Mike Brewer

BEIRUT, Lebanon - Imad Mughniyeh, the suspected mastermind of dramatic attacks on the U.S. Embassy and U.S. Marine barracks that killed hundreds of Americans in Lebanon in the 1980s, has died in a car bombing in Syria.

The Islamic militant group Hezbollah and its Iranian backers on Wednesday blamed Israel for the killing of Mughniyeh, Hezbollah's security chief in the 1980s who was one of the world's most wanted and elusive terrorists. Israel denied involvement.

Hezbollah did not say how or where Mughniyeh was killed. But Iranian state television and the National Organization for Human Rights in Syria said he died in a car bombing in the Syrian capital Damascus on Tuesday night.

Hezbollah's announcement of the death came a few hours after a late night explosion in Damascus destroyed a vehicle. Witnesses in the Syrian capital said at the time that a passerby was killed as security forces sealed off the area and removed the body. But authorities there would not give details.

"With all pride, we declare a great jihadist leader of the Islamic resistance in Lebanon joining the martyrs," said a statement carried on Hezbollah television. "The brother commander hajj Imad Mughinyeh became a martyr at the hands of the Zionist Israelis."

Mughniyeh, 45, had been in hiding for years. He was one of the fugitives indicted in the United States for planning and participating in the 1985 hijacking of a TWA airliner in which a U.S. Navy diver was killed. He is on an FBI most wanted list with a $5 million bounty on his head for that indictment.

Mughniyeh was believed to have directed a group that held Westerners hostage in Lebanon. Among them was journalist Terry Anderson, a former Associated Press chief Middle East correspondent who was held captive for six years.

"I can't say I'm either surprised or sad," Andersen told the AP by phone from the Caribbean island of St. Lucia, where he was sailing. "He was not a good man _ certainly the primary actor in my kidnapping and many others," he added. "To hear that his career has finally ended is a good thing and it's appropriate that he goes up in a car bomb."

In Washington, the State Department also welcomed news of his reported death but stressed it did not have independent information on the reports.

"The world is a better place without this man in it," said State Department spokesman Sean McCormack, who added that "one way or the other he was brought to justice."

Israel accused him of involvement in the 1992 bombing of Israel's embassy in Argentina in which 29 people were killed and the blast at a Buenos Aires Jewish center two years later that killed 85.

Iranian media reported that an Iranian school and a Syrian intelligence office were in the same area of Kafar Soussa where the explosion in Damascus occurred.

One report said Mughniyeh was leaving his house and about to get into his car when it exploded. Another said he was attending a ceremony at the Iranian school in Damascus and was killed as he left the function.

"This action is yet another brazen example of organized state terrorism by the Zionist regime," Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Mohammad Ali Hosseini said, according to the state news agency IRNA.

Hezbollah, whose top leader Hassan Nasrallah has been largely in hiding since the 2006 war fearing Israeli assassination, did not immediately threaten revenge.

Israel denied involvement and said it was looking into the death.

"Israel rejects the attempt by terror groups to attribute to it any involvement in this incident. We have nothing further to add," read the statement from Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's office.

Israeli lawmaker Danny Yatom, a former head of the Mossad spy agency, praised the killing.

"In the fight against terror today by the free and democratic world, I think that the free and democratic world today achieved a very, very important goal," Yatom said.

Syria has not commented on the death. If confirmed that Syria was hosting Mughniyeh, it would be an embarrassment for the government of President Bashar Assad. Syria is accused of hosting a number of Palestinian extremist groups and has been accused by the U.S. of sponsoring terrorism.

The death could also could further stir up turmoil in deeply divided Lebanon, where a Hezbollah-led opposition is locked in a bitter power struggle with the Western-backed government. Hezbollah called for a massive gathering of its supporters for Mughniyeh's funeral in southern Beirut on Thursday.

Mughniyeh was Hezbollah security chief during a turbulent period in Lebanon's civil war. He has been accused of masterminding the April 1983 car bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut that killed 63 people, including 17 Americans, and the simultaneous truck bombings of the U.S. Marine barracks and French military base in Beirut, killing 58 French soldiers and 241 Marines.

