The Australian:
Tehran is playing a leading role in arming Hezbollah and testing Israel’s response to rocket attacks, writes Geoff Elliott

August 10, 2006
TWELVE trucks crossed the Syrian border into Lebanon and rumbled south. When they were stopped at a checkpoint a few days later, the Lebanese Armed Forces found the trucks were brimming with ammunition and weapons, including Katyusha rockets that have been raining down on Israel since July 12.
What happened next, in this little-reported incident in late January, goes to the heart of the conflict between Israel and Lebanon. The convoy was waved on and travelled unhindered to its final destination: Hezbollah terrorists in southern Lebanon.

The Lebanese army said the transportation and storage of ammunition belonged to the “resistance”. Once inside Lebanon it was subject to a ministerial policy statement of the Lebanese Government, which considers the “resistance” to be legitimate.

“As the Government of Lebanon has confirmed, the Lebanese Armed Forces has thus not been authorised to prevent further movement of the ammunitions, which had been a common practice for more than 15 years,” UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan said in a letter to the Security Council in April. “Hezbollah publicly confirmed that the arms were destined for the group.”

It’s this uninterrupted flow of weapons, mostly made in Iran, under the nose of the Lebanese Government, that has allowed Hezbollah to stockpile some 12,000 Katyusha rockets. Over the past 29 days of conflict, Hezbollah has fired more than 3000 rockets into Israel.

Syrian-made rockets, including mid-range 220mm units, have also fallen on Nazareth and Haifa, Israel’s third-largest city. The warheads were filled with ball bearings to maximise civilian casualties.

Aside from rocket launchers, armoured personnel carriers, night vision goggles, aerial drones and motorised gliders make up the hardware for a 3000-strong guerilla unit that some say is in fact a well-organised and fierce military force.

“The fact that Hezbollah is difficult to dislodge from their positions is not a surprise for the Israelis or anyone else,” David Schenker, a specialist in Middle East affairs at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, tells The Australian. Schenker also worked for four years at the Pentagon as a Middle East specialist. “Hezbollah fighters are well trained and highly motivated and they are dug in,” he adds.

Former CIA officer Robert Baer, who has followed the group since 1983, told US News & World Report he has “a lot of respect for Hezbollah’s capabilities”. Baer, whose book See No Evil inspired the film Syriana, spent a couple of weeks with Hezbollah last year, touring its facilities. “You’ve got some of the most experienced operatives in the world there.”

When the Israelis left Lebanon in 2000, Hezbollah fortified its position along the northern border and continued to amass its cache of arms. In 2000, Hezbollah was estimated to have 6000 rockets. But in May, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah claimed to have more than 12,000. “All of northern occupied Palestine is within range,” Nasrallah said, referring to Israel. “Its ports, its bases, its factories and everything located there.”

Until the Syrian pull-out of Lebanon last year this supply of arms to Hezbollah was relatively easy. Schenker says the route to Hezbollah was traditionally Iranian cargo planes flying into Damascus, Syria, and overland from there. The direct air route to Damascus is over Iraq but Schenker says the US occupation made any airlifts through Iraqi airspace perilous, meaning a more common route became either overland through Turkey and northern Iraq (Kurdistan) and into Syria, or through Turkish airspace.

While Hezbollah’s burgeoning arsenal of rockets was well known, what has surprised Schenker and others during the conflict is Hezbollah’s use of sophisticated weaponry.

Just two days into the war, an Israeli Sa’ar 5 class missile corvette, enforcing the naval blockade off Lebanon, was struck by a C-802 radar-guided anti-ship cruise missile, an Iranian-made version of a missile known as the Chinese silkworm. The explosion claimed the lives of four soldiers and the ship had to return to port.

It was the first time the missile had been used in the war with Israel and military officials reported that the Israeli ship’s radar system was not calibrated to detect the missile, which is equipped with an advanced anti-tracking system.

Iran denied any involvement and US and Israeli officials say there was no evidence that Iranian operatives working in Lebanon launched the missile themselves. That made the incident even more curious, observes Schenker.

“It was assumed broadly that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard corp personnel stationed in Lebanon would assist Hezbollah in the technical operation of this equipment,” says Schenker. “That would not have been a surprise. What was a surprise is that according to Israelis, a Lebanese Armed Forces naval radar station was used and it was used to lock on the ship.”

It meant the land-based radar post communicated with the missile, which allowed the incoming missile to avoid detection.

“This enhanced capability is why the IDF (Israeli Defence Force) destroyed the Lebanese Armed Forces radar station,” says Schenker, referring to an IDF strike north of Beirut a few days later.

The incident points to the many sympathies within the Lebanese Armed Forces and the Government to Hezbollah and why the present conflict is so precarious and raising concerns of another civil war in Lebanon.

Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora has played a delicate act in avoiding the use of the word “militia”, which is the definition in UN resolution 1559 that calls for the disarmament of Hezbollah. In fact just as news of that intercepted convoy of arms was breaking in Lebanon, Siniora told Beirut parliament on February 6: “We have never called, and will never call, the resistance by any name other than resistance.”

That’s an affront to the US because prior to the al-Qa’ida September 11 attacks, Hezbollah – or Party of God – had the ignominious boast that it had killed more Americans than any other terror group.

Hezbollah was formed in 1982 in the ashes of Lebanon’s civil war, a fully paid-up subsidiary of Ayatollah Khomeini’s Iranian revolution and its vision of Islamic Shia fundamentalism.

US officials believe Iran finances Hezbollah to the tune of $US100 million ($132million) a year, while the Iran Revolutionary Guard trains its fighters.

Hezbollah’s terrorist attacks over the year include suicide bombings of the US embassy and Marine barracks in Beirut, the hijacking of TWA flight 847 and bombings of the Israeli embassy in Argentina and US military housing at Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia.

And it has grown into a potent political force, with two of its members in the Lebanese cabinet and, until Israel’s bombing campaign, a well developed network of social services, media outlets and businesses.

As the war drags on, Hezbollah is being severely degraded militarily, according to the IDF, but its political credentials in Lebanon have been enhanced and become “stronger than before in terms of the eyes of the Lebanese people”, says Martin Indyk, a former US ambassador to Israel.

Hisham Milhem, Washington correspondent for liberal Arabic newspaper Al-Nahar, says Hezbollah is projecting itself in Lebanon as the protector of the homeland.

“Hezbollah is riding high, not only in Lebanon but throughout the Arab world. (Hezbollah leader) Hassan Nasrallah is lionised. Nasrallah now, from where he is sitting in some bunker in Beirut or in the Bekaa Valley – I don’t know where – can claim with a great deal of credence that Hezbollah managed to create a hole in Israel’s strategic deterrence.

“He delivered … not necessarily in a very effective military way, but definitely politically in terms of perception. Hezbollah is standing up to the Israelis and doing relatively well.”

Clearly, Israel is attempting to deal Hezbollah a crippling blow by bombing the highways to Syria, and any convoys on it, to shut down Hezbollah’s supply routes. But military strategists acknowledge that its air campaign targeting mobile rocket launch sites is counter-productive, particularly when the guerilla forces are hiding among civilians. Israel suffered a significant propaganda defeat and widespread condemnation following the strike in Qana which claimed the lives of 28, including 16 children. It’s why Israel has committed more ground forces to try to rout the rocket launchers.

There is also concern the present conflict is a proxy battle in which Iran is observing Israel’s military tactics.

“Iran is bringing in to Lebanon sophisticated weaponry,” says Lebanon’s Druze leader, Walid Jumblatt. “The Iranians are actually experimenting with different kinds of missiles in Lebanon by shooting them at the Israelis. Iran is using this violence to test certain of Israel’s abilities,” he adds. Jumblatt heads Lebanon’s Progressive Socialist Party and is regarded as the most prominent anti-Syrian Lebanese politician.

And he adds of Syria’s role: “Syria will likely try to tell the world, ‘Look, see, since we left Lebanon, the Cedar Revolution and the forces in Lebanon that got our military out through popular support, those forces are not able to control Lebanon. While we were in control, Lebanon was a safe place. Now it’s not. We need to come back in,” he predicts.

“I would not be surprised if they even try to wiggle their way into a deal by convincing the Americans that Syrian influence in Lebanon will stabilise the region.”

Syria originally sent forces into Lebanon in 1976 during the Lebanese civil war and its military occupied the country until last year when suddenly its troops withdrew after an international outcry over the assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri, for which Damascus was blamed.

David Makovsky, also a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East policy, wrote that last month’s attack from Hezbollah demonstrated the first time the group felt “self-confident enough to claim responsibility for a strike across the internationally recognised border. These events suggest that Iran was pressing for Hezbollah’s initiation of the crisis.”

And on the day of the Hezbollah attack against Israel, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad declared: “If the Zionist regime commits another stupid move and attacks Syria, this will be considered like attacking the whole Islamic world and this regime will receive a very fierce response. The stakes for the international community go beyond Israel itself.”

Makovsky notes, as Iran pushes the world on its plans for a nuclear program, “Iran sees itself as being on the march”.

“This point is not lost on countries such as the US and European and Arab states, which do not want this crisis to end with Iran and Hezbollah feeling emboldened.”

Geoff Elliott is The Australian’s Washington correspondent.