AP Blog: Dispatches from Mideast conflict

[thedrifter]

AP Blog: Dispatches from Mideast conflict

44 minutes ago

AP correspondents are in Lebanon and Israel covering the fighting and its effects on the people. Here, in a combined web log, they convey the impressions and challenges of their assignment.

___

Tuesday, July 25, 11 a.m. local

RIAD SOLH SQUARE, central Beirut

Today is the first day I notice this city coming back to life. With the traffic, it takes twice as long to drive from the hotel to office as it did yesterday. Some shops are opening, and there are even a few brave souls jogging along the corniche — a slab of sidewalk that hugs the Mediterranean along Beirut's sweeping harbor. They chug by the Hard Rock Cafe and McDonald's (both closed), and hang a left by the picturesque lighthouse that was hit by Israeli fire a few days after the bombardment began. It had just been restored a year ago.

We've gone about 24 hours without an airstrike on the city.

A gang of about 80 protesters snakes down into Riad Solh Square, named for Lebanon's first prime minister. They're shouting into megaphones: "Hey Lebanon, my beloved, destroy Tel Aviv! Hey Lebanon, my eyes, destroy Kiryat Shmona!" (a town in northern Israel.)

A young girl of about 10 waving a Lebanese flag sees my microphone and rushes up to me. "Down with Israel, I love Sheik Nasrallah!" (the leader of the Hezbollah.)

The experiment here is how real people — the ones at this tiny but vocal rally, the girl with the flag, the taxi drivers weathering the fight and jacking up their fares — will react to the fighting. Before it began, Lebanese politicians were holding a national dialogue to decide if and how to disarm Hezbollah. Now Israel's trying to do it for them. But are ordinary Lebanese, as they emerge from homes and shelters after two weeks of bombings, any different? Many didn't like Hezbollah before, but do they hate Israel more for interfering?

I'm heading to Lebanon's Christian heartland to find out ...

• Lauren Frayer

___

Tuesday, July 25, 2:30 a.m. local

HAMRA STREET, downtown Beirut

We cruise along one of Beirut's busiest commercial thoroughfares, though it's deserted at this hour. For the past two weeks the sun goes up and down, but there's no change on many streets here — shops are closed and cars stay parked. I'm overjoyed to see a Starbucks here on Hamra Street, ready to jump-start my dormant latte addiction left over from the States. But alas, the shop with the friendly green and white window decorations has been shuttered since fighting began. I guess those who drink Starbucks had enough money to escape.

Our taxi driver grimaces when he hears we're Americans.

"Uh oh, I'm in trouble now," my colleague Lee Keath says, teasing. The driver launches into a political discussion, and I wonder if this is literally part of the job description. I've learned the most about the Middle East — its politics, its people, its cigarette smoke and its spirit — from taxi drivers.

"I like Americans, but your government — ugh," he says. He slumps down low in his leather seat and exchanges glances with a comrade in the passenger seat. They're both wearing way too much cologne and hair gel, cruising barren Beirut in the wee hours of the morning for I-don't-want-to-know-what.

"Well, aren't you happy Condi visited you today?" Lee asks him in Arabic. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was on the ground here for about 3 hours this afternoon — stopping in Cyprus, Beirut and then Israel on such a whirlwind trip that a reporter traveling with her told me, "We're barely skimming the ground." Her meetings with Lebanese officials apparently didn't go as well as planned: Parliament Speaker Nabi Berri rejected all of Rice's proposals.

The driver points to a figurine of Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah's leader, dangling from a keychain on the dashboard.

"The only one I'm happy with is him," he says.

• Lauren Frayer

___

Monday, July 24

HAGOSHRIM, Israel

Hezbollah has posed little more than a random threat so far with its daily rocket attacks on Israeli land. You see fires burning in open fields and bare mountaintops across northern Israel, and wonder what the guerrillas were even aiming at. You have to be spectacularly unlucky to be killed by a Katyusha here.

But on their own ground, the guerrillas are proving to be formidable enemies.

"They're good, aren't they?" one soldier asked as he prepared his tank for inspection. He said he'd been into Lebanon in the morning, and that it didn't go well.

One of the things you'll hear most often in talking to Israeli soldiers about Hezbollah is, "They're smart." The guerrillas know their own territory, and they've devoted much of the last six years to preparing for this fight. I asked a soldier who had crossed over today how Hezbollah moved and fought, and he said he didn't know.

The soldiers don't see Hezbollah fighters much, he said. All they know is they're getting shot at.