He was indicted in the United States for the 1985 TWA hijacking in which Shiite militants seized the 747 and flew it back and forth between Beirut and Algiers demanding the release of Lebanese Shiites captured by Israel. During the hijacking, the body of Navy diver Robert Stethem, a passenger on the plane, was dumped on the tarmac of Beirut airport.

During Lebanon's civil war, Mughniyeh was also believed to have directed a string of kidnappings of Americans and other foreigners, including Anderson _ who was held for six years until his release in 1991 _ and CIA station chief William Buckley, who was killed in 1985.

Anderson was the last American hostage freed in a complicated deal that involved Israel's release of Lebanese prisoners, Iran's sway with the kidnappers, Syria's influence and _ according to an Iranian radio broadcast _ promises by the United States and Germany not to retaliate against the kidnappers.

Giandomenico Picco, an Italian diplomat working at the time as a special assistant to U.N. Secretary General Javier Perez de Cuellar, said he was certain but never able to absolutely confirm that the hooded man he met in the slums of Beirut to finalize the deal was Imad Mughniyeh.

Mughinyeh's killing was the first major attack against a leader of Hezbollah since the 1992 helicopter strike that killed the Hezbollah secretary-general Sheik Abbas Mussawi in southern Lebanon.

Little has been known about him since the end of the Lebanese civil war and Hezbollah has regularly refused to talk about him. Wednesday's announcement of his death was the first mention of him in years.

Al-Manar on Wednesday aired a rare picture of Mughniyeh _ showing a burly, bespectacled man with a black beard wearing a military camouflage and a military cap. It did not say when the picture was taken. Mughniyeh has been reported by the media and intelligence agencies to have undergone plastic surgery to avoid detection as he moved around in the 1990s.

American intelligence officials have described Mughniyeh as Hezbollah's operations chief, who was believed to have moved between Lebanon, Syria and Iran in disguise.

Mughniyeh's last public appearance was believed to be at the funeral of his brother Fuad, who was killed on Dec. 12, 1994, when a booby-trapped car blew up in the southern suburb of Beirut.

In 2006, Mughniyeh was reported to have met with hardline Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Syria. Tehran and the country's paramilitary Revolutionary Guards have never publicly disclosed the extent of their links with their protege Hezbollah.

Hezbollah did not threaten immediate revenge. Its al-Manar television, which broke into Quranic verses after the announcement, broadcast another statement from the Shiite Muslim militant group, saying a funeral will be held on Thursday.

warrior_artist

Good riddens.

DickHardman

man, lebanon was so crazy in 80s when israel invaded it. so many different people fighting each other. people were being kidnapped, murdered, and blown up all over the place. the 2006 isreal-lebanon war was crazy too. the next one is probably not too far off.

DickHardman

JERUSALEM, Aug. 6 — On Dec. 26, 2003, a powerful earthquake leveled most of Bam, in southeastern Iran, killing 35,000 people. Transport planes carrying aid poured in from everywhere, including Syria.

According to Israeli military intelligence, the planes returned to Syria carrying sophisticated weapons, including long-range Zelzal missiles, which the Syrians passed on to Hezbollah, the Shiite militia group in southern Lebanon that Iran created and sponsors.

As the Israeli Army struggles for a fourth week to defeat Hezbollah before a cease-fire, the shipments are just one indication of how — with the help of its main sponsors, Iran and Syria — the militia has sharply improved its arsenal and strategies in the six years since Israel abruptly ended its occupation of southern Lebanon.

Hezbollah is a militia trained like an army and equipped like a state, and its fighters “are nothing like Hamas or the Palestinians,” said a soldier who just returned from Lebanon. “They are trained and highly qualified,” he said, equipped with flak jackets, night-vision goggles, good communications and sometimes Israeli uniforms and ammunition. “All of us were kind of surprised.”

