Mystery surrounds death of Hezbollah commander
Nicholas Blanford/Now Lebanon/May 13/16
If Israel is judged responsible for the death of Mustafa Badreddine, Hezbollah’s retaliation will likely follow a similar pattern to operations following recent killings of its military commanders in Syria
It will take several days, perhaps longer, for the murk surrounding Mustafa Badreddine’s demise to clear, key to which will be the results of Hezbollah’s investigation into the death of the veteran cadre.
Hezbollah’s official line at the time of writing is an acknowledgement that a “large explosion” occurred at one of its positions near Damascus International Airport and that Badreddine was killed and a number of other people wounded.
There are perhaps two possible culprits behind the assassination, if that is what it was, and one alternative, more fanciful, theory.
The main suspect is Israel—and with good reason. Since the 2006 war, Israel has abandoned its hesitancy of the previous decade about dispatching senior Hezbollah leaders—military and political—when the opportunity arises. In 1992, Israeli helicopter gunships destroyed a vehicle carrying then Hezbollah leader Sheikh Abbas Mussawi, killing him, his wife and child. What appeared to be a tactical victory for Israel quickly backfired. In retaliation, Hezbollah launched rockets into Israel for the first time, the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires was blown up a month later, killing 29 people, and Mussawi was replaced the next day by the even more capable Sayyed Hasan Nasrallah.
From then until after the 2006 war, Israel left the senior leadership alone and concentrated—with limited success—on finding and killing Hezbollah field commanders.
The 2006 war changed Israel’s calculus. Israel believes it can get away with killing senior Hezbollah figures because it is gambling that the organization will refrain from a major retaliation which could trigger an escalation that leads to a war. Israel apparently put that analysis to the test in February 2008 when it reportedly played a role in the car bomb assassination of then Hezbollah military commander Imad Mughniyeh. There followed a number of minor, bungled or thwarted attempts to attack Israeli targets around the world which were attributed to Hezbollah, but nothing on the scale of the 1992 bombing of the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires.
Since Mughniyeh’s assassination, Israel appears to have been busy killing other senior commanders: Hassan Laqqis, a top Hezbollah military technician, was gunned down outside his home in southern Beirut in December 2013; in January 2015, Jihad Mughniyeh, Imad’s son, was killed along with an Iranian general in the Golan Heights in an Israeli drone strike; five months ago, Israeli jets bombed a building outside Damascus, killing Samir Kuntar, who had been organizing anti-Israel militias in Syria. If Israel is responsible for killing Badreddine, it would fit in with the pattern of assassinations in recent years.
If Hezbollah announces that Israel is responsible, we can expect to see some form of retaliation, probably similar to the operations it carried out in the wake of the killings of Jihad Mughniyeh and Kuntar. Mughniyeh was avenged with a skillfully conducted anti-tank missile ambush of an Israeli military convoy in the Shebaa Farms which left two soldiers dead. The less successful Kuntar retaliation saw a pair of road side bombs explode in the Shebaa Farms but without causing casualties.
A retaliation for Badreddine would have to draw Israeli blood, the Hezbollah cadres would accept no less. But, as with similar past reprisals, Hezbollah will have to craft an operation that stings Israel but without goading it into a counter-retaliation, the first step of an unwanted escalation.
The fact that Hezbollah did not immediately accuse Israel of Badreddine’s death should not be interpreted as hesitancy among the party’s leadership to have another entanglement with the Jewish state. When Israeli jets bombed a Hezbollah weapons storage facility near Janta in the eastern Bekaa in 2014, Hezbollah radio initially claimed the attack occurred just across the border in Syria, and therefore had nothing to do with the party. But some 36 hours later, Hezbollah released a statement confirming that one of its bases inside Lebanon had been hit and that retaliation was imminent. There followed a string of small scale attacks against Israeli troops over the next three weeks in the Shebaa Farms and northern Golan. If Hezbollah had been unwilling to mount an attack against Israel at the time, it did not have to release that second statement. No one in Lebanon could disprove Hezbollah’s initial declaration that the missile strike had been in Syrian territory.
The second potential culprit behind Badreddine’s death is a Sunni jihadist group, perhaps the Islamic State or Jabhat al-Nusra. It must be said that the odds that militants from either group were able to track down Badreddine and kill him with a car bomb or missile are very remote, but it is one possibility that is being considered. Some sources close to Hezbollah’s thinking are mulling whether Saudi Arabia may have had a role in Badreddine’s demise, given the open hostility between the party and the kingdom.
On the other hand, if the facility near Damascus airport was widely known to be in use by Hezbollah, it could have been targeted by a Sunni jihadist group that was unaware Badreddine was inside.
A third option—and here we stray into conspiracy theories—is that Badreddine did not die in Damascus but was killed outside Aleppo in the ongoing fighting in the area. Several Twitter feeds from Syrian rebel groups, including Jaysh al-Sunna, are claiming that Badreddine was killed in a battle in Khan Touman in southern Aleppo. Such claims can probably be discounted. Hezbollah has not covered up the deaths of senior field commanders in Syria’s various battlefields, and there is no reason why the party would attempt to obfuscate the location of Badreddine’s demise. Hezbollah considers Badreddine a martyr regardless of who killed him and where.
**Nicholas Blanford is Beirut correspondent for The Christian Science Monitor and Nonresident Senior Fellow of the Middle East Peace and Security Initiative at the Atlantic Council’s Brent Scowcroft Center on International Security