The Syrian Army Fights the “Party” in Beirut… and Khaddam Warned Iran’s Ambassador in 1987 of “Infiltration” within the “Party”
The second invasion of Lebanon began on June 6, 1982. On June 13, the Israeli army succeeded in encircling the capital, Beirut, with the aim of forcing Yasser Arafat, chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, to leave the city.
Several weeks before the Israeli invasion, Arafat—who had moved to Lebanon years earlier following the “Black September” events in Jordan in 1970—met with some of his military commanders in the south and told them that Israel would invade Lebanon and that they should withdraw from the south when the invasion began.
That is exactly what happened. As a result, the south fell within hours when the invasion began.
A year earlier, Israel had bombed PLO headquarters in Beirut’s Fakhani district on July 17, 1981, an area the Palestinians called the “Fakhani Republic.” Fakhani covered no more than one square kilometer and was near the Cola Roundabout, which Israel bombed on September 30, 2024. The 1981 bombing of Fakhani killed at least 300 Palestinians, most of them civilians, and wounded around 800 people.
The United States intervened at the time and imposed a ceasefire, which Arafat honored. However, the other organizations violated it several times, including the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine–General Command, led by Ahmad Jibril, which was close to Damascus.
Israel’s Pretext and the Assassination Attempt
In preparation for the 1982 ground invasion, Israel had taken a number of steps, including annexing the Syrian Golan Heights (occupied since 1967) to its territory in 1981, launching a series of heavy raids against Palestinian positions in southern Lebanon, and bombing Iraq’s nuclear reactor in 1981. But U.S. Secretary of State Alexander Haig told Israel that Washington would not allow an invasion unless Israel found an “appropriate pretext” for doing so. That is precisely what happened when the Israeli ambassador in London was the target of an assassination attempt carried out by a Palestinian organization operating outside the authority of Yasser Arafat and the Palestine Liberation Organization.
On June 3, 1982, fighters belonging to Sabri al-Banna (Abu Nidal), the leader of Fatah–Revolutionary Council, opened fire on Shlomo Argov in front of the Dorchester Hotel in London. Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin immediately called his government into session and vowed to retaliate against all Palestinian organizations based in Lebanon, even though Abu Nidal’s organization was headquartered in Baghdad, not Beirut. The decision to invade was pressed particularly forcefully by Israeli Defense Minister Ariel Sharon, who personally led the invasion.
In response to the assassination attempt, Israeli forces crossed the Lebanese border along several axes, while the Tel Aviv government announced that its forces were conducting a military operation to ensure the security of the Galilee region. Under Sharon’s command, Israeli forces invaded Lebanon. Their strength was estimated at 60,000 troops, backed by warplanes and 800 tanks, while naval vessels sailed from the city of Ashdod toward the coast of Sidon.
On the evening of June 6, Israeli forces crossed the Litani River toward Sidon and subjected Lebanon to intense bombardment. During the first ten days of the assault, at least 3,500 shells were fired, striking residential neighborhoods, military positions, and Palestinian refugee camps across the country. On June 11, the Israeli army reached the Khaldeh area with the aim of occupying it in order to take control of Beirut Airport, which was under the control of Palestinian factions.
The Syrian-Iranian Alliance and the Founding of “Hezbollah”
How was Assad thinking at a time when he was present in Lebanon, preoccupied with his struggle against the Muslim Brotherhood, while Khomeini was embroiled in a war with Saddam?
Following the Camp David Accords at the end of the 1970s, Assad and Saddam sought to strengthen relations between them, but the effort was thwarted, and Saddam subsequently took power. The emergence of Khomeini in power in February 1979 did not alter Saddam’s calculations.
To put this in context, talks between Assad and Saddam were already underway, and the Syrian president sent Foreign Minister Abdul Halim Khaddam to Baghdad to meet Saddam. They met on January 1, 1979, just days before Khomeini’s “revolution” against Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.
