7

Quo vadis, “Party of God”? The Regional Entanglement of the Lebanese Hezbollah A Slippery Slope between Doctrinal Resistance

Rabi 2, 1437 - January 2016 against Israel and Strategic Adaptation in Syria

Sebastian Maier

Quo vadis, “Party of God”? The Regional Entanglement of the Lebanese Hezbollah A Slippery Slope between Doctrinal Resistance against Israel and Strategic Adaptation in Syria

Sebastian Maier © King Faisal Center for research and Islamic Studies, 2016 King Fahd National Library Cataloging-In-Publication Data

Maier, Sebastian Quo vadis, party of God the regional entanglement of the Lebanese Hezbollah./Sebastian Maier. - Riyadh, 2016 35 p; 16.5x23cm

ISBN: 978-603-8032-83-1

1- Hezbollah 2- Political parties - Lebanon I- Title

322.420956 dc 1437/3584

L.D. no. 1437/3584 ISBN: 978-603-8032-83-1

This report is part of the King Faisal Research Center's new initiative: The «Middle East Strategy Project». The aim of this project is to conduct in-depth research and analysis that falls within the scope of regional grand strategy of security and defence. In light of the recent events in the Syrian Arab Republic, the study will focus on examining the ongoing turmoil, study the resulting regional repercussions unfolding across the Levant, and analyze the policy objectives of the local, sub-state, and international actors. Table of Contents

Introduction 7

1a) Historical Context of Doctrinal Resistance against Israel 9

1b) Modus Operandi: Adherence to Asymmetric Deterrence 13

2a) Strategic Adaptation: Interference and Commitment in Syria 21

2b) Modus Operandi: Maintaining Strategic Depth for the 24 International Pro-Shi’ite, Assad Loyalist Camp

Outlook 30

5

Introduction

While the Lebanese Hezbollah’s raison d’être ever since its inception in the early ’80s has been the mantra of unwavering resistance against the Israeli occupation of Lebanese soil, in April 2013 the Shi’ite militia’s secretary general, Hassan Nasrallah, publicly stated that his fighters were openly fighting alongside the Shi’ite-sect Alawite regime of Bashar al-Assad on Syrian ground. Since then, Hezbollah has steadily deepened its commitment there both in size and in scope. It has scored tactical victories and territorial gains on the Syrian battlefield in bolstering the foothold of al-Assad, just as it has suffered considerable losses among some of its most experienced military ranks. Therefore, Hezbollah’s deepening interference on Syrian turf testifies to a paradigm shift in its strategic realignment in the context of the Levant’s unprecedented volatility. Feeling the repercussions from internal political divisions in Lebanon and the increasingly intricate frontlines across the neighboring country of Syria, Hezbollah has embarked on a dangerous path that is likely to have grave consequences. As it carries the dual burden of being expected to maintain the opposition against Israel as well as shoring up regime loyalists in Syria, it risks stalemate on its southern front and overexpansion in the protracted Syrian quagmire.

7 8 No. 7 January 2016

Parade of Lebanese Hezbollah members (Source: The New York Times).

According to Hezbollah’s TV outlet al-Manar, one of the most infamous figures among Hezbollah-affiliated terrorists, Samir Quntar, vanished on Saturday December 19, 2015, in an alleged Israeli airstrike that hit an Assad-loyal bastion on the outskirts of Damascus, the residential district of Jaramana southeast of the Syrian capital. Quntar, a member of Lebanon’s Druze community, gained notoriety after serving almost thirty years in an Israeli prison as a result of his involvement in the killing of three Israelis in the 1979 Palestine Liberation Front attack on the Israeli town of Nahariya. He was eventually released in the 2008 Israel- Hezbollah prisoner exchange, negotiated by Germany’s BND foreign intelligence service, which led to the transfer of the remains of two Israeli soldiers in exchange for the bodies of about two hundred Lebanese and Palestinian militants, as well as the release of five PLO militants. Samir Quntar was one of them. In fact, the taxonomy of this recent event bears an unequivocal resemblance to an event that took place on January 12, 2015, when the Israeli Air Force reportedly carried out a sortie against a Hezbollah military convoy in the southwestern Syrian district of Quneitra. News quickly spread that among the victims was a prominent figure of the Quds Force, Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps extraterritorial special unit, General Allahdadi. The purported Israeli air strike on the al-Amal Farms also killed Jihad Mughniyeh, son of the late Hezbollah intelligence commander Imad Mughniyeh, who died in a car bomb in the Syrian capital of Damascus in February 2008. A mere two weeks after, on January 29, 2015, Hezbollah lived up to expectations and retaliated by ambushing Israeli military vehicles, killing two and wounding seven soldiers close to the Israeli-occupied Sheba’a Farms on the Golan Heights in the Israel-Lebanon-Syria triborder area.

