BEIRUT: With cries of “Allahu Akbar,” militants from the Al-Qaeda-linked Nusra Front faction fired mortar rounds and machine guns as they overran a Hezbollah outpost in the barren mountains east of the Bekaa Valley village of Brital.
Moments later, a Nusra Front cameraman shakily filmed the interior of the compound, showing a small bunker of sandbags and rock-filled oil drums, a 14.5mm heavy machine gun and the bodies of at least four Hezbollah fighters.The seizure of the outpost located on a rocky bluff above Nabi Sbat was part of a coordinated attack on Oct. 5 by the Nusra Front against 10 Hezbollah compounds strung along the rugged limestone mountains near the border with Syria.
There was a certain irony to the Nusra Front’s videotaped assault on the Hezbollah compound. Twenty years ago, it was Hezbollah that was the mobile guerrilla force staging hit-and-run attacks against hilltop compounds. Back then, the defenders of the outposts were Israeli troops and their Lebanese allies, the South Lebanon Army, who manned positions across the south of bulldozed earth walls and dirt-packed oil drums, not dissimilar to those Hezbollah is today erecting across the rugged limestone mountains of east Lebanon.
Even the Nusra Front’s filming the attack is an homage to Hezbollah’s pioneering use of combat cameramen to further its propaganda war against the Israeli occupiers of south Lebanon. In the early 1990s, Hezbollah’s combat footage was filmed with clunky video cameras for later broadcast on Al-Manar. Today, it is a Nusra Front militant with a smart phone and an Internet connection to upload the results to YouTube.
Although Hezbollah quickly recaptured the outpost and successfully defended the other nine, the group reportedly lost eight combatants, underlining that the party’s intervention in Syria is exacting a high toll among the ranks of what is considered to be the most formidable nonstate armed actor in the world.
Hezbollah earned its reputation through three decades of fighting the Israeli army, successfully ousting Israeli troops from occupied south Lebanon in 2000, and then fighting them to a standstill in a monthlong war six years later.
Since Hezbollah intervened in Syria in earnest around two years ago to defend the regime of President Bashar Assad, the party is estimated to have lost several hundred fighters, perhaps close to 1,000, including veteran combatants and commanders. Hundreds more have been wounded.
By comparison, Hezbollah officially claims 1,284 “martyrs,” who died resisting Israel’s 18-year occupation of Lebanon between 1982 and 2000.
Obviously the scale and intensity of fighting is far greater in Syria than the battlefields of south Lebanon in the 1990s, when much of the daily combat involved relatively safe long-range mortar and rocket attacks against Israeli and SLA outposts. But Hezbollah also is facing a very different enemy to its traditional Israeli foe.
Since Hezbollah emerged in the wake of Israel’s 1982 invasion, its cadres have trained to fight a very specific enemy – Israel – in a very specific environment – the hills and valleys of south Lebanon.
Hezbollah became very good at developing a skill set that helped level the playing field to a certain extent against the most powerful military force in the Middle East. It built bunker and tunnel networks to stash weapons, launch ambushes and evade Israeli aerial power; it acquired advanced Russian anti-armor missiles for use against Israel’s Merkava tanks, anti-ship missiles to threaten Israeli naval assets, and, today, mid-range guided ballistic missiles that can strike designated targets as far south as Tel Aviv.
However, most of these tactics are of little use when confronted by lightly armed guerrilla fighters, some of whom have gained three years’ combat experience in the bloody Syrian theater, and who, like Hezbollah, also seek inspiration from the Quran.
As appears evident from the fighting in the barren mountains along the Lebanon-Syria border, Hezbollah and its Sunni militant foes are more evenly balanced.
“Hezbollah has a pickup truck with a heavy machine gun in the back. Well, guess what, [ISIS] also has a pickup truck with a machine gun in the back,” said a European diplomat in Beirut.
Hezbollah has been on a sharp learning curve the past two years as its cadres learn new skills in Syria, such as fighting in urban and rural environments and in territory with which it is unfamiliar. It has learned how to fight in larger combat units than was traditionally the case against Israeli troops, and alongside non-Hezbollah units, such as the Syrian army and the loyalist National Defense Forces militia.
The key advantages Hezbollah has over the Syrian militants are the organized and extensive training programs undertaken by new recruits, strong sense of unit discipline, intensive operational planning and clear command and control.
Still, despite the relatively heavy casualties, the rate is sustainable for now and does not appear to have had any impact on the morale of Hezbollah’s combatants.
“We are in a regional war now, so the casualty rate is still acceptable,” said Abu Khalil, a veteran Hezbollah fighter who has served multiple combat tours in Syria. “We are fighting a war against terrorism and there will be martyrs. We do not go to Syria to pose for pictures. We go to fight.”
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