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colorfl1
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Hezbollah's deadly hold on heartland
Loved by many, accused by others of sacrificing civilians
Sonia Verma
National Post
Saturday, August 05, 2006
TYRE, Lebanon - When Dr. Fouad Fatah emerged bleary-eyed from the ruins of his hospital during a pause in Israeli air strikes last week, it felt like the first time in forever.
He counted himself as the last living soul in the five-room clinic, the only hospital serving this devastated swath of Lebanon's south. His surviving patients had already been evacuated.
The surgeon led a group of journalists over what remained: mangled debris, shredded walls and a roof punched through by an Israeli shell.
"Look what they did to this place," Dr. Fatah said, shaking his head. "Why in the world would the Israelis target a hospital?"
The probable answer was found a few hours later in a field nearby. Hidden in the tall grass were the burned remnants of a rocket-launcher.
Confronted with the evidence, Dr. Fatah admitted his hospital could have been used as a site from which to fire rockets into Israel.
"What choice to we have? We need to fight back from somewhere," he said, tapping his foot on the ground.
"This is Hezbollah's heartland."
The Shiites of southern Lebanon have seen Hezbollah as their protectors ever since the group first emerged as an Iranian-backed militia during the Lebanese civil war.
When Israeli forces withdrew from south Lebanon in 2000, Hezbollah claimed victory.
Since then it has launched a steady stream of rockets across the border into Israel, causing few casualties but keeping the Israelis in a state of perpetual wariness.
Financed, armed and trained by Iran and supported by Syria, Hezbollah was treated by the Lebanese government as a legitimate, arm's-length force patrolling its southern border. Over the years, its social arm has come to provide social services -- schools, medical clinics and charities.
But the United States, Canada and Israel consider Hezbollah a powerful terrorist organization, in part because it launches violent attacks against civilians. Its armed wing is responsible for countless terror attacks.
Military experts say that over the past five years, Hezbollah fighters have steadily stockpiled weapons funnelled from Iran and Syria. They buried rockets in tunnels, houses and, according to Israeli officials, in hospitals.
U.S. military experts believe Hezbollah has rockets ranging in number from several thousand to tens of thousands.
"We've been preparing ourselves for this fight for the last five years. We can fight this for much longer," said Abu Ismail, a local Hezbollah leader near the village of Bint Jbeil who uses a nom de guerre, like most of his fellow fighters.
Residents of the cluster of villages closest to the Israeli border, Hezbollah's most loyal supporters, helped stow the weapons away.
But as the conflict continues, there is an undercurrent of anger among some residents.
"Hezbollah are using [us] as human shields," said Rima Khouri, gesturing overhead as Israeli warplanes sliced through the sky.
The Lebanese Christian woman fled from her village of Ain Abel to one of the swelling refugee shelters in the city of Tyre.
She was one of few people to speak freely about her anger at Hezbollah and their strategy of firing rockets into Israel from civilian areas.
"Their protection comes with a heavy price. We want nothing to do with them," she said.
Nasser Kareem shared her sentiments.
During a pitched battle in his village of Bint Jbeil last Thursday, the 48-year-old dentist watched from his kitchen window as Hezbollah fighters dragged a rocket launcher across the torn street in front of his house.
A few minutes later, he heard four successive blasts. Kareem barely managed to cover his four-year-old son's ears before the rockets were fired. His own ears are still ringing.
"Five minutes after they fired the rockets, the Israelis started bombing," he recalled from the safety of a shelter in Beirut.
"They are making us magnets for the Israelis," he said.
As war rages on between Israel and Hezbollah, civilian deaths are adding up on both sides of the border.
The conflict has taken its heaviest toll in Lebanon, where the line separating a civilian from a fighter is murky, and support for Hezbollah runs deeper than ever.
For its part, Israel says its military is simply locking on targets from where rockets are launched.
Driving through the emptied towns of south Lebanon, it's a charge that's nearly impossible to prove or disprove.
Most villagers bristle at the suggestion that Israel has been targeting anybody but civilians.
Anger boiled over last week when a shelter in Qana was hit, killing 29 people, most of them children.
"What have they done to deserve this? Is this a military target?" wept Mohamad Chaloub, clutching the lifeless body of his daughter.
Local officials said there were no weapons or rockets in the house where the children slept in Qana, no warning before the bomb fell.
But the next day, the same Lebanese Red Cross team that dug out the children's bodies stumbled across the shreds of more rocket launchers in a village nearby.
One was found deep inside a fruit orchard. Another was found wedged between two houses.
In this part of Lebanon, Hezbollah still rules the streets.
Armed with satellite phones, but no visible weapons, they patrol the roads on mopeds.
Stop in any town to ask for directions and the answer will likely come from Hezbollah, waving any cameras away with an angry fist.
Military experts say Hezbollah cut back on its full-time fighters in recent years, estimating there are now anywhere from 300 to 1,200 full-time fighters and several thousand reserves.
Though many would argue Hezbollah caused the current crisis -- some would say it intentionally precipitated it -- it seems clear the terrorist organization's ranks are swelling with each Israeli bomb that drops.
In a rare interview with Hezbollah fighters near the village of Srifa last week, a local leader took a reporter behind a stretch of barbed wire, inside an orange grove where a training camp for new recruits was underway.
Almost all of the camouflaged men racing along an obstacle course of flat tires and twisted metal said they had a relative buried under the rubble.
One man dressed in a green shirt and pressed pants said he still hadn't recovered the bodies of his eight brothers, buried beneath the wreckage of his family home.
Another fighter -- a young man of 16 years -- had pulled himself from under a car that had flipped over from the force of a bomb blast. He said his father died next to him.
"Show me a man who has lost his mother, his father, his sister, his brother, his child and I will show you Hezbollah," he said.
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