SO I SNEEZED!! Rare View…: Hezbollah’s Worst Nightmare: Chaos in Its Ranks

Hezbollah is known as a disciplined group. The group is well trained and invests heavily in its recruits. It is not known to waste them as cannon fodder. It sees itself as an elite organization and within its own structure there are centers of terrorist excellence, such as the Radwan force.

Hezbollah has achieved this through decades of fine-tuning its capabilities. It has built itself up slowly, first in the 1980s and then in the last two decades when it came to dominate Lebanon. Now the group is facing its worst nightmare: Chaos.

Hezbollah is in chaos after a large number of its alleged members were injured by exploding communications equipment on September 17. The full details of the incident are not yet known and will only emerge over time. However, videos and images from Lebanon show men, many in their 40s, with their hands and faces injured by exploding communications equipment.

The devices are believed to be pagers. The video shows at least one man pulling his pager out of his pocket, only to have it explode in his hand. Gruesome videos, apparently from hospitals in Lebanon, show scores of men missing parts of their hands or with injuries to their legs, abdomens or faces.

The suffering of so many casualties among key members of the terrorist group may not be crippling, but it will clearly hurt some of the group’s key members. This will put the men in the hospital for a while. Some of them will be able to serve Hezbollah again, but they will not have access to any of their hands.

This will likely be their dominant hand, meaning they use it to hold the trigger of a gun or press the button to fire a rocket. The men will also be marked in the future, so many men with bandages on their hands will be a sign of working for the terrorist group.

Hezbollah has already lost around 450 fighters in the 11-month confrontation with Israel. This is a significant loss for the group. Although Hezbollah can replace losses, it does not have an infinitely deep order of battle. This is not only because it must invest in training and security before recruitment, but it also draws its recruits from a narrow spectrum of Lebanese society.

Hezbollah is based on the Shiite population of Lebanon, and even among the Shiites it cannot recruit everyone. There are other Shiite movements, mainly the Amal movement. Amal has 14 seats in the Lebanese parliament, and Hezbollah has 15.

The overall challenge for Hezbollah is not just replacing wounded and dead fighters. The group will be challenged to quickly roll out another way to communicate with its men. Using pagers may seem old-fashioned, but Hezbollah apparently chose to use this system because it believed the network could not be penetrated. It issued the pagers, like a drug gang, and secured the network itself.

Hezbollah has long attempted to maintain its own complex and secure communications network in Lebanon. In 2008, this became controversial. Hezbollah was accused of assassinating former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafic Hariri and then dragging Lebanon into the 2006 war with Israel.

France24 noted at the time that “security sources say Hezbollah has an extensive fixed telecommunications network covering southern and eastern Lebanon, as well as the southern suburbs of Beirut.” The Lebanese government, which at the time had elements opposed to Hezbollah’s increasing control over Lebanon, opposed the private communications network. Ultimately, Hezbollah won and continued its march toward control of Lebanon.

In 2011, reports indicated that phone records of Hezbollah terrorists had led to charges against Hezbollah men for the 2005 assassination of Hariri. “Four Hezbollah suspects in the killing of Rafik Hariri were linked to the attack largely through circumstantial evidence from phone records, according to an indictment published on Wednesday after a six-year investigation that has divided Lebanon,” Gulf News reported.

Hezbollah would have known from its 2005-2011 experience that its communications systems were in the spotlight. The group prides itself on operational security. Hezbollah is also seen by experts as one of the more successful Arab military structures in the region. Kenneth Pollack examined Hezbollah’s relative success compared to other Arab militaries in the region in his 2019 book Armies of Sand.

Strong military structure

In essence, Hezbollah is a more successful military structure, even though it is a terrorist army in Lebanon, than many Arab armies in the region. This is evident in how it has not only been able to confront Israel, but has also stockpiled more rockets, missiles, and drones than many armies in second or third world countries. For example, Hezbollah has been a pioneer in drone threats against Israel and has carried out numerous attacks in this war.

The chaos that followed the exploding pagers is already clearly visible in Lebanon. According to reports, the Iranian-backed terrorist group is doing its best to tell its members not to use communication devices. Hospitals have dozens of wounded. The group will have to rush to get its organization back in order.

Effective groups, whether they are armies, terrorist groups, cartels, gangs, or corporations, need to be able to communicate well. A group like Hezbollah needs this to mobilize people and coordinate attacks. It can’t coordinate the launch of large numbers of rockets if it can’t get men to the launchers. Hezbollah needs a way to get in touch with its fighters. It will now have to rush to replace its pagers or other devices.

It will also now be concerned about the penetration of its operational security. When groups like Hezbollah are in chaos, they are more vulnerable to making mistakes. This reminds us of the story of the penetration of the KKK in the movie Mississippi Burning. It took a while for the FBI to “cause the rattlesnakes to commit suicide,” but eventually the KKK was defeated. Similarly, when the US-led coalition defeated Saddam’s army in Iraq in 1991, it began by destroying his command and control nodes. This is how terrorist groups and armies are defeated.

Hezbollah now faces a difficult challenge. It is in chaos. It may want to strike out and strike back. But it has suffered a major setback. This is also an embarrassing setback. Hezbollah relies on its attractiveness, its sense of being an elite group that is not vulnerable. Now it feels vulnerable.