An undated {photograph} launched by the press workplace of Hezbollah’s navy media on September 21, 2024 exhibits Hezbollah’s high commander Ibrahim Aqil, who was killed on September 20 in an Israeli strike within the southern suburbs of Beirut. | Photograph credit score: AFP
Ibrahim Aqil, the Hezbollah operations commander killed in an Israeli strike on Friday (20 September 2024), had a $7 million bounty on his head for 2 truck bombings in Beirut in 1983 that killed greater than 300 individuals on the US embassy and a US Marine barracks.
Two safety sources in Lebanon confirmed that the veteran fighter was killed in an airstrike within the southern suburbs of Beirut throughout a gathering of the elite Radwan unit of the Iranian-backed Lebanese militant group.
Aqil, who additionally used the aliases Tahsin and Abdelqader, was the second member of Hezbollah’s high navy organ, the Jihad Council, to be killed in two months following an Israeli strike in the identical space concentrating on Fuad Shukr in July.
Israel stepped up its assaults on the group this week after months of border preventing sparked by the battle in Gaza that started on Oct. 7 with a lethal raid and hostage-taking in Israel by Hezbollah’s Palestinian ally Hamas.
Like Shukr, Aqil is a veteran of Hezbollah, a gaggle based by Iran’s Revolutionary Guard within the early Eighties to struggle Israeli forces that had invaded and occupied Lebanon.
Born in a village in Lebanon’s Beqaa Valley round 1960, Aqil had joined Lebanon’s different main Shiite political motion, Amal, earlier than defecting to Hezbollah as a founding member, in accordance with a safety supply.
The USA accuses him of enjoying a task within the truck bombings of the US embassy in Beirut in April 1983, which killed 63 individuals, and the bombing of a US Marine barracks six months later, which killed 241 individuals.
It additionally accused him of masterminding the kidnapping of American and German hostages in Lebanon and positioned him on its record of specifically designated world terrorists in 2019, putting a $7 million bounty on his head.
Referring to the bombing of the US Marine barracks and different assaults on Western pursuits in Lebanon within the Eighties, Hezbollah chief Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah stated in a 2022 interview with an Arab broadcaster that they have been carried out by small teams not linked to Hezbollah.
Aqil’s group, made up of founding Hezbollah operatives, helped remodel the group from a shadowy militia into Lebanon’s strongest navy and political group, driving Israel out of its occupation of the south in 2000 and preventing it once more in 2006.
When Shukr was killed in July, it was seen as the most important blow to its command construction for the reason that 2008 assassination of Imad Mughniyeh, remembered by Hezbollah as a legendary commander however by Israel and america as a terrorist.
Aqil, whose bounty was set by the US at an excellent larger worth than Shukr’s, may show an identical blow.
Printed – September 21, 2024 04:26 pm IST