1a) Historical Context of Doctrinal Resistance against Israel The rise of Hezbollah as the most influential non-state actor allied with Iran and Syria commenced more than a quarter of a century ago in the wake of the Iranian revolution with the overthrow of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi in 1979. Ayatollah Khomeini personally gathered Lebanese Shi’ite clerics around him in order to form a significant alternative to the hitherto dominant Amal movement in Lebanon. Deeply anchored in its affinity to the Shi’ite belief system, Hezbollah emerged as a violent paramilitary resistance force, but in the follow-up to the Ta’if accord it began to exert influence on the Lebanese political sphere, peaking in its election to the Lebanese parliament in 1992, a victory that is still representative for the considerable support it enjoys beyond the Lebanese confessional cleavages. In addition, Israel’s military incursions in 1978 and 1982 were

9 10 No. 7 January 2016

of significance since they showed that the Levantine power play between Israel and Ba’athist Syria had found a new theater, in which both sides tried to manipulate the domestic Lebanese political disposition in their own favor. Former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak infamously confessed, “When we entered Lebanon, there was no Hezbollah. We were accepted with perfumed rice and flowers by Shi’a in the south. It was our presence there that created Hezbollah.” 1 As a result, both Syrian and Israeli meddling further paved the way for sectarian militancy and social fragmentation in Lebanon. While the Israelis eventually pushed into the outskirts of Beirut in support of Christian militias, Iran sent 1,500 Pasdaran, or Revolutionary Guards, over Syrian territory into Lebanon’s Beqa’a Valley, providing the fertile ground on which Hezbollah incubated. The president of nominally secular Syria, Hafez al-Assad, despite his initial reluctance and concerns about Tehran’s Islamist incursion, eventually adopted a pragmatic stance by cooperating with Iran, demonstrating his diplomatic virtue at that time in calibrating support whenever it toed “the Syrian line.” 2 Cooperation between Tehran and Damascus was subsequently further reinvigorated by their shared antagonism toward Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. A Shi’ite nexus, ranging from Iran into southern Lebanon and the border with Israel, had been created, and Hezbollah served alongside this nexus as an Iranian surrogate solidifying Tehran’s geopolitical foothold in the Levant. In the same way, Hezbollah’s efforts to attain “a larger slice of the sectarian pie” 3 within Lebanon and its relentless resistance to the

1- Augustus Richard Norton, Hezbollah: A Short History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), 33. 2- Ibid., 123. 3- Amal Saad-Ghorayeb, Hizbu’llah: Politics and Religion (London: Pluto Press, 2001), 112, 113. Israeli occupation have handily served Syrian purposes, too, given Damascus’s insistence that Israel disengage not only from southern Lebanon but also from the annexed, de jure Syrian Golan Heights. In fact, however, direct Israeli-Syrian negotiations remained hypothetical until the talks that took place in Geneva in March 2000. At that time, when a settlement of the Golan Heights’ future status seemed within reach, Hafez al-Assad nonetheless burned his bridges to Israel, leaving the diplomatic bargaining at an impasse yet again. 4 Worth mentioning is the fact that the Shi’ite nexus did not revolve solely around its members’ common hostility toward Israel. With the intricate Lebanese political reality unfolding in the wake of the Cedar Revolution and Lebanon’s thirty-year subordination to the Syrian agenda, Hezbollah also had quite a narrow escape in battling the domestic repercussions of social fragmentation and sectarian estrangement, which eventually would have led to the disarmament of its key instrument, its military wing. These threats notwithstanding, Hezbollah continued to influence Lebanese politics decisively by emerging as the holder of effective veto power over the national unity government in 2008. Even more importantly, Lebanon’s starkly centrifugal domestic tendencies did not in the end effectively tarnish Hezbollah’s paramilitary capabilities. Indeed, the Lebanese government recognized the latter’s right to resort to the whole spectrum of means in order to resist what it considers an ongoing occupation of Lebanese ground by Israel on the Sheba’a Farms. What is more, it is no secret that Russian-made surface-to-air

4- Eyal Zisser, “Israeli-Syrian Peace Negotiations (December 1999–March 2000): A Missed Opportunity?,” in The Middle East Peace Process: Vision versus Reality, ed. Joseph Ginat, Edward J. Perkins, and Edwin G. Corr (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2002), 229.

11 12 No. 7 January 2016

Hezbollah´s signature flag on top of ballistic missile system (Source: en.farsnews.com).

missiles (SAM) were delivered to Iran in 2005 and 2006 in order to protect Iran’s nuclear facilities against potential air attacks by their well-known foes. In similar fashion, the game-changing antitank weapons used by Hezbollah during the second Lebanon War also stem from Russian production; delivered to Iran, they were transported over Mount Lebanon, which serves as a gateway, 5 and eventually arrived in the south of Lebanon. Combined with continuous Iranian funding and arms transfers, this weaponry has allowed Hezbollah not only to penetrate further into Lebanon’s political architecture by providing considerable welfare not exclusively to Shi’ites, but also to critically enhance its own coercive strength by qualitatively upgrading its arsenal of short-, middle-, and long-range missiles. Given the increasing range of

