Free Warriors of God by Nicholas Blanford

thirteen or fourteen, blocked the narrow alleyways and fought the Israelis at close range with rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs). Even with air raids, it still took four days to subdue the Tyre camps. The fighting in the larger refugee camp of Ain al-Hilweh, on the outskirts of Sidon, was even fiercer. The Israelis razed the camp with artillery, air strikes, and tank fire after failing to persuade the residents to leave by dropping leaflets and broadcasting warnings over mosque loudspeakers.
    While the Palestinians in the camps greeted the Israeli invaders with RPGs and grenades, the Lebanese Shias of the south, for the most part, welcomed them with handfuls of thrown rice. For the Shia population, the Israelis were liberators, driving the boorish and detested Palestinian gunmen from their villages and towns. Amal’s leadership in the south instructed the fighters not to resist the Israelis, and even ordered them to hand over their weapons if required.
    Syrian forces in the southern Bekaa Valley fought bravely against overwhelming odds. The Israeli Air Force first jammed and destroyed Syrian radar, then attacked the blinded surface-to-air missile (SAM) sites in the Bekaa. The Syrian Air Force was completely outmatched in the skies over southern Lebanon when some seventy Syrian MiGs took on about a hundred Israeli F-15s and F-16s, losing a total of sixty-four planes in two days’ fighting. With Syria’s air cover smashed, the IDF charged up the Bekaa Valley toward the Syrian positions. The Syrian ground forces fought stubbornly for every inch of ground gained by the IDF. An Israeli armored column was halted by Syrian tanks at the village of Sultan Yacoub and prevented from reaching the crucial Beirut–Damascus highway that bisected the Bekaa Valley.
    The Israelis also met with fierce and unexpected resistance at Khalde at the southern approach to Beirut. Here a mixed bag of Syrian soldiers, Syrian-backed Palestinian fighters, Lebanese militiamen, Amal militants,and Khomeini-inspired Shia radicals checked the Israeli armored column as it pushed up the coastal road. Among them were Imad Mughniyah and his friends, who tied strips of cloth around their foreheads in emulation of Iranian fighters battling Iraqi troops and rushed out of the southern suburbs to confront the advancing Israelis. They fought with suicidal abandon, blasting Israeli tanks with RPGs at point-blank range. Ahmad Hallaq, a fearsome, bearded giant of a man who fought with the Syrian-backed As-Saiqa Palestinian faction, even captured an Israeli Centurion tank and rode it in triumph back to his headquarters in the Shatila refugee camp.
    Meanwhile, in Tehran, Tufayli and Harb were busy arranging Iranian support for a new Shia resistance force to confront the Israelis. Even though Iran was focused on war with neighboring Iraq, its leaders recognized that the Israeli invasion of Lebanon was an opportunity to spread the Islamic revolution to the front lines of the Arab-Israeli conflict. It was an opportunity that had to be seized.
    â€œI met with certain leaders and they recognized the need for support. Khomeini was very realistic about this,” Tufayli recalls. “When the invasion happened it accelerated everything.”
    A military communiqué in Tehran said that Iranian troops and Revolutionary Guards were being dispatched to Lebanon “to engage in face-to-face battle against Israel, the primary enemy of Islam and the Muslims.” Two days into the invasion, an Iranian delegation comprising the defense minister and top army commanders was in Damascus discussing terms of military assistance with the Syrians.
    â€œTo us, there is no difference between the fronts in the south of Iran [against Iraq] and in south Lebanon,” said Ali Khamenei, then president of Iran. “We are prepared to put our facilities and necessary training at the disposal of all the Muslims who are prepared to fight against the Zionist