Khomeini's Ghost by Con Coughlin

Author:Con Coughlin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins

8

The Legacy Defined

The Israeli invasion of Lebanon in the summer of 1982 provided Khomeini with a golden opportunity to sow the seeds of Islamic revolution in another foreign land, and the Revolutionary Guards were quick to seize the opportunity. The links Khomeini and his supporters had built up with Lebanon’s 1.5 million Shia Muslims put him in a strong position to exploit Lebanon’s political divisions. At the same time it provided the leaders of the Islamic revolution with their first chance to confront their sworn foe, the state of Israel.

The primary objective of Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin in launching Operation Peace for Galilee in June 1982 was to destroy the military infrastructure of Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organisation in Lebanon, which was held responsible for launching attacks on Israeli towns and villages in the Galilee region of northern Israel. The Israeli offensive was aimed at PLO targets in Beirut and southern Lebanon, and at first the local Shia population in southern Lebanon welcomed the advancing Israelis with rose petals, the traditional Lebanese greeting, such was their contempt for the PLO. But the mood soon turned sour as the invasion inflicted widespread devastation on Lebanon’s civilian population, particularly among the main Shia population centres in southern Lebanon and Beirut’s southern suburbs. The Christian Phalange militias, which had been involved for seven years in a bitter civil war with the PLO and its Lebanese Muslim allies, supported the Israeli offensive, while the Lebanese Muslims, both Sunni and Shia, belatedly rallied to defend the country from Israel’s incursion.

The main point of contact for Iran with radical Shia leaders in southern Lebanon was Amal, the Lebanese Shia militia, which had been formed under the leadership of Nabih Berri in the 1970s to protect the interests of the country’s Shia population during the civil war. Musa al-Sadr, the Iranian-born cleric who had befriended Khomeini in the 1970s, had been the spiritual driving force behind the creation of Amal before he disappeared in mysterious circumstances on a visit to Libya in 1978. Khomeini’s ties to the radical Shia of southern Lebanon were strengthened after one of his daughters married a close relative of Sadr’s, and the relationship between the two families led to Sadr arranging for scores of Khomeini’s Islamic supporters to undergo military training, both with Amal and Yasser Arafat’s PLO in Beirut.

Most of the key figures in Khomeini’s government, including Khamenei, the president, and Rafsanjani, the speaker of the Majlis, had received military training in Lebanon. Mostafa Chamran, the founder member of the Revolutionary Guards who organized Khomeini’s firing squads and became the revolution’s first defence minister, had also trained in Lebanon but was killed in action in 1981 during the war against Iraq. (Chamran today is regarded as one of the principal martyrs of the revolution, and his death is commemorated each year with a ceremony attended by senior Iranian government officials.) The relationship between Sadr and Khomeini had become so close that when the cleric disappeared during his trip to Libya,1

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