5- Norton, Hezbollah, 323. its ballistic stockpile, Hezbollah was able to relocate its arsenal from its former, mostly consolidated entrenchment in southern Lebanon further north beyond the Litani River. This move yielded several benefits for Hezbollah. First, it drew strategic lessons from the war of 2006, when its considerable arsenal of middle- and long-range rockets was perceived as a cardinal threat to Israel’s densely populated areas and was consequently destroyed by Israeli air raids during the very early stages of the war. 6 Second, Hezbollah’s rearmament in areas further north enabled it to circumvent the suspicious eyes of the UN Interim Force in the southern part of the country. 7 As a result, Hezbollah’s military capabilities have continued to grow also quantitatively, and the number of projectiles it now possesses most probably exceeds that prior to the war. 8 On top of that, in a project encapsulated in the term “Jihad al-Bina,” the “Holy Struggle Construction Foundation,” Hezbollah managed to summon even more financial means originating from Tehran to ramp up recovery efforts and the group’s esteem among the Lebanese public. 9

1b) Modus Operandi: Adherence to Asymmetric Deterrence In sum, the essential point to be made here is based on the realization that the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah is the

6- Anthony H. Cordesman, Arab-Israeli Military Forces in an Era of Asymmetric Wars (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008), 4–7. 7- Howard Schneider, “Hezbollah’s Relocation of Rocket Sites to Lebanon’s Interior Poses Wider Threat,” Washington Post, January 23, 2010, http://goo.gl/z7ZqJu. 8- “Hezbollah Reportedly Stockpiling 40,000 Rockets,” Haaretz, August 5, 2009. 9- Matthew Levitt, “What is Hizbullah? Domestic Aspects and International

19, 2014), http://goo.gl/i8MdVl. Influence” (Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Washington, DC, August

13 14 No. 7 January 2016

result of a fundamental strategic rivalry unfolding alongside its broader spatial, positional, and ideological dimensions. 10 The rivalry is spatial in the sense that Israel’s de facto fifteen-year occupation of southern Lebanon from 1985 to 2000 and the ongoing disputes as to the territorial status of the Golan Heights and the Sheba’a Farms remain unresolved and touch other countries’ geopolitical and territorial aspirations, too. 11

The Sheba´a Farms: geopolitical sticking point at the Israel-Lebanon-Syria tri-border area.

It is positional because for more than three decades both parties have not only tried to leverage the Lebanese political mosaic in

10- Michael Colaresi, Karen Rasler, and William R. Thompson, Strategic Rivalries in World Politics: Position, Space, and Conflict Escalation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 79, 80; see table 3.3, Types of strategic rivalry. 11- See Asher Kaufman, Contested Frontiers in the Syria-Lebanon-Israel Region: Cartography, Sovereignty, and Conflict (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013). their own favor but also sought to magnify their relative share of influence in the surrounding regional subsystem, even as both parties are exposed and prone to their respective allies’ interests. As for the ideological dimension, Israel’s and Hezbollah’s fundamental values and norms and their political, societal, and religious bonds are evidence of their divergence along adversarial lines. 12 Crucially, these three types of rivalry are by no means mutually exclusive. Rather, they gravitate toward one another and raise the threshold for conflict settlement exponentially. For instance, territorial concessions seem to be easier to achieve than compromises that concede positional shares of influence. To that end, protracted rivalries tend to stalemate even further given ideologically motivated mistrust and threat. In such an environment of normative hostility and entrenched animus anything that would come close to a political rapprochement seems rather improbable. Therefore, the absence of unbearable levels of violence like those seen in 2006 does not necessarily point to an end to the conflict. Its root causes have not changed or been settled; its perception has. 13 As a matter of fact, during the escalation of the tension accumulated in the course of 2006, Hezbollah’s sense that the newly formed Israeli government was too weak prompted it to continue playing its part to provoke the low-level war of attrition that existed in the

12- See “Open Letter Addressed by Hizb Allah to the Downtrodden in Lebanon and in the World,” February 16, 1985, in Norton, Hezbollah, appendix B, 167–87, also available at http://goo.gl/qaIVDn. See also Joseph Alagha, Hizbullah’s Documents: From the 1985 Open Letter to the 2009 Manifesto (Amsterdam: Pallas, 2011). 13- Robert Jervis, “Deterrence and Perception,” International Security 7, no. 3 (1982): 3–30; Richard Jervis, Richard Ned Lebow, and Janice Gross Stein, Psychology and Deterrence (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986).

15 16 No. 7 January 2016

lead-up to summer 2006. This proved to be a fatal misperception when the Israeli government toppled the balance of power on its northern border and embarked on an unexpected escalation. The excessive output of kinetic firepower pointed at targets across Lebanon was intended as a reminder of what would happen in any similar future conflict: immediate, coercive punishment.

South Lebanon town Qana during the Second Lebanon War in 2006 ( Source: Mark Pearson).