At least 20 Israeli soldiers were wounded today in sieges on two Lebanese villages across the border, and two were killed in a helicopter crash on Israeli soil.

We go to the crash site, now engulfed in flames. Small parts of the helicopter are stuck in a nearby fence. There's a wheel and part of the axle that lie partway buried in a watermelon patch. On the radio, they say two soldiers were hurt. Everyone around knows they were killed, but it's censored until the families can be told.

From the beginning, the soldiers have been convinced that this fight was just and necessary. But as Israeli casualties mount, they're getting more curious about what the world thinks. They crowd around reporters and pepper them with questions about what's being said outside, how's the war going, when will it end?

They seem not to know anymore.

• Benjamin Harvey

___

Monday, July 24

ON THE ROAD TO TYRE, Lebanon

It's just past noon when we head south from Sidon to Tyre in southern Lebanon. The delay was the road. It's a stunning stretch that winds and weaves along the Mediterranean.

But these days it's more like a game of Russian roulette. The road has been the target of Israeli bombs and rockets in recent days. We wait to find out whether there have been any reports of strikes on the road. Unable to get an answer from Tyre, we decide to head out anyway.

It's a striking scene off to my right. The Mediterranean is a deep blue, and there are whitecaps on the edge. It looks so peaceful, so normal.

Suddenly the car swerves, avoiding a giant crater caused by a 500-pound bomb dropped by Israeli jets days earlier. Not far beyond, a bridge lies in ruins from another bomb.

We're on some small secondary road. The main highway to Tyre is closed. It's visible from a distance. It looks to be a modern four-lane highway though it is difficult to tell from our vantage point on a narrow two-lane road several feet below and several more feet away.

Soon the pavement ends and we're bumping along an even narrower road-cum-sandy pathway. On the side are dust-covered vehicles. I count 20 of them. It's hard to tell how long they've been there. One car is without a tire, but the others look like the passengers just left them where they stopped.

We keep a steady pace, making it to Tyre in good time. Tyre is an ancient city founded in 2750 B.C. The Greeks believe their civilization is rooted in Tyre. Even in ancient times, Tyre was a prize. In the 6th century B.C., Nebuchadnezzar, the king of Babylon, laid siege to the city for 13 years.

Alexander the Great also had a turn at Tyre, assaulting it without success for seven months.

Once in Tyre, we go right to the port to see the evacuation of trapped expatriates aboard a ship bound for Cyprus. But more harrowing was a visit to Najem Hospital in the heart of Tyre.

The streets around it are pockmarked from rockets, and across the street all that's left of a jeep hit by an Israeli rocket is its charred skeleton.

Inside the hospital there's a 1-day-old baby fighting for his life in an incubator. An 8-year-old girl is sobbing and terrified of every sound she hears because of the planes she heard overhead before they bombed her family's car.

A nursing director, Inaya Haydar, takes us on a tour. She is filled with compassion as she strokes the young girl's head, trying to comfort her. At the end of the tour, after telling the sad stories of her patients, she talks about her own heartbreak. Just three days earlier, six members of her family were killed in an Israeli bombing raid on their village.

"It's not easy for me to talk about my family," she says, very close to tears.

Inaya could leave Lebanon if she wants. Her fiance lives in Sweden, wants her to come there. But she refuses.

"I love my country. I can't leave. We need to help our country now."

• Kathy Gannon

___

Sunday, July 23

THE ISRAEL-LEBANON BORDER

There are killing machines lined up in the most serene of places: in an apple orchard, atop a hill overlooking Lebanon, at the foot of a rocky incline. They're everywhere here. You hear them fire hundreds of times each day, each explosion aimed to kill someone or destroy something.

We find a tank with its turret pointed at Lebanon. The commander comes out to talk and says he's already killed four Hezbollah guerrillas, and it isn't even noon yet. I ask him how he killed them, and he says it doesn't matter. He gestures to the ground around him, littered with both large munition shells and bullet casings. The commander is covered in dust. He warns us to stay away from the border because it isn't safe yet.

On top of the tank, a soldier's lips move as he reads a prayer book.

The commander tells us that at noon, he's going up the hill to try to get shot at and draw Hezbollah fighters into the open. At 11:58 he starts moving. The tank makes a tremendous amount of noise as it lumbers up the hill, sending dust into the air, and we wait behind an Israeli military defense post. Close by, on the other side of the border, a Hezbollah flag flaps in the wind.

