Hezbollah Legand Killed!
Imad Mughnieh, the senior Hezbollah commander accused of master-minding the terrorist spectaculars of war-torn Lebanon in the 1980s, met his end in a car-bomb explosion in a smart suburb of Damascus on Tuesday night.
Mughnieh, 45, ranked second only to Osama bin Laden on Washingon’s most-wanted list, was accused of killing more Americans than any other militant before the attacks of September 11, 2001, earning him a $25 million (£13 million) bounty for his capture and the undying enmity of the US and Israel.
Mughnieh died at 10.45pm in Kfar Soussa, when a bomb exploded inside his Mitsubishi Pajero. He was the only victim of the blast. His body lay on the side of the road covered in a white sheet before being carried away along with the remains of his vehicle.
Hezbollah confirmed Mughnieh’s death early yesterday morning.
“With all due pride, we declare a great jihadist leader of the Islamic Resistance in Lebanon joining the martyrs . . . The brother commander Haji Imad Mughnieh became a martyr at the hands of the Zionist Israelis,” said a statement carried by the Hezbollah al-Manar television channel. The station broke off normal program-ming to broadcast verses from the Koran interspersed with commentary and propaganda footage of Hezbollah fighters in action.
As the news spread, gunfire broke out in the Ain Dilb quarter of the Shia-dominated southern suburbs of Beirut, a ramshackle district beside the airport that was home to Mughnieh in the 1980s. By yesterday afternoon Mughnieh’s coffin had been transported to the southern suburbs of the city, where it lay in state draped in yellow Hezbollah flags, flanked by uniformed fighters, as mourners filed past.
“This is as big a blow as it gets for Hezbollah security. It’s even bigger than killing [the Hezbollah leader Sheikh Hassan] Nasrallah,” said Magnus Ranstorp, a Hezbollah specialist at the Swedish National Defence College in Stockholm.
Israel denied responsibility for Mughnieh’s death, although Israeli officials greeted the demise of their arch enemy with joy. Danny Yatom, former director of the Mossad intelligence agency, called the assassination “a great achievement for the free world in its fight against terror”.
A retaliation from Hezbollah is almost certain. When Israel assassinated Sheikh Abbas Mussawi, then the Hezbollah leader, in February 1992, the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires was blown up a month later, killing 29 people in a revenge operation alleged to have been planned by Mughnieh himself.
“This is something that Hezbollah cannot let pass. Mughnieh was too much of a symbol,” said Timur Goksel, a lecturer on international relations in Beirut and a former United Nations official in south Lebanon. “I don’t think Hezbollah will go for a big bombing, probably an assassination of a high-profile target.” Sheikh Afif Naboulsi, a prominent Hezbollah cleric in south Lebanon, told al-Manar television “Any attack against Hezbollah will be met with a response . . . an eye for an eye, a man for a man, a leader for a leader”.
Mughnieh’s death comes amid high tensions in Lebanon as the country prepares to mark the third anniversary of the assassination of Rafik Hariri, the former Prime Minister, in a Valentine’s Day lorry bomb blast in 2005.
Hezbollah is organising a large funeral for Mughnieh this afternoon, even as a huge turnout is expected in central Beirut to commemorate Hariri’s death. While Israel and the US top the list of suspects behind Mughnieh’s death, some Lebanese – especially those that oppose the Syrian regime – were quick to point a finger of blame at Damascus.
“It could have been the Syrians,” Walid Jumblatt, an outspoken member of the antiSyrian March 14 parliamentary coalition, told The Times. “Damascus is well protected and I don’t think somebody else could do it.” Israel’s assassins have penetrated Damascus before, however. In September 2004 a senior commander of the Palestinian Hamas movement was killed in a similar car-bomb explosion, an act pinned on Israel.
In 1985 Mughnieh led the hijacking of a TWA airliner in Beirut in which a US navy diver was killed. He is also alleged to have run the networks of kidnappers who snatched dozens of foreigners in Beirut in the mid to late 1980s, including Terry Waite, the former envoy to the Archbishop of Canterbury, and John McCarthy, the British journalist.
Mughnieh was born in 1962 in the southern Lebanese village of Teir Dibba. He grew up in the southern suburbs of Beirut, where, as a teenager, he joined Force 17, the elite unit of the Fatah faction led by Yassir Arafat, the Palestinian leader.
