Warriors of God Read Free

movies in cinemas. Even some Israeli tourists and businessmen had come to admire the sights and explore possible commercial opportunities in the newly pacified region. The Shias of southern Lebanon had greeted the invading Israeli troops with handfuls of rice and cheers, thankful that the detested Palestinians had been forced out. The Israelis had basked in the goodwill.
    But it soon became evident that the Israelis were in no hurry to leave. Temporary military positions were reinforced and began to take on alook of permanence. Gradually, the smiles of the southerners at their Israeli “liberators” grew less frequent.
    One morning, the general had met a local Lebanese and heard some advice—and a warning that would stay with him for almost three decades.
    â€œThank you for kicking out the PLO, but go home quickly,” the Lebanese man had told him. “If you stay, two things will happen. First, we will corrupt you because we know how to corrupt foreign invading armies. Second, we will create a guerrilla movement that will make you miss the Palestinians. Please, go home quickly.”
    The pen jerked rapidly across the yellow sheet as the general continued to write.
    After that brief lull in late summer 1982, it had all started to go wrong. A local Shia resistance emerged in the villages around Tyre and steadily intensified. By 1985, the Israeli army had pulled back to a border strip and was facing a newly ferocious enemy of grim, bearded Shia militants who took their lead from Iran’s Islamic revolutionaries and sought inspiration from the martyrdom of the sect’s founders 1,400 years earlier. By the mid-1990s, Israel was fighting a losing battle against these determined guerrillas, and finally withdrew from Lebanon in 2000. But the conflict continued to simmer; in 2006 it exploded into a brutal monthlong war.
    Even as the general was writing his letter, these two bitter foes were making preparations for another encounter that promised to be even more destructive than the last.
    The general finished his letter and began to sign his name at the bottom, before scribbling it out and writing instead his old Arabic nom de guerre. He folded the sheet three times and inserted his business card into the crease.
    Later, in south Lebanon, the recipient of the general’s letter unfolded the yellow sheet and read, his eyes darting across the handwritten lines. He smiled thoughtfully.
    â€œHe should have listened to me back in 1982,” he said, handing over the note.
    The letter was short and reflective in tone, but one sentence stood out, a simple but rueful acknowledgment.
    The general had written, “All your predictions were right.”

ONE
 
The “Sleeping Giant”
    The Lebanese Shia are as old as Lebanon itself. They have participated with the other communities in cultivating its plains and mountains, developing its land, and protecting its frontiers. The Shia have survived in Lebanon in prosperity and adversity. They have soaked its soil with the blood of their children, and have raised its banners of glory in its sky, for they have led most of the revolts
.
    â€”I MAM M USA S ADR
MARCH 17, 1974
    BAALBEK, Bekaa Valley —They had waited for hours, a noisy, tumultuous throng jamming the narrow streets of this ancient town sprawling across the flatlands of the northern Bekaa Valley. From all the Shia territories in Lebanon they had come. From the cramped cinder block homes in the squalid slums of southern Beirut, from the banana plantations and citrus orchards of Tyre on the Mediterranean coast, from the olive groves and tobacco fields set among the steep stony hills of Bint Jbeil and Nabatiyah in the south, from the dusty villages clinging to the arid mountain slopes flanking the northern Bekaa Valley. Some had traveled for more than a day, filling buses and shared taxis and private vehicles as they navigated over the mountains separating the Bekaa from the coast and then