Imad Mughniyah is dead
Feb 13th, 2008 by MESH
From Andrew Exum
Imad Mughniyah is dead, killed in Damascus by a car bomb at the age of 45. Mughniyah was believed to have been Hezbollah’s chief of military operations, and his assassination marks the first time a major figure in the movement has been killed since secretary-general Abbas Musawi in 1992—an assassination which brought the current secretary-general, Hasan Nasrallah, to power.
For many, Mughniyah was a reviled figure, wanted by both Israel and the United States for his alleged role in numerous attacks on American and Israeli targets—including the truck-bombing of the U.S. Marine Corps barracks in Beirut in 1983 and the attack on the Israeli embassy in Argentina in 1992. (Formally, the FBI most-wanted him for his role in the 1985 hijacking of an American airliner to Beirut and the murder of a U.S. Navy diver on board.) For researchers such as myself, Mughniyah was of great interest because he represented a constant figure in Hezbollah throughout its evolution from an Iranian-backed Lebanese militia in the 1980s to a nationalist insurgent group in the 1990s and finally to its current incarnation as the most powerful political party in Lebanon—both in terms of weapons and popular support.
The timing of the assassination, from the perspective of Lebanese of all political stripes, could not have been worse. Tomorrow, after all, is the anniversary of the assassination of a great figure on the other side of Lebanon’s current political divide, former prime minister Rafik Hariri. One hopes that calm heads will prevail and that any ostentatious rallies in Hariri’s honor are postponed. At last year’s mass rally, ugly sectarian chants broke out, and surely given Beirut’s current tension, such chants could easily devolve into open violence.
This past week, Lebanon’s leaders once again irresponsibly postponed the election of a new president. So the assassination of Imad Mughniyah has taken place within a political environment that is, still, on a razor’s edge. If this year’s assassination and the memory of another lead Lebanon down a short path to civil war, Lebanon’s sectarian leaders will have only themselves to blame.
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8 Responses to “Imad Mughniyah is dead”
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Mughniyah’s death raises some interesting issues. The fact that Mughniyah was killed in Damascus highlights the Asad regime’s increasing difficulties in protecting the terrorists they provide with “safe haven.” In 2004, another guest of the regime, Hamas leader Izzeddin Subhi Sheikh Khalil, was killed by a car bomb in Damascus. The Israelis bombed an Islamic Jihad training camp in 2003, buzzed Asad’s Latakia palace in 2006, and destroyed a presumed North Korean-supplied nuclear facility in 2007. As Mughniyah’s aunt told AFP earlier today, “We were shocked to learn that he was killed in Syria. We thought he was safe there.”
In all of these cases, to put it mildly, the Syrian response has been remarkably restrained.
Another interesting issue raised by Mughniyah’s death is the impact this will have on the next U.S. Administration’s policy toward Syria. It’s no doubt problematic that the Asad regime provides sanctuary to top former Saddam regime elements who help orchestrate the insurgency in Iraq, getting a lot of U.S. soldiers killed in the process. But this hasn’t stopped many in the United States from arguing that “dialogue” with Damascus is the solution to these misunderstandings.
But Syrian attempts to harbor a leading killer of American citizens like Mughniyah will likely be viewed even more harshly by Washington. It will be more difficult for a candidate like Senator Obama to make the case for talks when Syrian behavior is so brazenly anti-American. The harboring of Mughniyah and others belies Syrian officials’ claims (like those of Syrian Ambassador Imad Mustafa) that Damascus seeks good relations with Washington.
Finally, Mughniyah’s departure may have implications for the internal politics of Hezbollah. In recent months, a series of articles have appeared in the Arab press (here is an example) suggesting some dissatisfaction among Hezbollah elites with Secretary-General Nasrallah’s leadership of the organization. Mughniyah, as Andrew Exum correctly notes in his post, was a constant for decades. His removal from the scene will necessarily impact the internal dynamics of the group, perhaps resulting in some changes within Hezbollah.
David Schenker is a member of MESH.