After Israeli forces expelled the Palestinians from Beirut during the invasion of Lebanon in 1982, Mughnieh joined a group of Shia Islamists then coalescing under Iranian guidance in the Bekaa Valley. The group became Hezbollah, and Mughnieh, despite his youth, was considered one of its most capable figures. He is believed to have overseen the April 1983 suicide bombing of the US Embassy in Beirut and, six months later, the twin suicide lorry-bomb attacks against the US Marine barracks and the French paratroop headquarters in Beirut – acts that killed nearly 400 people.
Unlike Osama bin Laden, Mughnieh rarely gave interviews or released statements to the public. He lived in the shadows, aware that he was a target for assassination by the Americans and Israelis. In the mid1990s, the Israelis recruited a former pro-Syrian Sunni militiaman to kill Mughnieh in Beirut with a bomb. But the assassin killed his brother, Fuad, instead. Mughnieh’s other brother, Jihad, died in car-bomb assassination attempt in March 1985 against a senior Shia cleric that was later found to have been carried out by CIA-trained Lebanese agents.
Mughnieh was rumoured to have had facial surgery twice to disguise his features. He moved his family to Tehran at the end of the Lebanese civil war in 1990 and travelled between the Iranian capital, Beirut and Damascus, allegedly using an Iranian diplomatic passport and travelling on unscheduled flights.
After Hezbollah drove Israeli forces out of south Lebanon in 2000, Mughnieh is thought to have overseen the development of the group’s military wing, turning it into the formidable machine that battled Israeli forces to a standstill in the summer war of 2006.
Hezbollah, officially, has always distanced itself from Mughnieh and his alleged exploits. However, in an interview with The Times in July 2003, Nasrallah, a long-time friend of Mughnieh, said: “Haji Imad is among the best freedom fighters in the Lebanese arena. He had a very important role during the occupation [of Lebanon by Israel]. But as for his relationship with Hezbollah, we maintain the tradition of not discussing names.” The few photographs of Mughnieh in the public domain date back to the 1980s and show a serious-looking, narrow-faced young man with a sharply pointed black beard. But, with his death, al-Manar television broadcast a recent picture of him. It showed a chubby man with full beard streaked with grey, wearing wire-rimmed spectacles and dressed in a camouflage uniform.
“The man was a murderer and murdered people who had nothing to do with Lebanon,” Robert Baer, a former CIA officer who tracked Mughnieh in 1980s Beirut, told The Times. “But, at the same time, he believed he was fighting an anti-colonial war.”
Imad Mughnieh, the senior Hezbollah commander accused of master-minding the terrorist spectaculars of war-torn Lebanon in the 1980s, met his end in a car-bomb explosion in a smart suburb of Damascus on Tuesday night.
Mughnieh, 45, ranked second only to Osama bin Laden on Washingon’s most-wanted list, was accused of killing more Americans than any other militant before the attacks of September 11, 2001, earning him a $25 million (£13 million) bounty for his capture and the undying enmity of the US and Israel.
Mughnieh died at 10.45pm in Kfar Soussa, when a bomb exploded inside his Mitsubishi Pajero. He was the only victim of the blast. His body lay on the side of the road covered in a white sheet before being carried away along with the remains of his vehicle.
Hezbollah confirmed Mughnieh’s death early yesterday morning.
“With all due pride, we declare a great jihadist leader of the Islamic Resistance in Lebanon joining the martyrs . . . The brother commander Haji Imad Mughnieh became a martyr at the hands of the Zionist Israelis,” said a statement carried by the Hezbollah al-Manar television channel. The station broke off normal program-ming to broadcast verses from the Koran interspersed with commentary and propaganda footage of Hezbollah fighters in action.
As the news spread, gunfire broke out in the Ain Dilb quarter of the Shia-dominated southern suburbs of Beirut, a ramshackle district beside the airport that was home to Mughnieh in the 1980s. By yesterday afternoon Mughnieh’s coffin had been transported to the southern suburbs of the city, where it lay in state draped in yellow Hezbollah flags, flanked by uniformed fighters, as mourners filed past.
“This is as big a blow as it gets for Hezbollah security. It’s even bigger than killing [the Hezbollah leader Sheikh Hassan] Nasrallah,” said Magnus Ranstorp, a Hezbollah specialist at the Swedish National Defence College in Stockholm.
Israel denied responsibility for Mughnieh’s death, although Israeli officials greeted the demise of their arch enemy with joy. Danny Yatom, former director of the Mossad intelligence agency, called the assassination “a great achievement for the free world in its fight against terror”.
A retaliation from Hezbollah is almost certain. When Israel assassinated Sheikh Abbas Mussawi, then the Hezbollah leader, in February 1992, the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires was blown up a month later, killing 29 people in a revenge operation alleged to have been planned by Mughnieh himself.