Much attention has been focused on Hezbollah’s astonishing stockpile of Syrian- and Iranian-made missiles, some 3,000 of which have already fallen on Israel. More than 48 Israelis have been killed in the attacks — including 12 reservist soldiers killed Sunday, who were gathered at a kibbutz at Kfar Giladi, in northern Israel, when rockets packed with antipersonnel ball bearings exploded among them, and 3 killed Sunday evening in another rocket barrage on Haifa.

But Iran and Syria also used those six years to provide satellite communications and some of the world’s best infantry weapons, including modern, Russian-made antitank weapons and Semtex plastic explosives, as well as the training required to use them effectively against Israeli armor.

It is Hezbollah’s skillful use of those weapons — in particular, wire-guided and laser-guided antitank missiles, with double, phased explosive warheads and a range of about two miles — that has caused most of the casualties to Israeli forces.

Hezbollah’s Russian-made antitank missiles, designed to penetrate armor, have damaged or destroyed Israeli vehicles, including its most modern tank, the Merkava, on about 20 percent of their hits, Israeli tank commanders at the front said.

Hezbollah has also used antitank missiles, including the less modern Sagger, to fire from a distance into houses in which Israeli troops are sheltered, with a first explosion cracking the typical concrete block wall and the second going off inside.

“They use them like artillery to hit houses,” said Brig. Gen. Yossi Kuperwasser, until recently the Israeli Army’s director of intelligence analysis. “They can use them accurately up to even three kilometers, and they go through a wall like through the armor of a tank.”

Hezbollah fighters use tunnels to quickly emerge from the ground, fire a shoulder-held antitank missile, and then disappear again, much the way Chechen rebels used the sewer system of Grozny to attack Russian armored columns.

“We know what they have and how they work,” General Kuperwasser said. “But we don’t know where all the tunnels are. So they can achieve tactical surprise.”

The antitank missiles are the “main fear” for Israeli troops, said David Ben-Nun, 24, an enlisted man in the Nahal brigade who just returned from a week in Lebanon. The troops do not linger long in any house because of hidden missile crews. “You can’t even see them,” he said.

With modern communications and a network of tunnels, storage rooms, barracks and booby traps laid under the hilly landscape, Hezbollah’s training, tactics and modern weaponry explain, the Israelis say, why they are moving with caution.

The Israelis say Hezbollah’s fighters number from 2,000 to 4,000, a small army that is aided by a larger circle of part-timers who provide logistics and storage of weapons in houses and civilian buildings.

Hezbollah operates like a revolutionary force within a civilian sea, making it hard to fight without occupying or bombing civilian areas. On orders, some fighters emerge to retrieve launchers, fire missiles and then melt away. Still, the numbers are small compared with the Israeli Army and are roughly the size of one Syrian division.

The Iranian Revolutionary Guards have helped teach Hezbollah how to organize itself like an army, with special units for intelligence, antitank warfare, explosives, engineering, communications and rocket launching.

They have also taught Hezbollah how to aim rockets, make shaped “improvised explosive devices” — used to such devastating results against American armor in Iraq — and, the Israelis say, even how to fire the C-802, a ground-to-ship missile that Israel never knew Hezbollah possessed.

Iranian Air Force officers have made repeated trips to Lebanon to train Hezbollah to aim and fire Iranian medium-range missiles, like the Fajr-3 and Fajr-5, according to intelligence officials in Washington. The Americans say they believe that a small number of Iranian operatives remain in Beirut, but say there is no evidence that they are directing Hezbollah’s attacks.

But Iran, so far, has not allowed Hezbollah to fire one of the Zelzal missiles, the Israelis say.

The former Syrian president, Hafez al-Assad, was careful to restrict supplies to Hezbollah, but his son, Bashar, who took over in 2000 — the year Israel pulled out of Lebanon — has opened its warehouses.

Syria has given Hezbollah 220-millimeter and 302-millimeter missiles, both equipped with large, anti-personnel warheads. Syria has also given Hezbollah its most sophisticated antitank weapons, sold to the Syrian Army by Russia.

