Killing Hezbollah commander in Beirut was biggest loss for group since 2008
2024.08.01 08:42
BEIRUT (Reuters) -Fuad Shukr, the top Hezbollah commander killed by Israel on Tuesday, was a founding member of the Iran-backed group who helped oversee its expansion from a shadowy Lebanese civil war militia to a major force in the Middle East.
His killing is the heaviest blow to Hezbollah’s command since the 2008 assassination of Imad Mughniyeh, underlining the gravity of this week’s escalation in the conflict, which has been rumbling across region since the Gaza war erupted.
While the assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran marked a major political setback to the Palestinian Islamist group and its Iran-backed allies, Shukr’s killing has stripped their camp of one of its top military leaders.
Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah is due to speak at his funeral on Thursday.
Also known as Al-Hajj Mohsin, Shukr was part of a generation of Lebanese Shi’ite Muslims who mobilised in 1982 to fight Israeli troops, which had invaded Lebanon that year. They were driven by ideological inspiration from Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution.
He was a close associate of Mughniyeh, a shadowy figure remembered in Hezbollah as a legendary commander but by the United States as a terrorist, accused of plotting attacks including the 1983 bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut.
The United States says Shukr played a central role in the bombing that killed 241 U.S. military personnel. In 2017, it put a bounty of up to $5 million on Shukr’s head, according to the U.S. government’s Rewards for Justice website.
Israel said Shukr was responsible for the killing of numerous Israelis and foreign nationals over the years.
RETALIATORY STRIKE
Israel killed Shukr, 61, in retaliation for a July 27 rocket attack that killed 12 children and teenagers in a Druze village in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights on Saturday.
Hezbollah, which has been trading fire with Israel since Oct. 8, denied any role in the attack.
In 1982, Shukr helped to plan a suicide car bomb attack on Israeli troops at their barracks in the southern Lebanese city of Tyre, along with Mughniyeh and others, according to details of his life published by the pro-Hezbollah al-Akhbar newspaper.
Photos of Shukr published by the paper on Thursday showed him in fatigues standing between Mughniyeh and Mustafa Badreddine, another Hezbollah veteran commander who was killed in Syria in 2016.
Al-Akhbar also published a photo of Shukr alongside Qassem Soleimani, the commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Quds Force, who was killed in a U.S. drone strike in Baghdad in 2020.
As a top Hezbollah commander from 1985 until the mid-nineties, Shukr oversaw the evolution of Hezbollah attacks from suicide bombings to operations that included storming Israeli positions, whilst building Hezbollah’s arsenal with the addition of weapons such as anti-tank missiles, al-Akhbar reported.
He assumed many of Mughniyeh’s responsibilities after his assassination, sources familiar with his role said. His roles included acting as military adviser to Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah.
The Israeli military said Shukr was responsible for the majority of Hezbollah’s most advanced weaponry, including precision-guided missiles, cruise missiles, anti-ship missiles, long-range rockets and drones.
Announcing the bounty on his head in 2017, the U.S. Rewards for Justice program said he played a key role in Hezbollah’s military operations in Syria, where the group deployed fighters in support of President Bashar al-Assad in the early years of the Syrian civil war.
Hezbollah at the time dismissed the accusations against Shukr and another Hezbollah operative for whom a bounty was offered, Talal Hamiyah, saying they were “rejected and void”.
Referring to the bombing of the U.S. Marine Barracks and other attacks on Western interests in Lebanon in the 1980s, Hezbollah leader Nasrallah said in 2022 they were carried out by small groups not linked to Hezbollah, in an interview with an Arabic broadcaster.
