Tales from Rohan

A few days ago, I went to the South of Lebanon. To go south of the Litani river (other than to the city of Tyre) you need to get special authorization from the police. Four of us took a taxi from our hotel for the day. The taxi driver speaks excellent French so we talked about various things throughout the trip. Before we left, I found out he was an ambulance driver for the Red Cross during the civil war.

First we went to Sidon (Saida) which is a quaint town with a small Crusader castle built sticking out into the sea. There was a Roman city here as well (and earlier) so the Crusaders used “leftover” pillars extensively as building material–not just as lintels and for structural support in the castle itself, but also in the sea wall.

Next we saw the remains of an old castle (Chateau Beaufort) on a knife ridge that was held by the Israeli army for a long time and finally destroyed by Hezbollah. After that we went to the town of Khiam. This town had a small prison on a hilltop that Hezbollah was using as a local base, and this is were Israel launched the first ground offensive during the 2006 war. I looked around for a while and I could not find a single building that had not been bombed in this village. Most houses were being completely rebuilt or extensively renovated. A few others still showed their shell damage. At this point in the trip, our driver told me that he grew up in this village and that his brother was a Hezbollah soldier who died in 2006.

Cluster bomb says “Made in USA”. Taxi driver’s brother is on the far left in the second row on the “martyrs poster”



After leaving the former prison, we drove along the border with Israel/Occupied Palestine and saw UNIFIL tanks and trucks all over the place. We stopped to talk to some Indonesian UNIFIL troops at an overlook and one of them asked to get a group shot (unfortunately mine was blurry).

Israeli flag The border Lebanese, Palestinian, and Hezbollah flags

UNIFIL is out in force

Finally we stopped in Tyre (Sour) and saw the ruins there, including the world’s largest hippodrome (420m long).

Intense.