Those, General Kuperwasser said, include the Russian Metis and RPG-29. The RPG-29 has both an antitank round to better penetrate armor and an anti-personnel round. The Metis is more modern yet, wire-guided with a longer range and a higher speed, and can fire up to four rounds a minute.

Some Israelis say they believe that Syria has provided Hezbollah with the Russian-made Kornet, laser-guided, with a range of about three miles, which Hezbollah may be holding back, waiting for Israel to move farther into southern Lebanon and extend its supply lines.

Despite Israeli complaints to Moscow, “Russia just decided to close its eyes,” a senior Israeli official said.

In its early years, Hezbollah specialized in suicide bombings and kidnappings. The United States blames it for the suicide attacks on the American Embassy in Beirut and a Marine barracks in 1983. The group became popular in the Shiite south and set up its mini-state there, as well as reserving to itself a section of southern Beirut, known as Security Square.

Until 2003, Timur Goksel was the senior political adviser to Unifil, the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon, which monitors the border. He says he knows Hezbollah well and speaks with admiration of its commitment and organization.

After fighting the Israelis for 18 years, “they’re not afraid of the Israeli Army anymore,” he said in a telephone interview from Beirut. Hezbollah’s ability to harass the Israelis and study their flaws, like a tendency for regular patrols and for troop convoys on the eve of the Sabbath, gave Hezbollah confidence that the Israeli Army “is a normal human army, with normal vulnerabilities and follies,” he added.

Now, however, “Hezbollah has much better weapons than before,” he said.

Mr. Goksel describes Hezbollah much as the Israelis do: careful, patient, attuned to gathering intelligence, scholars of guerrilla warfare from the American Revolution to Mao and the Vietcong, and respectful of Israeli firepower and mobility.

“Hezbollah has studied asymmetrical warfare, and they have the advantage of fighting in their own landscape, among their people, where they’ve prepared for just what the Israelis are doing — entering behind armor on the ground,” Mr. Goksel said.

“They have staff work and they do long-term planning, something the Palestinians never do,” he said. “They watch for two months to note every detail of their enemy. They review their operations — what they did wrong, how the enemy responded. And they have flexible tactics, without a large hierarchical command structure.”

That makes them very different from the Soviet-trained Arab armies the Israelis defeated in 1967 and 1973, which had a command structure that was too regimented.

In 1992, when Sheik Hassan Nasrallah took over, he organized Hezbollah into three regional commands with military autonomy. Beirut and the Hezbollah council made policy, but did not try to run the war. Sheik Nasrallah — said to have been advised by the secretive Imad Mugniyeh, a trained engineer wanted by the United States on terrorism charges — thereby improved Hezbollah’s security and limited its communications.

It set up separate and largely autonomous units that live among civilians, with local reserve forces to provide support, supplies and logistics. Hezbollah commanders travel in old cars without bodyguards or escorts and wear no visible insignia, Mr. Goksel said, to keep their identities hidden.

Hezbollah began by setting up roadside bombs detonated by cables, which the Israelis learned to defeat with wire-cutting attachments to their vehicles. Then Hezbollah used radio detonators, which the Israelis also defeated, and then cellphone detonators, and then a double system of cellphones, and then a photocell detonator — like the beam that opens an automatic door. Now, Mr. Goksel said, Hezbollah is working with pressure detonators dug into the roads, even as the Israelis weld metal plates to the bottom of their tanks.

Hezbollah, Mr. Goksel says, has clear tactics, trying to draw Israeli ground troops farther into Lebanon. “They can’t take the Israelis in open battle,” he said, “so they want to draw them in to well-prepared battlefields,” like Aita al Shaab, where there has been fierce fighting.

He added: “They know the Israelis depend too much on armor, which is a prime target for them. And they want Israeli supply lines to lengthen, so they’re easier to hit.”

Israeli tanks have been struck by huge roadside bombs planted in expectation that Israeli armor would roll across the border, said one tank lieutenant, who in keeping with military policy would only give his first name, Ohad.

At least two soldiers from his unit have been wounded by snipers who are accurate at 600 yards. The Hezbollah fighters “are not just farmers who have been given weapons to fire,” he said. “They are persistent and well trained.”

