In 1982, hundreds of Iranian Revolutionary Guards traveled to Lebanon's rugged Bekaa Valley and began training various radical Shiite groups, including Islamic Amal and the Dawa Party. The ongoing civil war and Israel's occupation of southern Lebanon created a radicalizing environment where Hezbollah's religious fanaticism flourished. "The movement gained momentum quickly due to logistical, financial, and military support from both Syria and Iran" and engaged Israel in guerrilla warfare. The physical geography of southern Lebanon is green and hilly with deep valleys, which favored the defender and was ideal for Hezbollah's "classic" guerrilla warfare. Hezbollah's initial tactical choices involved human wave attacks, similar to those used by Iran in the Iran–Iraq War in which some Hezbollah elements participated, and terrorist tactics like kidnappings, aircraft hijackings, and mass-casualty suicide attacks to hurt Israel's resolve to fight. Hezbollah engaged in short raids to harass and kill and did not try to hold territory. Although initially very successful, these choices imposed a heavy cost on the organization in casualties and in public opinion. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in 1985 said the group's command and control was "virtually non-existent" and described the organization as not a hierarchy but defined by personal loyalties, personal rivalries, and family ties. At this time, operational decisions were inefficiently passed through multiple clerics and imams in Beirut, who were far from the front lines. Hezbollah did have a military structure and separate responsibility for operations, logistics, communications, intelligence, training and recruitment. This lack of a hierarchy was similar to contemporary left-wing liberation movements. Tactics around 1985–1986 were mainly planting landmines, detonating IEDs and occasionally gathering bands of armed men to shoot at the Israelis. Hezbollah was not able to use sniping at this time. An IDF intelligence officer described Hezbollah in the mid-1980s as a "rag-tag group" that "failed every time," and a 2014 review considers the group's tactical performance during this period poor and "very amateurish." The CIA says that prior to spring 1986, the party's attacks were more "undisciplined acts of desperation" rather than military actions.