Warriors of God by Nicholas Blanford

between the two young men. Originally from Nabi Sheet, a small village scattered over a barren mountainside in the eastern Bekaa, Mussawi was eight years Nasrallah’s senior and had been studying in Najaf with Baqr as-Sadr since 1970. On meeting Nasrallah, Baqr as-Sadr instructed Mussawi to take the Lebanese youngster under his wing and serve as his mentor and tutor.
    Nasrallah spent the next eighteen months immersed in studies alongside a handful of other students under the guidance of Mussawi, whom the future Hezbollah leader considered as “a father, an educator, a friend.”
    â€œUnder Sayyed Abbas, our group broke all routines, never took time off, and never rested, because Sayyed Abbas converted us into an active beehive and made us thirsty for learning,” Nasrallah said. 11
    But his studies were cut short in early 1978 when the Iraqi regime launched a crackdown on the Najaf seminaries, arresting and expelling Lebanese clerical students. Nasrallah slipped out of Iraq avoiding arrest and returned to Lebanon, where he enrolled in a new
hawza
established by Mussawi in Baalbek.
Territorial Integrity
    Nasrallah’s return to Lebanon in mid-1978 coincided with several pivotal developments that were to have a profound impact on Lebanon’s Shia community.
    On March 11, a dozen armed Fatah fighters infiltrated northern Israel by sea, hijacked a bus with its passengers, and embarked on a shooting spree along the highway toward Tel Aviv. By the time the fighting had ended, all but two of the Palestinians were dead, along with thirty-seven Israelis, twenty-five of whom burned to death when the Fatah fighters blew up the bus with hand grenades.
    The Israelis had been looking for an excuse to move into south Lebanon to drive out the PLO and consolidate Saad Haddad’s militia. Now they had one. On the night of March 14, the Israelis invaded south Lebanon, punching north along four main axes between the coastal road in the west and the mountainous Arkoub district in the east. The Israeli government said it had no intention of occupying the area, but General Mordechai Gur, the IDF chief of staff, said that the goal was to link up Haddad’s militia-controlled Christian enclaves and establish a “security belt” along the length of the border. The PLO had been expecting a major operation by the Israelis after the bus hijacking, but they underestimated the scale of the attack and were driven northward.
    On March 19, the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 425, which called for “strict respect” of Lebanon’s “territorial integrity, sovereignty and political independence” and demanded of Israel “immediately to cease its military action” against Lebanon and “withdraw forthwith its forces from all Lebanese territory.” It also agreed to establish a UN Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) to oversee the Israeli withdrawal and help the Lebanese government restore its authority over the area.
    The Israelis agreed to a cease-fire on March 21, by which time the IDF had occupied much of the area between the border and the Litani River. On May 22, Israel announced that it would withdraw its forces from Lebanon by June 13. But on the scheduled day of withdrawal, the departing Israelis handed over the border strip to its ally Saad Haddad rather than to UNIFIL, a move that simultaneously prevented the peacekeeping force from deploying along the border and fulfilled General Gur’s pledge to establish a “security zone” in the south.
    The Israelis refused to implement Resolution 425, and there was a lack of international will to force Israel to comply. The peacekeepers ofUNIFIL suddenly found themselves uncomfortably sandwiched between two enemies—Haddad’s militia to the south and the PLO factions to the north. As the stalemate hardened, the “Interim” of UNIFIL’s name soon became ironic; by 2011, the peacekeeping force was more than