Free Warriors of God by Nicholas Blanford Page A

regime.”
Preaching Religion
    Farhan Ali Ismael could have been no older than twenty when he died on November 16, 1983. The Iranian soldier’s youthful face gazes with awide-eyed and slightly nervous expression from a black-and-white photograph tucked into a small glass box filled with colorful plastic and silk flowers that sits on a stand above the gray marble slab marking his grave. Ismael is one of eight Iranian Revolutionary Guards buried in the “martyrs’ cemetery” in a corner of Brital, a dusty, disheveled village scattered along either side of a shallow stream running down the rugged, barren mountains on the eastern flank of the Bekaa Valley. There are no Iranian soldiers stationed in Brital today, but it was here and in the surrounding Shia villages in 1982 that the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) began the process of mobilization, recruitment, religious education, and military training that provided the foundation for the emergence of Hezbollah.
    The first Iranians to arrive in Syria in the wake of the Israeli invasion consisted of some five thousand Iranian Revolutionary Guards and religious officers who were expecting to deploy quickly into Lebanon and confront the IDF advance up the southern Bekaa Valley. But by the time they landed at Damascus airport, the fighting between the IDF and Syrian forces in the Bekaa Valley was over. The Israelis had halted a few miles south of the key Beirut–Damascus highway, well short of the Bekaa’s Shia areas farther north. Assad had no desire to allow the IRGC into Lebanon to reignite a war that had proved so costly to Syria in equipment and manpower and could yet threaten his regime. But he did agree to a military accord with Tehran in which the Iranians would help build a Lebanese resistance force to do the fighting instead. In exchange for this Iranian toehold on Lebanese soil, Tehran agreed to supply Syria with 9 million tons of free oil a year.
    Most of the Revolutionary Guards returned to Iran, but around fifteen hundred elements, mainly drawn from the IRGC’s Office of the Islamic Liberation Movements, stayed behind to establish a base of operations in Syria on the outskirts of the resort town of Zabadani on the border with Lebanon.
    The physical link between the new IRGC base at Zabadani and the nearest Shia villages in the Bekaa was an old smuggler’s track that snaked through a narrow valley cutting through barren 4,500-foot-high mountains.The track terminated at the hamlet of Janta, a cluster of small stone houses beside a river, lined with poplar and walnut trees, that gushed and splashed through a steep valley of towering limestone crags before emerging into the Bekaa plain.
    The first few hundred Revolutionary Guards used this track to move into the Bekaa, renting houses in Baalbek and then visiting the surrounding villages. They adopted a low-key and convivial approach. The IRGC wore khaki military uniforms, but they were unarmed. The mission initially was to raise the religious consciousness of the local people and to spread the teachings of Khomeini in preparation for resistance against Israel.
    Among the Iranians arriving in the Bekaa was a diminutive engineer in his late twenties with narrow eyes, called Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The future president of the Islamic Republic was one of a group of Iranians who set up a camp beside a copse of spindly poplar trees in a shallow valley called Hawsh Bay near the village of Taraya. Local residents still remember Ahmadinejad with affection and not a little pride at his later public role.
    Before the civil war, Baalbek attracted coachloads of tourists who came to gape at the magnificent Roman temples beside the town and attend the world-renowned music festival each summer. But with the arrival of the Iranians, Baalbek and some of the nearby villages soon began to take on the trappings of a mini-Iran. Huge, eye-catching murals appeared on walls depicting Shia motifs and