For its part, Hezbollah communicated its own message by being remarkably resilient and absorbing heavy losses. Its endurance and ability to force its counterpart to eventually wage a ground incursion shifted the narrative of the war further toward psychological dimensions. On the one hand, it reminded the Israeli Defense Forces of the consequences of military adventurism dating back to 1982: the events triggered by Israel’s incursion into Lebanon were meant to serve as a clear harbinger. On the other hand, Hezbollah’s armed opposition throughout the thirty-four-day war in 2006 also proved almost unbearable for the perception of Israel abroad as its conduct of the prolonged war had been associated internationally as means of collective punishment and unproportionate response. Against this backdrop, the rivalry dyad seemed to undergo a phase of unprecedented violence before eventually finding a new middle ground. Since 2006 this stalemate has taken the form of a relatively tempered relationship of mutually established deterrence. It is grounded on tacit, reciprocal consent, based on silent acknowledgment that both sides possess the means to inflict unbearable costs in the case of a new escalation. This sort of balance in the form of a capability standoff is the result of an overstretch on the part of Hezbollah of the balance of terror that existed prior to the war. At the end of the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon in 2000, Hezbollah immediately embarked on a new tactic of challenging Israel by firing thousands of rockets at it. Such constant harassing had triggered two major Israeli operations in Lebanon in the past, “Accountability” in 1993 and “Grapes of Wrath” in 1996, both of which Hezbollah survived. Paradoxically, however, the decrease in hostilities during a period of skirmishes from 2000 to 2006 also played into the hands of Hezbollah. Since the Israeli withdrawal in 2000 brought major spatial and positional changes, one might have assumed that Israel would have openly considered a dramatic retaliatory blow in the constant low- level fighting around the Sheba’a Farms. But it did not live up to this expectation and missed that window of opportunity. Instead, Israel engaged yet again in a tit-for-tat strategy against what it considered a terrorist organization. The latter therefore took advantage of Israel’s poorly conceived denial capability at that particular time and continued its resistance. It did so in a determined fashion and with a motivation that was nourished

17 18 No. 7 January 2016

by its ideological incongruity with the enemy. Supporting this reading of the intensifying rivalry, Israel eventually saw it as necessary to deviate sharply from its prior containment policy. Israel’s reaction was also shaped by normative considerations, through which the sudden commitment to punish emerged as a necessary remedy against Hezbollah. Such a stance is also laid out in the final report of the Winograd Commission, an official Israeli government inquiry into the conduct and shortcomings of the operations during the 2006 Lebanon War. 14 Israel was thus unapologetically determined to go out on a limb in order to alter the established setting on its northern border. Its swift and disproportionate punishment was intended to send out an unequivocal signal in order to close the gap that Hezbollah tried to exploit by operating outside national and international accountability. In that light, Israel may have deliberately rejected any constraints on its actions in order to, first, remind the Lebanese government of its obligation to maintain its territorial integrity and, second, undermine Hezbollah’s grip on the Lebanese public, which was forced to bear the brunt of Israel’s military engagement. This engagement was intended as a signal to extort concessions from Hezbollah by challenging the manner in which the latter had framed its previous relentless taunting of Israel, which Nasrallah described in 2000 as a weak “spider’s web.” 15 Furthermore, the Israeli determination to change the rules of the game also reflected Hezbollah’s increasing influence on Hamas in the context of the abduction of Israeli soldier Gilad Schalit in 2006, as well as the rumors of Hezbollah being on the

14- See the Winograd Commission’s final report, released January 30, 2008, clauses 37, 38, and 39, available via the Council on Foreign Relations. 15- Norton, Hezbollah, 133. Hezbollah military entrenchment in the south of Lebanon (Source: The Washington Post). brink of achieving “first-strike” capabilities. In effect, the dyad’s relationship had become far less predictable, thus increasing the risk of escalation. Given this image of summer 2006 as the herald of further erosion and miscalculations, it is not surprising that Hezbollah accused Israel of exploiting the cross-border raid as a convenient pretext for launching a military incursion. 16

16- Ibid., 154.

19 20 No. 7 January 2016

The prevailing quiet after the second Lebanon War seems to affirm the existence of a changed environment in which the rivalry dyad of Israel and Hezbollah now operates. The resettled threshold of escalation is marked by newly arranged behavioral standards and demonstrates altered perceptions. This becomes apparent when we consider the alleged Israeli intelligence operation in Damascus in 2008 to which the abovementioned leading Hezbollah figure Imad Mughniyeh fell victim. 17 Not surprisingly, the rhetorical reaction of Hezbollah was to promise retributive action. As a matter of fact, however, Hezbollah’s subsequent failure to take any actual retaliatory steps can be seen as a deliberate move toward the perpetuation of a cautious and tacit bargaining relationship, eventually contributing to restraint rather than triggering detrimental escalation. Additionally, such cautiousness also entails the mutual realization of a capability standoff. On the one hand, Hezbollah came to realize that Israel was now determined to renounce restraint in delivering punishment—something it had not dared to do in the years before 2006. The unexpected Israeli willingness to use disproportionate force thus placed a burden on Hezbollah, with consequences that might reoccur in the case of any escalation in the future. On the other hand, Hezbollah’s own denial capability in absorbing losses and inflicting pain on its adversary’s home front represents a significant burden for Israel, too. The fact that the postwar landscape is characterized by relative quietude along the shared border explains the rapprochement between the two sides in terms of their perceptions and calculations: neither side wishes to undermine the strategic equation, since any maneuvering in the direction of another round of escalation would trigger intolerable violence and

17- Roi Kais, “Lebanese Probe: How Mughniyeh Was Assassinated,” Ynetnews, February 19, 2013, http://goo.gl/Xjt62n. possibly unbearable costs and, equally importantly, bring back the unavoidable image of ingrained lethality to both sides.