“This is something that Hezbollah cannot let pass. Mughnieh was too much of a symbol,” said Timur Goksel, a lecturer on international relations in Beirut and a former United Nations official in south Lebanon. “I don’t think Hezbollah will go for a big bombing, probably an assassination of a high-profile target.” Sheikh Afif Naboulsi, a prominent Hezbollah cleric in south Lebanon, told al-Manar television “Any attack against Hezbollah will be met with a response . . . an eye for an eye, a man for a man, a leader for a leader”.
Mughnieh’s death comes amid high tensions in Lebanon as the country prepares to mark the third anniversary of the assassination of Rafik Hariri, the former Prime Minister, in a Valentine’s Day lorry bomb blast in 2005.
Hezbollah is organising a large funeral for Mughnieh this afternoon, even as a huge turnout is expected in central Beirut to commemorate Hariri’s death. While Israel and the US top the list of suspects behind Mughnieh’s death, some Lebanese – especially those that oppose the Syrian regime – were quick to point a finger of blame at Damascus.
“It could have been the Syrians,” Walid Jumblatt, an outspoken member of the antiSyrian March 14 parliamentary coalition, told The Times. “Damascus is well protected and I don’t think somebody else could do it.” Israel’s assassins have penetrated Damascus before, however. In September 2004 a senior commander of the Palestinian Hamas movement was killed in a similar car-bomb explosion, an act pinned on Israel.
In 1985 Mughnieh led the hijacking of a TWA airliner in Beirut in which a US navy diver was killed. He is also alleged to have run the networks of kidnappers who snatched dozens of foreigners in Beirut in the mid to late 1980s, including Terry Waite, the former envoy to the Archbishop of Canterbury, and John McCarthy, the British journalist.
Mughnieh was born in 1962 in the southern Lebanese village of Teir Dibba. He grew up in the southern suburbs of Beirut, where, as a teenager, he joined Force 17, the elite unit of the Fatah faction led by Yassir Arafat, the Palestinian leader.
After Israeli forces expelled the Palestinians from Beirut during the invasion of Lebanon in 1982, Mughnieh joined a group of Shia Islamists then coalescing under Iranian guidance in the Bekaa Valley. The group became Hezbollah, and Mughnieh, despite his youth, was considered one of its most capable figures. He is believed to have overseen the April 1983 suicide bombing of the US Embassy in Beirut and, six months later, the twin suicide lorry-bomb attacks against the US Marine barracks and the French paratroop headquarters in Beirut – acts that killed nearly 400 people.
Unlike Osama bin Laden, Mughnieh rarely gave interviews or released statements to the public. He lived in the shadows, aware that he was a target for assassination by the Americans and Israelis. In the mid1990s, the Israelis recruited a former pro-Syrian Sunni militiaman to kill Mughnieh in Beirut with a bomb. But the assassin killed his brother, Fuad, instead. Mughnieh’s other brother, Jihad, died in car-bomb assassination attempt in March 1985 against a senior Shia cleric that was later found to have been carried out by CIA-trained Lebanese agents.
Mughnieh was rumoured to have had facial surgery twice to disguise his features. He moved his family to Tehran at the end of the Lebanese civil war in 1990 and travelled between the Iranian capital, Beirut and Damascus, allegedly using an Iranian diplomatic passport and travelling on unscheduled flights.
After Hezbollah drove Israeli forces out of south Lebanon in 2000, Mughnieh is thought to have overseen the development of the group’s military wing, turning it into the formidable machine that battled Israeli forces to a standstill in the summer war of 2006.
Hezbollah, officially, has always distanced itself from Mughnieh and his alleged exploits. However, in an interview with The Times in July 2003, Nasrallah, a long-time friend of Mughnieh, said: “Haji Imad is among the best freedom fighters in the Lebanese arena. He had a very important role during the occupation [of Lebanon by Israel]. But as for his relationship with Hezbollah, we maintain the tradition of not discussing names.” The few photographs of Mughnieh in the public domain date back to the 1980s and show a serious-looking, narrow-faced young man with a sharply pointed black beard. But, with his death, al-Manar television broadcast a recent picture of him. It showed a chubby man with full beard streaked with grey, wearing wire-rimmed spectacles and dressed in a camouflage uniform.
“The man was a murderer and murdered people who had nothing to do with Lebanon,” Robert Baer, a former CIA officer who tracked Mughnieh in 1980s Beirut, told The Times. “But, at the same time, he believed he was fighting an anti-colonial war.”
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