Another tank company commander, a captain who gave his name as Edan, said that about 20 percent of the missiles that have hit Israeli tanks penetrated the Merkava armor or otherwise caused causalities.

Col. Mordechai Kahane, the commander of the Golani brigade’s Egoz unit, first set up to fight Hezbollah, told the Israeli newspaper Yediot Aharonot of one of the worst early days, when his unit went into Marun al Ras in daylight, and lost a senior officer and a number of men.

“Hezbollah put us to sleep” building up its fortifications, he said. “There’s no certainty that we knew that we were going to encounter what it is that we ultimately encountered. We said, ‘There is going to be a bunker here, a cave there,’ but the thoroughness surprised us all. A Hezbollah weapons storeroom is not just a natural cave. It’s a pit with concrete, ladders, emergency openings, escape routes. We didn’t know it was that well organized.”

General Kuperwasser, too, respects Hezbollah’s ability “to well prepare the battlefield,” but says, “We’re making progress and killing a lot of them, and more of them are giving up in battle now and becoming prisoners, which is a very important sign.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/07/wo...ewanted=1&_r=1

Mike Brewer

Dick,
What precisely did that have to do with Imad Mughniyeh's death?

DickHardman

i just find the 2 israeli invasions of lebanon to be quite fascinating to study, so i posted an article for anyone else interested in reading about some of the stuff that happened. modern guerrilla warfare is an interesting subject.

Mike Brewer

I get that, and it is interesting. But I'll ask again - What did it have to do with today's killing of a priority terrorist target?

DickHardman

i gave information about the organization he is a part of, and gave details about the kinds of things this organization is involved in. you dont like it or what?

Mike Brewer

It's not that, it's just that I think it belonged in its own thread. Or maybe you could have summarized the main points or something so it was a little more obvious what you were trying to get at.

I think the study of topics like that is not only interesting, but really important. It just seemed like you missed the point that we got the guy entirely in favor of posting a bunch of stuff about what his group and others have done. The hunt for the man who killed those Marines has been the life and blood of many agents and officers in the U.S. Bob Baer, Author of See No Evil and former CIA Operations Officer, was consumed by the hunt for this terrorist, and spent the bulk of his career attempting to find and kill the guy. The point of my post was not to trumpet terrorist attacks or even discuss them. My point in posting the article was to highlight the happy fact that one of the worst terrorist leaders ever - one of the leading killers of American men and women - is now worm bait.

Another small measure of justice has finally been delivered, and the list of capable, skilled terrorist leaders in the world has just gotten one name shorter. My issue with your posts was not the quality or content - just the placement. I didn't want to cock up the celebration of this shitbag's demise with scholarship regarding the past conflict itself.

Dammit Dick! Just let people be happy that another scumbag has been unceremoniously removed from the Earth and granted his meeting with Allah!

Tom Yum

Glad they took the guy out.

__________________

Love it, leave it or fix it.

DickHardman

so who do you think took him out?? israelis or americans?? someone planted the car bomb that took the guy out, they just arent saying who yet.

Mike Brewer

I don't know if I really care who did it. I'm glad it was done. I'd be just as happy about it if it was one of his own guys that just didn't know how to rig a fuze and ... oops! ... blew up the boss man.

Frankly, I'd LOVE to see special ops forces from every allied country start using things like that (car bombs) to take out terrorists when it's plausible. I'm a big fan of the message it sends. The only thing better in my mind would be convincing young Muslim radicals to go blow themselves up in the presence of these masterminds in the name of "moderate Islam." How ironic would that be?! "Rise up, young martyrs! Terrorists are perverting the only True Faith! It is up to us to take Islam back in the name of all real Muslims! Here's a bomb vest. Go blow up the radicals."

Man, that'd be a great headline.

DickHardman

this kind of thing is pretty common around the world. the mossad for example is notorious for assassinating terrorists with bombs and hit squads.

they would be doing their faith a much bigger service that way. even more ironic is that islam explicitly forbids suicide....