2a) Strategic Adaptation: Interference and Commitment in Syria As a symbolic sequel to Lebanon’s 2005 Cedar Revolution, which brought the ruling coalition of the big-tent March 8 alliance to prominence from summer 2011 until spring 2013, one of Prime Minister Najib Mikati’s first official statements included the announcement that Lebanese land still suffered under Israeli occupation and must be liberated. As an apparent side effect of the Syrian presence in Lebanon, tensions between pro- and anti-Assad factions in Lebanon continued to flare up against the background of the ongoing civil war in Syria. Illustrating yet again the intertwined courses of the two neighboring countries, the violence that broke out on Syrian soil repeatedly showed potential to plunge Lebanon, too, back into unrest.

Supporters of Bashar al-Assad and Hezbollah waive flags in Beirut (Source: Bilal Hussein, Associated Press).

21 22 No. 7 January 2016

In 2013 the country had to cope with three major bomb attacks, causing more than one hundred casualties and injuring further hundreds. These bombings included an attack against the Iranian embassy in the south of Beirut on November 19, 2013. The attacks hit Shi’ite and Sunni targets alternately, sparking further fears of vengeful action. Unlike the attacks that had previously occurred in Tripoli on August 23 and in a Hezbollah stronghold in southern Beirut on August 15, the bomb attack on the Iranian embassy showed no sign of the use of remote-controlled bomb devices but rather held the signature of two suicide bombers. Indeed, the Jihadi Abdullah Azzam Brigades took responsibility for the attack and heralded further attacks if Iran were not to pull out of the conflict in Syria. Since then, partisans of the radical Sunni sheikh Ahmed al-Assir, who was persecuted by the Lebanese army, have called on the Sunni Lebanese to support their brothers in their struggle on Syrian soil. The deliberately stoked ethnic resentments suggest a kind of “blood guilt” that radical Lebanese Sunnis have yet to settle with the Shi’ite Hezbollah. The latter, in return, makes no secret of the fact that it is supporting the troops of Bashar al- Assad with its own fighters. Nasrallah’s public vow of fidelity to Assad took place only a few days after a visit to Tehran in April 2013. 18 Nasrallah justified the deployment of his troops across the border by claiming that Hezbollah was to fight solely Sunni extremists, who otherwise would threaten Lebanon’s Shi’ites and Christians alike. In addition, Assad’s Syria was to continue to be an important ally in resisting Israel. Obviously, the main reason for Nasrallah’s support went unstated: besides Tehran, Damascus under the

18- “Nasrallah Met Khamenei in Iran, to Make Speech May 9,” Daily Star (Leba- non), April 22, 2013, http://goo.gl/TbxFB2. Assad regime still counts among the most important supporters of Hezbollah. If the Syrian regime were to fall, Hezbollah’s strategic foothold in Lebanon would be significantly weakened. Conversely, the involvement of Hezbollah’s troops in Syria is equally vital to Assad in fighting the increasing spectrum of anti-regime forces. In a broader strategic context, the retention of power by Assad would have a stark regional impact: the supply of weapons from Iran across Syria into southern Lebanon close to the Israeli border would further bolster the importance of a considerable Shi’ite axis, stretching from Tehran over Baghdad and Damascus into the southernmost corners of Lebanon. Adding to the growing sectarian tensions along the often barely marked, 365 km long Lebanese-Syrian border, fighters of various factions are already commuting more or less freely in both directions, and border villages and towns get bombarded or hit by missiles from Syria. Since the devastating double attack on two Sunni mosques in Tripoli in August 2013, with fifty killed and more than five hundred injured, domestic Lebanese tensions have increased further, especially after the Lebanese judiciary issued several arrest warrants in the case, including one against the chairman of the pro-Assad Arab Democratic Party, the Alawite Ali Eid. Eid is said to have helped Syrian intelligence in the preparation for the attack, which lends support to the widespread assumption that Assad still has recourse to a well- entrenched network in the neighboring state. Conversely, it is hardly possible to push forward in attempts to demilitarize the entirety of Lebanon’s non-state armed groups, at the very least as long as Hezbollah continues to rely on weapons in its effort to maintain the resistance against Israel.