According to an official Syrian record of the meeting, Imam Ruhollah Khomeini was seeking to return to the region so that he could be close to his country when the Shah fell. Khaddam said that Khomeini, who was living in France at the time, had sent a message to President Assad requesting permission to reside in Syria. Assad apologized and promised to try to arrange for him to live in Algeria.
Saddam replied that, although Iraq supported the “revolution,” it did not want to interfere in Iran’s internal affairs. Khaddam said that the Syrian leadership wanted to maintain direct contact with Khomeini “as a precaution for the future,” so that it could make use of this relationship in the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Saddam, who would enter a fierce war against Khomeini just one year later, replied: “There is no objection to maintaining these channels with him, but without his presence on Syrian soil.”
Saddam Hussein justified his position by saying that he feared the Communists would seize power in Tehran, and that only the religious current was capable of standing up to them.
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Former Iranian Supreme Leader Ruhollah Khomeini
Saddam’s calculations were wrong. This became apparent the following month. Assad, by contrast, benefited from the victory of the “revolution” in Iran in 1979.
There were Iranian figures opposed to the Shah who were living in Lebanon and who soon went on to assume positions of power in Tehran. For years, the Syrian authorities in Lebanon had sponsored and supported the Amal Movement and the leaders of the “Liberation of Iran Movement” who were living in Lebanon and regarded Musa al-Sadr, president of the Supreme Islamic Shiite Council, as their spiritual authority.
Most of them assumed key roles after the “Khomeini Revolution,” including Iran’s first prime minister, Mehdi Bazargan; his deputy, Sadegh Tabatabaei, al-Sadr’s nephew; Ebrahim Yazdi, the foreign minister who succeeded him after his resignation; Sadegh Ghotbzadeh; and Mostafa Chamran, who later became defense minister.
Assad, who had refused to receive Khomeini after his expulsion from Iraq in order not to upset Saddam, took the initiative to send him a “warm congratulatory” message following the success of his “revolution,” affirming his desire for “comprehensive cooperation.”
At the beginning of August, he then sent Khaddam to Tehran, where he met with Bazargan, the prime minister, as well as senior officials, who affirmed that “the revolution will work to build strong relations with brotherly Syria.”
The most important part of the visit was Khaddam’s meeting with Khomeini in Qom. Khomeini spoke little and “asked me to convey his thanks and greetings to President Assad, and his keenness on strong relations with Syria.”
Khaddam comments: “The meeting was brief and symbolic, but it was extremely important in terms of my understanding of the man’s determination, which I sensed in every phrase he uttered.”
He added: “After I returned to Damascus, I briefed Hafez on the course of the visit, and we concluded that the circumstances were ripe for cooperation with the new regime in Iran.”
That is indeed what happened. An alliance was formed that became a fundamental pillar of the Middle East. One of its principal instruments was the establishment of “Hezbollah” in Lebanon, with Iranian figures who had opposed the Shah and were living in Lebanon helping to give the movement the green light. They soon became decision-makers following the Khomeini Revolution.
Iran’s broader and more active involvement in Lebanon came during the Israeli invasion of Lebanese territory in early June 1982. At the time, the Iranian leadership decided to send a brigade and experts from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps to Syria, which had deployed its forces in Lebanon in 1976.
Indeed, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard brigade arrived just a few days after the fighting began, and most of it proceeded to Lebanon, to Sheikh Abdullah Barracks in the Baalbek-Hermel area.
AFP
Hezbollah members during a march in the southern suburbs of Beirut marking the first anniversary of the suicide attack that targeted Israeli soldiers in Kafr Kila, southern Lebanon.
This group began establishing “Hezbollah.” The Islamic Dawa Party was among the first groups to contribute to its establishment. At that stage, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps focused on organization, ideological and political preparation, training, and carefully vetting recruits to prevent infiltration, while directing Hezbollah to devote itself to resistance and avoid becoming embroiled in Lebanese internal affairs.
Syrian Foreign Minister Abdul Halim Khaddam writes in his papers:
“A group from the brigade that had arrived from Iran went to Lebanon, to the Baalbek-Hermel area. It did not participate in the war, which ended following the ceasefire decision, but it did something more important than that.”