Soon the valley is alive with the sound of explosions and machine-gun fire.

• Benjamin Harvey

___

Sunday, July 23, 3:30 a.m. local

CASA D'OR HOTEL, downtown Beirut

I'm shaken in my bed by another explosion, stronger than the one 30 minutes before. This one rattles the glass in my hotel room window, and I roll over to the far side of the bed.

Tonight brought the loudest, strongest blasts since I've been here, and my hotel is about six miles away from Dahiyah, the neighborhood of south Beirut that's been like a magnet for Israeli artillery. The sound carries for miles and echoes across the city.

In the morning I get a call from the front desk, asking me to switch to another room on a lower floor. "It's not safe for you up there," the voice on the other end of the line says.

I wonder what she means. Will rockets hit the building's top floors? Will the rumble of warplanes affect the structural integrity of the building? Seems unlikely, but who am I to argue? I pack my stuff and take the elevator down.

• Lauren Frayer

___

Saturday, July 22

ON THE ISRAEL-LEBANON BORDER

The hotel is surrounded with the thumping sound of explosions when I arrive around 2 a.m. The man working the late shift doesn't speak English, and I don't bother to ask for a room. I ask for the bomb shelter, and he points. Twenty minutes later, I'm asleep on top of a table inside a room with reinforced walls.

Later that morning we're on the Lebanese border, looking up to the village of Maroun al-Ras. Situated on a hilltop overlooking the valley into Israel and flanked by fields and orchards, Maroun al-Ras looks from below like it would be an idyllic place for a rich man's country home.

All day it gets pounded from the air by Israeli tanks, artillery and an F-16. The impacts send little mushroom clouds of smoke into the air, but besides that, Maroun al-Ras doesn't seem to react much. It seems an incredible amount of force to use on such a tiny place, but from below we can't see what's happening inside — in the valley and in between the houses. We can only hear the explosions and cackle of heavy guns.

Soldiers roll up slowly to the village in armored personnel carriers, face no resistance on the way up, and then disappear. When they come back, they act like they've just returned from hell.

Israel said it took control of Maroun al-Ras, but you could still hear fighting going on inside when the day ended.

• Benjamin Harvey

___

Saturday, July 22, 3 p.m. local

DBAYEH PORT, Beirut

U.S. Marines are shoveling weary Americans into hovercraft on this sandy strip near Beirut's commercial port. I back up as it prepares to take off, but not far enough — the giant turbines on the craft start spinning and spew sand and salt all over me. After that, ragged and run-down, I get mistaken for an evacuee, many of whom have been waiting here 10 hours or more.

They're frustrated. They thought they were finished with this war stuff 16 years ago, after the ruinous 1975-1990 civil war. They thought they'd be able to show their children the real Lebanon, the country they remember from the pre-civil war days — lush, green hills falling off into the Mediterranean. Chic boulevards, stylish fashion, beachgoers flooding the corniche at night — the Paris of the Middle East they've been telling their children about.

All this is still here, part of a small nightlife that's become a haven for locals and journalists trying to stay sane.

But on the horizon _warships, and the occasional boom in the night.

• Lauren Frayer

___

Friday, July 21, 11:30 a.m. local

DAHIYAH, south Beirut

I've been invited on a Hezbollah-guided tour of Dahiyah — the section of south Beirut that houses the guerrilla group's headquarters. Or used to house them, before Israeli warplanes reduced a wide swath of the area — home to about a half-million people — to smoking piles of concrete.

AP Photographer Ben Curtis and I hop in the car and drive 20 minutes south, into another world.

I'm too distracted by logistics — donning a flak jacket and helmet, stuffing my pockets with first-aid gauze — to notice when exactly the scenery changes, whether there's line past which everything falls away. Maybe it was when we went under that bridge. But I suddenly look up to see a wasteland.

You can tell this used to be a vibrant, bustling place. A World Cup billboard, with a close-up photo of a man's bare legs running, hangs on a steel frame, bent 90 degrees to the side. A woman in a full-length black chador, with high heels peeking out at the bottom, carefully steps over garbage and ducks to pass under the sign. She's walking with purpose, the only one on the street.

Our driver stays behind, and we join a group of fellow journalists milling around, waiting for the Hezbollah guys to arrive. Israeli warplanes screech overhead. Let's get this thing over with, I'm thinking.

There's no indication of who's in charge here. Unshaven men wield clipboards and zip in and out of alleyways on motorbikes. I'm getting impatient; I don't want to play roulette here for very long. But finally the crowd crosses the street, and we're off.