23 24 No. 7 January 2016

2b) Modus Operandi: Maintaining Strategic Depth for the International Pro- Shi’ite, Assad Loyalist Camp – the Theaters of Al-Zabadani and Al-Qusayr The Battles of Al-Zabadani (2012, 2015) Over the last four years, the Syrian town of Al-Zabadani— prominently nestled in the mountains, surrounded by a fertile valley, and located in close vicinity to the border with Lebanon—has repeatedly been the setting of fierce fighting between fighters of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) and forces of the Syrian Arab Army (SAA). From a strategic perspective, not only was the city the first to fall for the most part under the control of FSA in early January 2012, but it also caused a great stir when initial news emerged that Hezbollah fighters were actively involved in helping government troops regain control of the city, which they ultimately accomplished in mid- February 2012. Since then, Al-Zabadani has continued to sustain damage as it has been affected by resurfacing Syrian rebel activities as well as pro-government operations. Certainly the most critical recurrence of urban clashes took place in July 2015. By this time, however, the reality across the battlefield of Al-Zabadani district had fundamentally changed from the situation three and a half years prior. First, the spectrum of splinter groups operating on the ground had increased dramatically. While the FSA represented a comparatively cohesive bloc operating around Al-Zabadani in the earlier stages of the conflict, by 2015 Islamist fighters belonging to groups such as Syria’s Al-Qaeda offshoot Jabhat al-Nusra, Ahrar al-Sham, Jaysh al-Islam, Islamic Front, and ISIL had become entrenched within Al-Zabadani district as well as across the Qalamoun Mountains, which mark the nearby Syrian-Lebanese border area. The actual sequence of events during the so-called battle of Al-Zabadani in summer 2015 can therefore be seen as a distinct, yet logical consequence of Hezbollah’s operational approach in the months prior to the main military offensive to capture Al-Zabadani. In May and June 2015, Hezbollah had been waging a considerable offensive along the Qalamoun, as all factions involved realized the importance of the mountain range—it provided an elevated retreat, shelter, and a tactical lookout from which to wage future assaults. On the one hand, Hezbollah’s operations were aimed at containing the spillover of antiregime fighters and various Islamist factions into Lebanese territory as well as curtailing the considerable flow of logistical support, weaponry, and reinforcements into the mountains. On the other hand, from the Shi’ite militia’s viewpoint, the recapture of Al-Zabadani, which took place on July 3, 2015, was a logical step in a broader attempt to connect the dots in securing a pro- Assad sphere of influence ranging from Damascus over the slopes of the Qalamoun to Lebanon’s eastern border. By early September 2015, Hezbollah fighters and troops of the Syrian Arab Army were able to disperse opposing forces and to secure the city center of Al-Zabadani as well as surrounding districts. Although a ceasefire between the Syrian opposition and government forces brokered by Turkey and Iran and backed by the UN effectively tempered ongoing clashes and put a halt to the violence, it also allowed Hezbollah to divert the focus of its attention to attack remaining hotbeds of armed opposed Islamist factions in other areas along the Lebanon- Syria border. On the same token, the outcome of the offensive paved the way for a well-calibrated media campaign whose aim was to show that the regime and its allies were still capable of dictating the course of events on their own terms. Less openly, however, the increasing burden carried equally by the two allies displayed the indispensability of Hezbollah fighters in bolstering the regime’s foothold in southwestern Syria.

25 26 No. 7 January 2016

Activities of Hezbollah´s military wing on Syrian soil. The Battle of Al-Qusayr (2013) Nasrallah’s already mentioned pledge of allegiance to Assad in spring 2013 was certainly not mere lip service to the Assad regime. Quite the contrary: Nasrallah turned rhetoric into action when Hezbollah fighters finally stepped to the fore as an official faction engaged in Syria. To be sure, the militia had already been decisively engaged throughout 2012, beginning soon after the outbreak of the civil war. However, during that period, its efforts had predominantly been of a clandestine nature. The battle of Al- Qusayr that erupted in early April 2013 thus served as a litmus test of Hezbollah’s resilience in the Syrian battlefield, and it provides relevant insights into the subsequent military steps taken by the Lebanese Shi’ite militia until today. From a strategic angle, Al-Qusayr sits in the immediate vicinity of the crossroads of the Syrian motorway no. 5, which links Damascus via Homs to the northwestern governorates of Latakia and Tartus, and Highway 4 to Baalbek, Lebanon. As the latter also cuts through Lebanon’s Beqa’a Valley, the fertile land from which Hezbollah emerged in the early ’80s, Al-Qusayr’s strategic weight is apparent: just as Al-Zabadani marks Syria’s and Lebanon’s interconnectedness in the south, control over Al-Qusayr is tantamount to maintaining the link to the Beqa’a Valley as well as controlling the stretch of land extending north into the Mediterranean coastal governorates that constitute the Alawite heartland. In practice, Assad’s regime resorted to a blend of regular forces fighting alongside the ground troops of Hezbollah. The forces reportedly included considerable elements of the 3rd and 4th divisions 19 and the mechanized infantry unit of the Syrian Republican Guard in order to escalate the struggle against the rebels. The fierce siege of Al-Qusayr lasted two and a half weeks. Government and Hezbollah fighters advanced decisively toward the center of the city in the beginning of June 2013, despite ongoing resistance from various rebel brigades, including members of the Farouq Brigades and the Qassioun Battalion. Fighters of Jabhat al-Nusra were also reportedly entrenched in the battlefield, although their contribution in terms of sheer numbers and tactical importance has by and large been exaggerated by the media. 20 Ultimately, pro-government forces handed the rebels a heavy defeat when they forced the latter to withdraw from the city on the eve of June 5, 2013. The testimony of a Syrian rebel colonel, Abduljabbar al-Oqaidi, about his experience in Al-Qusayr speaks volumes: “The

19- Jeffrey White, “The Qusayr Rules: The Syrian Regime’s Changing Way of War” (Policywatch 2082, Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Washington, DC, May 31, 2013), http://goo.gl/pTHpwQ. 20- “Syria Update: The Fall of Al-Qusayr” (Institute for the Study of War, Washington, DC, June 6, 2013), http://goo.gl/2f9t0b.