He notes that the Revolutionary Guard group focused on:
“A – Organization, ideological and political preparation, training, and carefully selecting recruits to prevent any infiltration.
B – The decisive directives called for Hezbollah to devote itself to resistance and avoid becoming embroiled in Lebanese internal affairs, and consequently to focus on preparation and training and carry out specialized operations against the occupying Israeli forces.
C – Strong emphasis on personal conduct, on the one hand, and avoiding the practices of the armed organizations operating on the Lebanese scene.
D – Expanding the development of the Party and the process of military and ideological preparation and training, in addition to winning the sympathy of the population in the southern region.
E – Iran provided Hezbollah with military assistance in the form of training, preparation, weapons, and funding, as well as assistance in carrying out certain social services. The Party established institutions that played a major role in integrating Lebanon’s Shiite Muslims, while Iran also employed its relations with Syria in building and supporting Hezbollah.”
In practical terms, the Syrian position as a whole was sympathetic to the Amal Movement. Assad alone, according to Khaddam, showed sympathy toward Hezbollah and instructed the army command and security agencies to assist it.
Khaddam adds:
“The president based his position on the fact that the Party had become the principal resistance force after the decline of the Amal Movement and the national parties. Therefore, it had to be relied upon to resist and wear down Israel. By contrast, most Syrian officers in Lebanon sympathized with the Amal Movement and were not inclined toward Hezbollah because it was an Islamist party. They—the Syrian officers—were still under the weight of the bloody events that had taken place in Syria between the state and the Muslim Brotherhood.”
According to Khaddam, Assad “was not concerned about Iranian influence, nor did it occur to him that Iran was building a military and political base in Lebanon aimed at serving its strategy, and that it had ambitions for regional expansion while being an ally with which we cooperated in confronting the Iraqi regime.”
At the same time, under the Syrian umbrella, Iran provided Hezbollah with military assistance, training, preparation, weapons, and funding for social services.
One of the rare instances of a confrontation between the Syrian army and Hezbollah occurred in February 1987, when more than twenty Hezbollah members were killed at the Fathallah Barracks in Beirut after Assad decided to restore security in the capital at the request of Lebanese political forces.
Notably, the Iranian ambassador in Damascus, Hassan Akhtari, requested a meeting with Khaddam on March 3 to protest the incident. According to the minutes of the meeting, Khaddam criticized Iranian Prime Minister Mir-Hossein Mousavi’s statement that “whoever lays a hand on Hezbollah is serving Israel and America,” as well as the claim that “some figures in Iran are placing Syria on one side of the scale and Hezbollah on the other.”
He said:
“When Hezbollah was established, we regarded it as a friendly party and provided it with assistance and support. We absorbed all the negative actions carried out by some of its members against Syria’s friends in Lebanon and against Syrian soldiers, and we did not react.
“But you will recall that we repeatedly warned about infiltrations within this organization by three parties: by Arafat, by the Iraqi group, and by the Lebanese Second Bureau. We warned of the dangers of these infiltrations because we feared that these groups, which had infiltrated Hezbollah, might carry out actions that would undermine its role in Lebanon and damage its relations with Syria. Unfortunately, these warnings were not given the necessary attention by Hezbollah’s leadership.”
Khaddam asked the ambassador:
“Is Imad Mughniyeh part of Hezbollah or not?”
He replied:
“I have never met him and do not know him. According to my information, he is not part of the organization and is not a member of Hezbollah.”
He continued:
“As for your statement that there is infiltration within Hezbollah, I do not deny that. Arafat could infiltrate some members, but if we look at this Party and its declared objectives, it cannot be compatible with Arafat.”
Khaddam replied:
“I distinguished between Hezbollah as a leadership and some of its members.”
In February 2008, Imad Mughniyeh (Hajj Radwan) was killed by Israeli intelligence in the Kafr Sousa district of Damascus. In September, the pager explosions, assassinations, and airstrikes revealed the extent of Israel’s infiltration of Hezbollah, paving the way for the start of Israel’s fourth war in Lebanon.
