Hezbollah grassroots stand firm in onslaught

Juwaya, Lebanon: There were no cars in the winding streets of this southern Lebanese village.

Not many people, either. The signs of life were the buzz of Israeli surveillance drones overhead and, below, a gaggle of Hezbollah loyalists, sitting in a small storefront, along an abandoned street.

There was a walkie talkie, bottles of water and, according to the half-dozen or so men, patience.

"We are waiting," said Jamal Nasser, a burly man in civilian clothes. "We are here, and we're not going anywhere."

Three weeks into its war with Israel, Hezbollah has retained its presence in southern Lebanon, often the sole authority in devastated towns along the Israeli border.

Elusive

The militia is elusive, with few logistics, little hierarchy and less visibility. Often even residents say they don't know how they operate or are organised. Communication is by walkie talkies, always in code, and sometimes messages are delivered by motorcycle. Weapons seem to be already in place across a terrain that fighters say they know intimately.

"On the ground, face to face, we're better fighters than the Israelis," said Hajj Abu Mohammad, 44, a bearded militiaman in the village of Srifa, whose walkie talkie crackled and cell phone rang with a Hezbollah anthem.

The group admits to having suffered losses, but in the fighting so far, it has demonstrated its detailed planning since the Israeli withdrawal from southern Lebanon in 2000, ending its 18-year occupation. Fighters appear to exercise a great deal of autonomy, a flexibility evident along the region's back roads: ammunition loaded in cars, trucks in camouflage, rocket launchers tucked in banana plantations.

Advantage

Analysts say the militia could probably hold out a month, without serious resupply. Fighters and supporters suggest that time is their advantage in a war that most suspect won't have a conclusive end. In conversations in southern Lebanon, its supporters seem most adamant in trying to deprive either Israel or the United States political gains from the military campaign.

"We'll never submit to oppression, whatever the force applied, whatever the time it takes," one of the group gathered in Juwaya said on Tuesday. "You won't find any difference between 21 days and 121 days. The difference is solely a matter of time."

Village after village south of the Litani River, the region of Lebanon that Israel has threatened to invade, are like ghost towns. Traffic rarely plies roads that pass often spectacular destruction, rubble spilling into sun-drenched streets.

In Sidiqin, the wall of a home was sheared off to show a table still set with dishes, as if the family fled in a moment. In Srifa, where villagers say 35 bodies remain buried under rubble from a bombing in the war's first week, the wiry Abu Mohammad was one of the few people left.

"We're in a defensive position," he said.

The smell of decomposing bodies hung in the air. Overhead were the contrails of Israeli jets. "There will still be a lot of big surprises," he said.

Hezbollah appears to have hewn to a twofold strategy so far in the war.

Strategically, it has calibrated the barrages of its short- and long-range rockets, trying to match what it views as each Israeli escalation with its own response.

In a relative lull in fighting on Monday and Tuesday, when Israel suggested it would halt air attacks for a time, only a few rockets were fired into Israel. As it renewed its offensive on Wednesday in a string of villages, Hezbollah fired the most missiles of the war.

On the ground, its fighters appear eager to draw Israel deeper into the country, stretching supply lines, or see them hunkered down in villages where they would be more vulnerable to the guerrilla-style attacks that Hezbollah used in Bint Jbeil, where eight Israeli soldiers were killed in an ambush.

Often there is little infrastructure to destroy among fighters who fade into the villages they hail from.

Among the fighters and grass-roots loyalists of Hezbollah, especially on the ground level, in villages where they are often defending their homes, views are hardened and expressed bluntly.

The men in Juwaya, in the hinterland above Tyre, gathered around a small plastic table. They deferred to an older man they addressed as Sayyid Abu Ali. Cars passed by occasionally, where a few terse words were exchanged. The rest of the time conversation revolved around their confidence over a war that, at least for now, Hezbollah believes it is winning.

While the war outside may have inflated the rhetoric, no one seemed to have any doubts.

"The aggression gives birth to resistance," Abu Ali said.

Another man nodded. "Every civilian killed, his children, when they get older, will join the resistance," he said.