gesture was undermined when the next day Haddad’s militiamen stormed Nabatiyah and conducted house-to-house searches for those who had attacked the Israeli convoy. The Shia clerics came off the fence and issued calls for confrontation and fatwas forbidding cooperation with the Israelis. The Shia recruits to the Israeli-controlled National Guard deserted and the militia collapsed.
    Worse was to follow for the Israelis. On November 4, a green Chevrolet truck crashed through the main gate of an IDF headquarters housed in a school building on the coastal road south of Tyre. The Israeli guards fired a few shots, at least one round hitting the youthful-looking driver, but the truck continued moving and had almost reached the main building when it exploded. The blast, caused by an estimated 440 pounds of explosive, demolished the building, killing twenty-nine Israelis, mainly border security guards, as well as thirty-two Lebanese and Palestinian detainees.
    The deadly attack not only echoed that of Ahmad Qassir against the previous IDF headquarters in Tyre almost a year before, but also mirrored a devastating simultaneous suicide truck bombing less than two weeks earlier against the U.S. marine barracks at Beirut airport and the French paratroop headquarters in southern Beirut on October 23 that killed 241 American servicemen and 58 French soldiers. The marine casualties were the highest in a single day for the corps since Iwo Jima in World War II. Once again, the mysterious Islamic Jihad claimed responsibility for both attacks as well as the latest bombing of the Tyre headquarters.
    Hezbollah has always officially denied involvement in the bombing of the U.S. marine barracks and French paratroop headquarters, although its leaders publicly supported the attacks at the time. Hezbollah later described them as the “first punishment” of “our people” against the “imams of infidelity of America, France and Israel.” 5
    Nearly a quarter of a century later, Tufayli, now no longer a member of the party he helped to found, admitted to me that Hezbollah was responsible for the U.S. marine barracks bombing.
    â€œThe marines were not civilians. I considered the Americans as an occupying force and I fought them,” he said. While he remained “proud” of the attack,