Friday, February 15, 2008

The death of Mugniyeh

Congratulations to whoever blew up and killed Imad Mugniyeh in Damascus, Syria! He was the head of Operations of Hizbollah in Lebanon under Sheikh Nasrullah, and he was responsible for hundreds of deaths throughout the world.
He was wanted by three main groups (i) the Lebanese Christians, whose leadership has been decimated in a series of car bombings attributed to him, probably including the murder of Rafik Hariri, (ii) the Americans, since he was known to be responsible for the bombing of the US marine barracks in Beirut in 1983 that killed 241 marines and the US Embassy the same year that killed many more, and he was directly implicated in the torture and murder of CIA Beirut station chief William Buckley and US military intelligence officer Lt. Col. William Richard Higgins, (iii) the Israelis, who have suffered dozens of IDF casualties at his hands in Lebanon and the bombing of both the Israeli embassy and Jewish center in Buenos Aires that killed 250. He was also behind the kidnappings of several Westerners in Lebanon during the 1990s and the deadly hijacking of TWA 847, and he was considered responsible for the taking of the two IDF hostages Eldad Regev and Ehud Goldwasser in 2006 that initiated the Second Lebanon war.
Because of his notoriety and number of enemies there were several attempts on his life and he was forced to seek safety in Damascus, where he has been protected by the Assad regime. Since his security was very high he had avoided assassination for many years. So there is some suspicion that he may have been killed because Syria relaxed his protection deliberately. For what reasons are unknown, but it could be an internal quarrel in Hizbollah, or a deal that the Assad regime made with others, possibly the Americans, but in exchange for what?
In Lebanon and Syria there were large demonstrations with placards calling for revenge, and throughout the Arab world Israel was blamed for the murder, without any evidence and a denial by the Israeli authorities, although noone belives that. If the Mossad or another Israeli security agency carried out this assassination of such a murderous terrorist, then good for them. But, whether or not they did there are now threats from Hizbollah to avenge Mugniyeh's death. Since Israel is quite well protected and Hizbollah are reported to have some 50 secret cells located around the world, there is fear of an attack against Jewish facilities somewhere in the West. Let's hope the rise in security awareness will be enough to prevent such an occurrence.

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home