27 28 No. 7 January 2016

firepower was overwhelming. I never saw such a thing in my life,” 21 he said, referring to the force used by the governmental forces both by air and with Hezbollah pushing relentlessly on the ground. The decisive victory achieved in Al-Qusayr provides further insight into the strategy pursued by Hezbollah. Its paramilitary units certainly tactically exploited the fact that the hinterland between Al-Qusayr and the Lebanese border is home to a large part of Syria’s Shi’ite community. In these areas, Hezbollah proved to be professional in creating a widespread system of sophisticated, agile pockets of defense serving as shelter and storage facilities. In similar fashion, it exploited the topographical situation of that strip of land: the hilly and densely wooded landscape was crucial for the performance of Hezbollah’s guerrilla squads. It enabled them to operate covertly and to camouflage a vast array of command posts. Drawing on more than twenty years of experience in low-intensity warfare against Israel in its natural habitat, southern Lebanon, Hezbollah managed to blend the methods of warfare exemplified by “the polar extremes of the Maginot Line and the Viet Cong.” 22 As such, it had access to weaponry meant to be available exclusively to regular armies under the auspices of state actors, 23 and given its proxy character it was able to capitalize on the expertise of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards and Syrian advisors on the command-and-control

21- Richard Spencer, “Syria: Rebels Heed Lesson of Qusayr to Drive Back Assad Forces in Aleppo,” Telegraph, June 23, 2013, http://goo.gl/rnJuf6. 22- Jeffrey A. Friedman and Stephen Biddle, The 2006 Lebanon Campaign and the Future of Warfare: Implications for Army and Defense Policy (Carlisle, PA: Strategic Studies Institute, 2008), 14. 23- Benny Gantz, “Only a Handful of States Have More Firepower than Hezbol- lah,” Jerusalem Post, June 9, 2014, http://goo.gl/Y95poa. level, 24 which had beneficial effects on discipline, hierarchical structure, technology, and concealment through diversionary counterintelligence operations. 25 It also had at its disposal complex irregular, guerrilla-tactical elements. It internalized the art of blending into built-up civilian areas and concealing its operating squads and equipment among such facilities, which was useful in creating spaces to hide and disperse. As a result, it lowered the threshold of direct vulnerability in the field.

Hezbollah´s efforts to bolster the Alawite heartland ( Source: Institute for United Conflict Analysis).

24- Cordesman, Arab-Israeli Military Forces, 262. 25- Mark Perry and Alastair Crooke, “How Hezbollah Defeated Israel: Winning the Intelligence War,” Asia Times, October 12, 2006, http://goo.gl/epI9eE.

29 30 No. 7 January 2016

In retrospect, the battles in Al-Zabadani and Al-Qusayr are evidence of the importance of Hezbollah in securing geographical pivots for the survival of the Syrian regime. By gaining control over these strategic gatekeepers on the Lebanese-Syrian border, Hezbollah secured a position from which to pull the strings in maintaining supply lines from Iran and Syria to Hezbollah’s strongholds in Lebanon. In addition, in the grand scheme of things, Hezbollah’s successful attempts in 2012 and 2015 to alleviate the mounting disarray in Homs governorate and across the Qalamoun area accounted for a wider strategy that the Syrian regime and its supporting proxy adamantly pursue: first, maintaining strategic depth by securing vital transit routes connecting the Syrian capital of Damascus with its strategic backyard in Lebanon, and second, improving resilience—provided by Hezbollah—in order to maintain control over territory linking the Alawite coastal regions in the north with the southwestern sphere of influence along the Lebanese border.

Outlook The ongoing war in Syria that has spilled over into Lebanon reveals a distinct fact: Hezbollah is busy. In the event of another escalation with Israel, it may be forced to engage on two front lines. First, such dual engagement would divert and overstretch its capabilities significantly. Secondly, an Israeli military campaign of a scope comparable to that experienced in summer 2006 would push Lebanon most probably to the brink of collapse. In his speech in May 2013, Nasrallah said that the Syrian opposition was anything but “a popular revolution against a political regime.” Rather, Assad’s opponents were either henchmen of America or the long arm of al-Qaeda, driven solely by the aim of contributing to the realization of “the Israeli project” in the region. Hence, from Hezbollah’s standpoint, its intervention in Syria was not only logically consistent but essential. Nasrallah has hereby embarked on a dangerous path. Celebrated across the region for his achievements in forcing Israel to withdraw from southern Lebanon in 2000 and resisting Israel’s military incursion in 2006, he has added further detrimental effects to the turmoil in the region and placed the militia itself in a tenuous position with its open intervention in Syria since 2013. As such, its entanglement in the Levant is by no means just about the achievement of strategic ends. It is also about Hezbollah’s own survival. Its armed wing has gone to great lengths and sustained heavy losses on the Syrian battlefield. The emerging reports of the Shi’ite group’s efforts to rally support through a recruitment initiative within south Lebanon’s Shi’ite community thus comes hardly as a surprise. It appears that the diversion of its troops across Syrian territory has put considerable strain on its infantry capabilities, with sources confirming that one thousand Hezbollah fighters have been killed since the organization stepped up its role in Syria. Among the casualties are a growing number of senior officials. According to one report, for example, “Hassan Hussein al-Haj, a top Hezbollah commander, was killed in October 2015 while fighting in Idlib province. His replacement, Mahdi Hassan Obeid, was killed there hours after al-Haj was buried in his south Lebanon hometown.” 26 Fawzi Ayoub, a dual Lebanese-Canadian citizen

26- “AP: Suffering Heavy Losses in Syria, Hezbollah Entices New Recruits with Money and Perks”, Haaretz, December 19, 2015. http://goo.gl/hW1Kkd.