Everything is coated in dust. For me, it conjures memories of 9/11 — that iconic TV footage of lower Manhattan covered in inch-thick ash, paperwork from someone's desk 70 floors up fluttering down in eerie silence. The smell of garbage and gas leaks hang in the air.

Between two intact buildings there's a pile of twisted metal and concrete about 50 yards wide, and toward the center there's a big black hole. Israeli missiles hit the building's roof, I'm told, and continued down through at least a dozen floors and bored 30 feet into the ground. There's a charred black ring around the hole, and a child's rocking horse sits upright just outside it.

We make our way down a wide thoroughfare strewn with debris. Curtains and a deflated basketball peek out from underneath, and mannequins lie naked in a bombed-out storefront. A dry-cleaning shop's windows are shattered, but pressed shirts still hang on a line inside, covered in grime.

Striped awnings dangle off storefronts, and they shudder as the wind blows smoke by.

• Lauren Frayer

___

Thursday, July 20, 9 a.m. local

THE SYRIA-LEBANON BORDER

On the road from Damascus to Beirut, we swerve around bombed-out trucks along the way. One charred frame has the remnants of its load in the back — either sacks of potatoes or sandbags. Was it carrying food into Lebanon, struggling under Israel's blockade of its ports and bombing of its only international airport? Or was it carrying sandbags to fortify bunkers for guerrillas fighting in the south? I can't tell as we whiz by fast.

Another truck looks like a missile hit straight through the windshield and exploded between the driver and passenger seats. Broken glass covers the pockmarked road, and a red-checkered khafiyeh — an Arab man's headdress — dangles limply over the driver's side mirror. I wonder where its owner is. My driver Mahmoud tells me.

"Look at this one — that driver died. Why do they do this?" he asks half in English, half in Arabic. Mahmoud has been shuttling journalists along the Beirut-Damascus highway — the main lifeline between two ancient cities — nearly every day, and along the way he makes a tally of the new carnage.

As wreckage accumulates, the price of a taxi ride along this beautiful half-desert, half-mountain road goes up. We pay $650 for the 2 1/2-hour journey. Three days ago, a colleague paid $400. A week ago, a friend got a bargain at 50 bucks — plus a $5 tip.

As eerie as they are, the bombed-out trucks are safety for us — they won't be hit again. Mahmoud has instructions to quickly pass any trucks rumbling along the way — the live targets. That brings its own treachery as he pulls into the opposite lane to quickly overtake them. I wonder what would be worse — a head-on collision or an airstrike. I put on my iPod to distract myself.

We're taking as many backroads and winding mountain passes as we can, and we phone colleagues in Beirut every hour, asking for news about attacks. And we stop along the way, chatting with a hotelier who hasn't seen visitors in days, about what lies ahead.

The man — a middle-aged Christian with an easy smile — pulls up a chair and pleads.

"How long will this last?"

I wish I had answers for him.

• Lauren Frayer

Ellie

[thedrifter]

Backstory: The few and fortunate who escaped Beirut

By Nicole Itano, Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor
Wed Jul 26, 4:00 AM ET

The open-air landing craft listed suddenly sideways, sending children tumbling into their mothers. Bags fell over. A salty wave splashed over the side, drenching those on one side.

But as the US military boat pushed away from the pebble shore on the outskirts of Beirut, bearing hundreds of American citizens away from the growing crisis in Lebanon and toward safety, the relief of those on board was evident. A few laughed nervously, while others waved to US Marines onshore or pulled out cameras to snap mementos of their departure.

Packed in among those headed to the USS Trenton, a warship just offshore, were23-year-old Rana Zayek and her new husband, Nassar Sokhn,from San Francisco. When the Lebanese-American couple had planned their wedding at the flashy Casino du Liban, outside Beirut, they thought it would be fun to introduce American friends to the cosmopolitan capital of the country their families are from. Hundreds were invited, including at least 20 who planned to come from California, where Ms. Zayek works with foster children and Mr. Sokhn is a software engineer.

But two days before their July 14 wedding, Hizbullah, the Lebanese Islamist group, staged a raid into Israel, killing eight soldiers and capturing two. Israel's response was immediate and sustained, raining bombs on Lebanon. And with Hizbullah launching rockets into northern Israel and Israeli troops engaging Hizbullah guerrillas on the ground, the couple found their wedding coinciding with war.

