Hezbollah fighter strove to be a martyr

BINT JBAIL, Lebanon -- In unguarded moments, Rani Ahmed Bazzi openly expressed his fear of death.

On a battlefield in southern Lebanon, in the middle of last summer's month long war between Hezbollah and Israel, he broke down weeping as he spoke with a pair of reporters: "I'm afraid to die," he sobbed.

But Bazzi was also a resolute Islamist, a charismatic pillar of Hezbollah's militia -- the kind of trainer, recruiter, and fighter that the Shi'ite movement depends on to maintain its popularity in southern Lebanon and southern Beirut.

And when he finally died on the last weekend of the war -- apparently rushing an Israeli position in a suicidal charge, fighters with him told his family -- he achieved the immortality of "martyrdom," the most vaunted status for an Islamist fighter.

A rare, personal glimpse of Bazzi's public and private faces tells the story of Hezbollah's battlefield strength, its fanaticism, its religious potency, and its deep cultural hold over Lebanon's Shi'ites.

In death, Bazzi is a political instrument -- Hezbollah airs video clips of his "martyr's will" on its television station and plasters posters of martyrs like Bazzi all over the country. In this way, the Islamist movement seeks to build on its perceived success against the Israelis to strengthen its political hand in Lebanon's power struggle.

But in life, Bazzi also had a personal story, one colored by warmth and a compulsion to befriend strangers and win their confidence, and proselytize for Hezbollah's cause.

During the war that began July 12, Bazzi fought as a Hezbollah field commander with a specialty in anti tank mines. He fought first in his hometown of Bint Jbail -- a heavily contested border town -- and in the last weeks of the war in Ghandouriyah, where he was killed.

On July 31, during a two-day suspension of Israeli bombing in the middle of a punishing war, Bazzi called out to passing reporters from a half-destroyed mosque in downtown Bint Jbail.

He wanted to talk, which he did for more than two hours, in perfect English he learned in Kuwait, where he grew up. He gave a fake name, "Hussein," and said he was three years old er than his age, 39. He led reporters to a destroyed building, where Hezbollah fighters had clashed with Israeli soldiers, and he fished out Israeli night-vision goggles from the wreckage.

By turns delirious, hectoring, and affectionate, Bazzi talked of dead comrades with glee in his eyes -- "They've gone to paradise!" -- and wept about the destruction of his hometown under Israeli shelling.

He toed Hezbollah's political line when he talked of the war, but he also displayed humanity. After excoriating Israel and America as countries "where people treat animals better than they would treat a Muslim," he cried and described sharing one of his last cans of tuna with a starving stray dog during one battle.

He said he fought not only because he opposed Israel, but because as a devout Muslim he was obliged to resist any force that opposed Islam. He said he made all his decisions based on his faith and the Koran.

After the war, a reporter visiting Bint Jbail needed only a few minutes to learn the real identity of "Hussein the fighter " -- the well-known engineer Rani Ahmed Bazzi, 39, who has left a wife and two sons.

"I always had fights with him about religion. I am open-minded, and he was very strict," said Ali Bazzi, a cousin and dentist who emigrated to Sydney more than two decades ago and was home for his annual visit during the month of Ramadan.

Rani Bazzi was part of a well-off family that gave him a good engineering education, and encouraged him to stay in Kuwait. But he turned down high-paying engineering job offers in the early 1990s to move back to his family's ancestral village of Bint Jbail, which at the time was still under Israeli occupation.

Family members assumed Rani Bazzi had joined the Islamic resistance, or was collaborating with the Israelis, Ali Bazzi said.

Rani Bazzi never talked about his work for Hezbollah, his relatives said. But his ties to the resistance were no secret.

In 1996, his wife and other relatives recalled, the Israeli occupation forces arrested Rani Bazzi and destroyed his house, accusing him of storing weapons there.

He was released after less than a year from the notorious Israeli Khiam Prison in southern Lebanon. He and Farah were married that year.

Farah had known Rani Bazzi from Kuwait, where their families prospered. Farah Bazzi was studying art and teaching in Beirut, and said she fell in love with her husband for his warmth and for the patriotism that had brought him back to Bint Jbail from Kuwait.

Within a year they had their first son, Amir, which means "prince" -- as in prince of the martyrs. Farah Bazzi was pregnant with a second child when her husband was arrested again, in 1999. This time he stayed in Khiam prison for more than a year, until the Israeli withdrawal from south Lebanon in May 2000.

"They practiced so many ways of torturing us," Farah Bazzi said.

For example, she said, his captors told him that his second son was stillborn, and he only believed the child had survived when his wife brought him photographs in prison. He told her then to change the boy's name from Mohammed to "Shaheed," Arabic for "martyr."

The second term in prison hardened Rani Bazzi , his wife recalled, and he would regularly spend time away supposedly teaching engineering in other cities, but doing military training for Hezbollah.

From then on, she and other relatives said, he became increasingly religious. He taught his children to eat the healthy diet of the "digestive jihad," and he regularly talked with his wife and others about the afterlife.

When Hezbollah kidnapped a pair of Israeli soldiers on July 12, it took less than a day for all-out war to engulf Lebanon's south. Israeli bombs and shells turned Hezbollah strongholds like Bint Jbail into hellholes.

Farah Bazzi and her children stayed in the village for six days before fleeing to Beirut. Her husband telephoned regularly.

"He would cry, he would say the angels were helping them fight," his cousin Mariam Bazzi recalled.

In the last week of the war, Rani Bazzi was seen in Ghandouriyah, on the eastern side of the front, delivering a truckload of mines. According to his wife and cousins, some fighters who were with him visited her later and told of his final day.

Israel and Lebanon had agreed on a cease - fire, the fighters told Farah Bazzi. Her husband shaved his head, and asked his companions if any were ready to join him in paradise.

One said yes, and together they rushed an Israeli commando position. They were shot dead just a few yards from the Hezbollah position.

Rani Bazzi is buried in a single row of 16 graves in the Bint Jbail cemetery, reserved for fighters who fell during "Operation Truthful Promise," Hezbollah's name for the war of the summer of 2006.

"The Martyrs with God have the honor and the light," his tombstone says.

The Martyr's Association has publicized the images and tales of dead fighters like Bazzi, and it will also fund a private education for his sons Amir and Shaheed.

The boys are shy and tearful, although with prompting from their mother they also parrot Hezbollah slogans about glory and death.

Farah Bazzi said her husband was terrified of growing old. She teeters between certainty about his cause, and sadness over his death.

``I am proud of what he did, but I miss him,'' she says, crying quietly in her living room, decorated with pictures of Iranian leader Ayatollah Khomeini, Hezbollah leader Nasrallah, and her husband.

She has moved to Beirut and resumed working as a high school painting teacher, and her kids have enrolled in school there.

In addition to a written will for his wife, Rani Bazzi left behind a videotape, just under 8 minutes long. In it he faces the camera and speaks of heaven and hell, Hezbollah's cause, and the ``joy of martyrdom.''

Then, eyes downcast, he addresses his family members, consulting a piece of paper in his hands.

``This life is not for rest. It is for patience and endurance,'' he tells his wife.

His sons, he says, must follow the path of Hezbollah and never forget the significance of their names.