An old television sleeps in the corner of the room where a group of retired military personnel meet in Akkar al Atiqa to discuss how to organize the aid they are distributing to those displaced by the war in Lebanon since the intensification of Israeli bombing in September. The north of the country, where this town of 17,000 inhabitants is located, is a remote place from Beirut. Not because of the distance—barely 135 kilometers—but because of that battered asphalt, flanked by garbage, which speaks of a State in ruins. The forgotten region of Akkar is, however, the nursery of what is considered the only popular institution of that absent Administration: the Armed Forces and its around 80,000 soldiers. “50% of them come from this area,” says Petty Officer Haytham Khalil, 55 years old.
“Honor, sacrifice, loyalty.” That is the motto of an army that assists impotently in the war, faced with the military power of the Israeli Goliath and with its hands tied to submit to its authority Hezbollah, the Shiite militia that is also the dominant political party in Lebanon and whose arsenal is higher than that of the Armed Forces. Relegated to the role of stone guests of the war conflict, the country’s Government now intends to turn its fragile army into the guarantor of a ceasefire proposal that Israel has already rejected.
The country’s acting prime minister, Najib Mikati, asked this Monday, at the summit of Arab countries in Riyadh (Saudi Arabia), that the international community press for an immediate cessation of hostilities. He then noted his Government’s commitment “to UN Resolution 1701” – which includes the withdrawal of the militia from Lebanon’s southern border – “the strengthening of the deployment of the Lebanese army in the south” in cooperation with the blue helmets of the UN, Unifil, and “the extension of the authority of the State to all its internationally recognized borders.”
Mikati had announced on November 6 the recruitment of 1,500 soldiers to send “5,000 additional troops that will join the 4,500 already deployed” on the southern border of the country if this ceasefire were to be signed, something that will require the unlikely approval Hezbollah’s prior agreement, without which any pact would remain a dead letter. UN Resolution 1701, which ended the last war with Israel in 2006, requires both the Israeli army and militia to withdraw troops and weapons from territory south of the Litani River. The document provides that the blue helmetsand the Lebanese army guarantee this withdrawal and are the only forces deployed along the border between the two countries, but that offer is not enough for Israel. He hopes that his soldiers, and also his war planes, have carte blanche to enter Lebanese territory, according to the American media. Axios.
In the 18 years since the adoption of Resolution 1701, “Israel has violated Lebanese air and naval space 36,000 times,” while Hezbollah has reinforced “its positions, built tunnels and missile ramps” along the country’s southern border. , says retired general Khalil Helou. Since October 2023, when the party-militia resumed firing rockets against Israel in solidarity with Gaza, Lebanon has recorded 3,243 deaths and more than 14,100 injuries. Following the ground offensive that began on October 1, at least 37 towns and 40,000 homes have been destroyed by Israeli attacks.
The only ones who have withdrawn from the southern border so far have been those 4,500 Lebanese soldiers to whom Prime Minister Mikati alluded this Monday. Four Lebanese soldiers have died in the war and only once has the Lebanese army defended itself. It was on October 3, when his military opened fire after Israeli troops killed one of their own in the southern Bint Jbel.
The Lebanese Armed Forces have until now lacked the “government mandate to assume the defense of the country,” says Sergeant Medyen Mohamed Al Assaad at the Akkar al Atiqa Retired Military Movement headquarters. “If they told us to put on the uniform and go fight, we would go right now,” he asserts, as his companions nod. And they would do it “even with bare hands.”
No weapons
That metaphor hardly is. Lebanon’s military spending in 2023 was about 226 million euros; Israel’s reached almost 26 billion euros, estimates the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (Sipri). The Lebanese Armed Forces lack anti-aircraft defenses and combat aircraft. Their weapons, obsolete, usually come from donations from other countries. Far from being comparable to Israel and its latest generation F-35s, its arsenal is also not comparable to that of Hezbollah, which is believed to have accumulated between 120,000 and 200,000 projectiles before Israeli bombings decimated its leadership and probably also its weapons.
If Hezbollah refuses to disarm, the Lebanese army will not be able to force the militia to do so. Not only because of its political power or because of the understaffing of the Armed Forces, but because part of the Lebanese population would see it as a betrayal against Israel. Also because this would undermine its reputation for neutrality among the confessions that coexist in Lebanon and would lead to the desertion of many Shiite soldiers, the community from which the party-militia is nourished. Such a decision could revive that ghost that haunts the Lebanese, that of the civil war that ended in 1990 and its more than 100,000 deaths.
Much less can the Armed Forces fight against Israel. Even without considering the absence of a mandate from the Lebanese State in this regard, nor the overwhelming Israeli military superiority, that country has the unfailing support of the United States. If the Lebanese Armed Forces have stayed afloat in recent years, it has been in part due to the around 2.8 billion euros of military aid granted by Washington since 2006.
The fragility of the Lebanese army is not a coincidence, adds retired general Hisham Jaber in his office in Beirut. In 2008, the United States “threatened [presidente Michel] Sleiman with punishing Lebanon” if it accepted “the donation of an air defense system and several helicopters from Russia. That threat came from Israel,” says the former military commander of the Lebanese capital.
Social work
So far in the war, the retired soldiers of Akkar al Atiqa have worked hard in that social work that also underpins the popularity of the army. The trunks of their cars, parked in front of the headquarters of their movement, are full of pasta, cookies and blankets for the displaced people whom their people have given shelter. The absence of the Armed Forces on the front is being as noticeable as their presence on the streets. In the towns that host many of the 1.2 million people displaced by the war “there has been friction” between Shiites, Sunnis and Christians that, “without the presence of the military,” could “have degenerated,” the analyst also considers. Khalil Helou.
Imad Salman, another 62-year-old retired soldier, displaced with his family from Abbasiyeh, in the south, maintains that Akkar al Atiqa has received his family “as guests, not as displaced people.” This officer, who is staying in a house provided by a comrade in arms, repeats: “I am Shiite, but, above all, I am Lebanese and a soldier. “The army is the backbone of national unity.”
An Arab Barometer survey concluded in 2019 that 91% of Lebanese considered their army unrelated to the corruption that prevails in the country, despite the fact that their economic situation is “miserable,” describes Sergeant Al Assaad. In 2018, a soldier earned “the equivalent” of about 939 euros. In 2019, the Lebanese currency was devalued by 90% and that salary plummeted in certain cases to 32 euros. The current salary of a private soldier is “about 87 euros”; that of an officer, about 560, Al Assaad estimates. In 2020, the Lebanese Government authorized members of its Armed Forces to moonlight and many work in their free time as taxi drivers, mechanics or bus drivers.
“Lebanon has excellent soldiers and officers,” says General Jaber, who estimates that, for the Lebanese army to be able to assume the defense of the country, at least 4.6 billion euros in weapons would be needed. The 200 million dollars (185 million euros) committed at the conference to support Lebanon in Paris on October 24, “are nothing.”