They went ahead with the wedding, but it wasn't the event they'd planned. None of their San Francisco friends made it (the Beirut airport was bombed). While 147 Lebanese family and friends came, "half of the guests left by dinner," Zayek said sadly, her new ring twinkling in the Mediterranean sun.

A week later, the young couple was waiting for evacuation near a beach outside Beirut with thousands of other American citizens. Twenty-five thousand Americans were trapped in Lebanon when the fighting erupted, along with tens of thousands of other foreign citizens.

"We only had a honeymoon for one day," Sokhn laughed. "Then we decided we better try to get out. We called the embassy again and again, but no one could tell us what was going on."

They were told they'd be contacted when a concrete evacuation plan had been arranged. But no one ever called. Meanwhile, rumors were flying: one said the US government was charging $4,000 to get out (in fact, the evacuations were free). Eventually the local news said that Americans were to meet at the Dbayeh Bridge in Beirut. They went and were sent away because the boats were full that day. Last Friday, a week after their wedding, the couple and some of their American relatives returned at 4:30 in the morning.

"We were afraid they were going to send us away again," said Zayek, exhausted after hours of standing in a chaotic line for evacuation registration. "We were right on the bridge and people were pushing and shoving. We were like animals," she recalled after being processed and awaiting to board the landing craft.

"Until the marines came," her husband chimed in, gesturing to soldiers in desert fatigues handing out military rations – known as MREs or meals ready-to-eat – and water. "They were much better. They were very patient, very polite. But outside it was bad."

***

By the time Sokhn and Zayek boarded the USS Trenton, it was packed. The Trenton, which has a normal capacity of 800, was carrying more than 1,500 evacuees, plus crew.

Inside, sailors helped passengers carry bags through narrow corridors and up steep metal staircases. Children slept on mattresses stuffed into tiny nooks. Before the ship even left Lebanon, the trash cans in the bathrooms were overflowing and water covered the floor, but the crew was unfailingly polite and cooks dished up plates of fried chicken in the mess hall.

"Did you actually see any bombs?" one stocky teenage boy in a baggy sport jersey asked another as they stood in line waiting for dinner.

"Nah," said the other, with evident disappointment. "But I heard them."

Up on deck, Hala Abinader, a 27-year-old Lebanese-American who recently moved from Manhattan to London, was fortunate to have boarded early. She found a cot overlooking the clear blue sea, and lay reading a paperback novel.

If smoke hadn't been rising from the cityscape on the horizon, and her right foot hadn't been in a cast, she might have been on a pleasant holiday cruise. As it was, she was fleeing the place where she'd gone to spend a pleasant vacation with friends. She broke her foot, she admitted, running from the sound of a falling bomb. It fell miles into the ocean, and no one else had panicked. But never having heard a bomb before, she'd been terrified nonetheless.

She was angry, tired, and worried. "The embassy has done the worst job," she groused. "They've been treating us like cattle. I've been sitting outside for hours.... They had no priorities. It should've been women and children first. All they said was anyone who had four kids could go ahead," she laughed. "Who has four kids?"

She grew suddenly somber, thinking of friends and family left behind with no way out and no foreign government to help them. "I think this time it's going to be really bad. The economy isn't strong enough to sustain something like this. It's such a shame, because people there don't want this."

***

The USS Trenton steamed northwest through 120 miles of calm seas before docking in the Cypriot port of Limassol early Saturday. Its tired passengers were shuttled by bus to the International Fair Grounds in the capital, Nicosia.

There they joined hundreds of other Americans among bright-orange cots set out in a florescent-lit exhibition hall. After days of waiting, here was another wait: this time for flights home.

Mohamad Rawas and his 4-year-old daughter, Samar, spent 24 hours at the camp in Nicosia. That was after 17 hours on the MS Ramah, a US-hired Saudi passenger ship which had mechanical troubles en route. He and his daughter had been scheduled to fly home to Los Angeles the day bombs destroyed the Beirut airport – and they witnessed the bombing as they drove there.

"When [Samar] heard the bombs, she jumped," he recalled. "And I tell her it's just fireworks."

By Sunday, Mr. Rawas and his daughter, remarkably clean and neat in head-to-toe pink, had finally made it to the Larnaca airport. They were to board a military plane bound for Newark, N.J. How they'd get from there to their home in L.A., he wasn't yet sure. But he was relieved to be out of Lebanon, where he'd gone to visit his sick mother.

"Thank God she hasn't been giving me a hard time," he sighed, looking at his daughter playing with another child. "We've still got a long way to go."

Ellie