31 32 No. 7 January 2016

and another veteran among Hezbollah’s experienced military commanders, fell to the Free Syrian Army in May 2014 in the ongoing battle of Aleppo in Syria’s northwest. The same fate awaited Jamil Hussein Faqih, Hezbollah’s top field commander in charge of military operations in the Shi’ite enclave of Idlib province, when he was killed in action in July 2015. Hassan al-Laqis, a commander who was involved in overseeing the militia’s attack on Al-Qusayr in summer 2013, was killed in December of the same year close to his home in Beirut. The abovementioned killings of Samir Quntar on December 19, 2015, on the outskirts of Damascus and Jihad Mughniyeh, Hezbollah’s Syrian Golan Heights commander, along with Mohammed Ali Allahdadi, the senior Iranian general of the Revolutionary Guards Corps Quds Force, on January 12, 2015, in another alleged Israeli airstrike add up to a growing list of significant losses hard to stomach for Hezbollah. All of this demonstrates that Hezbollah’s major struggles carry an intrinsically intertwined character: its domestic constituencies expect it to maintain a credible posture of asymmetric deterrence vis-à-vis Israel in southern Lebanon. To that end, Hezbollah eventually retaliated by setting off a bomb on January 4, 2016, targeting Israeli armored vehicles in close vicinity of the contested Sheba’a Farms. However, although it could still draw on a vast rocket arsenal for this purpose, it seems unlikely that Hezbollah could weather another round of escalation. Contravention of the rules of the deterrence bargain painfully established in summer 2006 would be unwise, since Hezbollah’s political and military leverage is restricted given its sacrifices on its eastern front: in Syria it is waging an all-out war against a growing number of anti-regime forces. Consequently, Hezbollah can be expected to continue to adhere to a well-calculated tacit stalemate on its southern front, even if its public statements over the past nine years suggest otherwise. At the same time, its presence in Syria is also likely to survive, as the Russian involvement since September 2015 has triggered a gain in momentum for the entirety of the Assad loyalist camp. It is safe to say that in the not-too-distant future Hezbollah has to live up to expectations dictated not just from Tehran and Damascus, but also from Moscow. As such, it will most probably continue to be a key player in sharing the military burden and achieving the alliance’s ends on Syrian turf. Whether Israel, currently sitting relatively tight, will eventually unleash draconian military action on the militia in light of the currently lower deterrence threshold given a presumably weakened Hezbollah and whether Hezbollah might eventually surface as an actor in a future partitioned Syria remains to be seen. Both are plausible possibilities that will determine the future of the military wing, political party, and welfare provider that make up Hezbollah. At the very least, the complexity of the challenge it faces in stemming the tide on both the southern and the eastern front underlines the inherent duality of Hezbollah’s position on the slippery slope between doctrinal resistance on the one hand and strategic adaptation in the Syrian theater on the other.

33 34 No. 7 January 2016

The Author

Sebastian Maier is a Research Fellow in the unit on Contemporary Political Thought at the King Faisal Center for Research and Islamic Studies. He received a bachelor’s degree in Political Science and Law in 2013 from both the University of Munich and the Institut d’études politiques de Paris (SciencesPo Paris). He earned his master’s degree in Intelligence and International Security in 2014 from the Department of War Studies at King’s College, University of London. Prior to joining the Contemporary Political Thought Unit at KFCRIS, he worked as a trainee at the Canadian embassy in Germany, as well as a Consultant for the German- Saudi Liaison Office for Economic Affairs in Riyadh. He has been living in Saudi Arabia since February 2015. His work focuses on the Syrian conflict and the involvement of Russia, Iran, and Hezbollah in Syria.

King Faisal Center for Research and Islamic Studies (KFCRIS)

Founded in 1983 in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, the mission of King Faisal Center for Research and Islamic Studies is to be a beacon for humanity as envisioned by the late King Faisal bin Abdulaziz. The Center aims to accomplish this through conducting research and studies that stimulate cultural and scientific activities for the service of mankind, enrich cultural and intellectual life in Saudi Arabia, and facilitate collaboration with the East and the West. The Center’s activities include lectures, seminars, conferences, and roundtable discussions. It houses the King Faisal Library, collections of rare manuscripts, an Islamic art museum, and the King Faisal Museum. It also administers a robust Visiting Fellow Program. Since the Center’s focus is scholarly research, the Research Department was restructured in 2013 to carry out in-depth analysis in contemporary political thought, Saudi studies, regional studies, Arabic language studies, and modernity studies. The Center has also been collaborating with various research centers around the world within its scope of research. The Chairman of the KFCRIS Board is HRH Prince Turki Al-Faisal bin Abdulaziz, and the Secretary General is Prof. Yahya bin Junaid.

P.O.Box 51049 Riyadh 11543 Kingdom of Saudi Arabia Tel: (+966 11) 4652255 Ext: 6892 Fax: (+966 11) 4162281 E-mail: [email protected]