Hizbullah / Hezbollah (just the group)

[SWJED]

Moderator's Note

This thread has steadily acquired smaller threads, six today and concerns the group's activities. Hezbollah appears in the title of several threads and in a large number of threads on other subjects (ends).


22 July New York Times - In 1990’s, Shadows Waged War by John Kifner.

The Hezbollah guerrilla campaign that ended Israel’s 18-year occupation of southern Lebanon in 2000 was in many ways a precursor to the kind of asymmetrical warfare American troops are facing in Iraq — and Israeli troops would face again if they entered Lebanon in large numbers.

Suicide bombers, roadside explosives and ambushes were the weapons the shadowy force that called itself the resistance used to drive out a superior conventional army.

“By limiting the firing, we were able to keep the cards in our hands,” said Sheik Nabil Qaouk, then and now the Hezbollah commander in the south, in a rare interview six years ago, shortly after the Israeli withdrawal.

“We were able to do small, little battles where we had the advantage,” the sheik, a Shiite imam who is also referred to as a general, said at the time in Tyre, Lebanon.

Now, as Israel contemplates the possibility of another land invasion of Lebanon, its commando reconnaissance teams are meeting stiff fighting as they discover that Hezbollah has spent much of the past six years constructing networks of fortified bunkers and tunnels and amassing stores of thousands of rockets.

And while the Palestinians whom Israel is battling in the Gaza Strip have only light weapons and homemade rockets, Hezbollah is equipped with up-to-date weaponry like laser-guided missiles, much of it supplied by Iran.

In the earlier battles in southern Lebanon, Hezbollah used innovations like roadside bombs made of fake plastic rocks, which could be bought in Beirut garden stores for $15.

To confuse Israel’s motion sensors, they would run farm animals across areas monitored by the devices.

A Soviet tank that was hidden in a cave and never driven, and thus did not show up on heat sensors, took the Israelis months to find, the sheik said.

A turning point was the ambush, in the summer of 1997, of a raid by elite Israeli naval commandos — some of Israel’s toughest troops — in which a dozen were killed. Then Hezbollah put out word that it had an informer, deterring further Israeli counterinsurgency operations.

The effect was to drive the Israelis into fixed, fortified positions, conceding land and initiative to Hezbollah...