Hezbollah’s worst nightmare: Chaos in its ranks - analysis

Hezbollah is known as a disciplined group. Highly trained, the group invests heavily in its recruits. It is not known to waste them as cannon fodder. It views 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 as it came to dominate Lebanon. Now, the group faces its worst nightmare: Chaos.

Hezbollah is facing chaos because a large number of its alleged members were wounded on September 17 by exploding communications devices. The full details of this incident are not yet known, and they will only be known over time. However, video and images from Lebanon show men, many of them in their forties, wounded in the hands and faces by exploding communications devices.

The devices are alleged to be pagers. The video shows at least one man pulling his pager from his pocket, only to have it explode in his hand. Gruesome videos, apparently from hospitals in Lebanon, show a large number of men missing parts of their hands or wounded in the legs, stomach, or face.

Suffering so many casualties to key members of the terrorist group may not be crippling, but it clearly will harm a swatch of the group’s key members. This will put the men in hospital for a period of time. Some of them can go back to serving Hezbollah, but they will not have access to one of their hands.

These will most likely be their dominant hand, meaning the hand they’d also use to hold the trigger of a rifle or push the button to launch a missile. The men will also be marked going forward, so many men with bandages on their hands will be a mark of working for the terrorist group.

Hezbollah has already lost around 450 fighters in its eleven-month confrontation with Israel. This is a significant loss for the group. While Hezbollah can replace losses, it doesn’t have an endlessly deep batting order. This is not only because it has to invest in training and security ahead of recruitment, but it also draws its recruits from a narrow spectrum of Lebanese society.

Hezbollah is based on the Shi’ite population of Lebanon, and even among Shi’ites, it can’t recruit all of them. There are other Shi’ite movements, principally the Amal movement. Amal has 14 seats in Lebanon’s parliament, and Hezbollah has 15.

The overall challenge for Hezbollah is not just replacing wounded and dead fighters. The group will be challenged to rapidly roll out some other way to communicate with its men. The use of pagers may seem archaic, but Hezbollah apparently chose to use this system because it assumed the network could not be penetrated. It issued the pagers, the way a drug gang might do so, and secured the network itself.

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

At the time, France24 noted that “security sources say Hezbollah has an extensive fixed-line telecommunications network that covers south and east Lebanon as well as Beirut's southern suburbs.” Lebanon’s government, which at the time had elements opposed to Hezbollah’s increasing control of Lebanon, opposed the private communications network. In the end, Hezbollah won out and continued its march to control Lebanon.

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

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

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 from how it has not only been able to confront Israel but also stockpile more rockets, missiles, and drones than many armies in second or third-world countries. Hezbollah has pioneered drone threats against Israel and carried out numerous attacks in this war, for instance.

The chaos that will follow the exploding pagers is already evident in Lebanon. Reports say the Iranian-backed terrorist group is scrambling to tell its members not to use communications devices. Hospitals have numerous injured men. The group will have to scramble to put its organization back together.

Effective groups, whether militaries, terrorist groups, cartels, gangs, or corporations, need to have good communication. A group like Hezbollah needs this to mobilize people and coordinate attacks. It can’t coordinate the launch of large numbers of missiles if it can’t get men to the launchers. Hezbollah requires a way to get in touch with its fighters. It will need to scramble now 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 film Mississippi Burning. It took time for the FBI to cause the “rattlesnakes to commit suicide,” but in the end, the KKK was defeated. Similarly, when the US-led coalition defeated Saddam’s army in Iraq in 1991, it set about destroying its command and control nodes. This is how terrorist groups and militaries are defeated.

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