I’m surprised my friend David Schenker ignores the possibility that Mughniyah’s death was an olive branch from Syria to the West. Certainly Syrian state security had the capacity both to plant a powerful car bomb and to surveil Mughniyah well enough to know where the bomb should be placed so as to be lethal. In fact, such a task would be infinitely easier for the Syrians than any other potential actor.
Given speculation that Mughniyah may have been involved in the Hariri assassination, eliminating him may have had the dual effect of eliminating a witness and demonstrating Syrian good faith in the battle against terrorism.
If nothing else, his death is a lesson that if you hang out with people who have no respect for human life, they tend not to have very much respect for your life either.
Jon Alterman is a member of MESH.
David Schenker asks some great and necessary questions, but there is also a contradiction in what he says. You can only denounce Syria for allowing Imad Mughniyah into the country, as David does, if they did not have a role in his killing. If Syria did, in fact, play a role in his assassination as Jon Alterman suggests, you can’t condemn them for allowing him in. For critics of the Syrian regime, this is equivalent to having one’s cake and eating it too. You might have to open up to the possibility that Syria meant his assassination as an “olive branch” to the U.S. or Israel, as Jon suggested. But even if Syria was working with other elements of Hezbollah or the Iranians and not in concert with the U.S. or Israel, you still can’t criticize Syria for “harboring” Imad Mughniyah into the country if their intent was to kill him. Being killed by a car bomb in one of Damascus’s more secure neighborhoods is no one’s idea of safe harbor.
Trying to tie this in with the U.S. presidential election or what Senator Obama’s policy might be toward Syria is also premature. Who killed Imad Mughniyah and what their motivation was must surely first be determined before solid policy conclusions can be drawn.
Andrew Exum is a member of MESH.
My friend Jon Alterman’s supposition about Damascus being somehow involved in Mughniyah’s demise deserves some discussion. We’re probably going to be hearing a lot of this line of thinking in the coming days.
This is a pretty murky world we’re talking about here, but the common wisdom on Mughniyah has traditionally been that he was very close with Iranian intelligence and the Qods Force in particular. A lot of information on his ties to Iran in the 1990s is now in the public domain—and we also know that Mughniyah’s people were visiting their counterparts in Tehran as recently as 2007 for coordinating meetings on operations in Iraq.
So I think it’s a stretch to argue that Mughniyah had gone “rogue” as my friend Andrew Exum suggests in his blog today. In any event, if Damascus did want to kill Mughniyah, it seems to me the kind of decision that would have required Tehran’s blessing.
A few additional points regarding the “olive branch” theory:
1) When did Syria ever give a concession—particularly one that could never be revoked—as an olive branch?
2) The model we’re looking at is not that of the former Syrian viceroy in Lebanon, Ghazi Kenaan, who apparently was “suicided” after the Hariri assassination because he knew too much. In this case, I think Syria’s modus operandi more closely resembles what they have done with potentially embarrassing foreigners. Like Ocalan, who Syria dispatched to Russia in 1999 (he was eventually nabbed in Kenya), and former Saddam regime member Ibrahim Sabawi—who had been helping to orchestrate the insurgency from Syrian territory. Sabawi was unceremoniously dumped on the Iraqi side of the Syria-Iraq border in 2005, just a week or so after the Hariri assassination, a move most likely intended to alleviate pressures on Damascus.
3) Why would the Asad regime kill Mughniyah in Syria, when it would only confirm the provision of safe haven? It’s not as if Mughniyah was lured to Syria on this one occasion. According to his relatives, he lived there.
I do agree with Jon’s last point, though. These are not nice people.
David Schenker is a member of MESH.
I don’t know why the idea that Syria might be behind the Mughniyah assassination has gained such traction, as articulated here by Andrew Exum and Jon Alterman, but I am hearing even some in Lebanon are convinced it is part of a U.S.-Syria deal. Still, it doesn’t make sense on a number of levels.
Syria’s is a hard security regime, or, as regime-friendly explicator Joshua Landis likes to put it, Syria gets an A for security. So to have cars blowing up in the middle of the Syrian capital damages the prestige of the regime—and at a very high level, given that Asad’s brother-in-law Asef Shawkat is an intelligence chief. When the Syrians want to show to the world (i.e., Washington) that they are actively killing terrorists (Sunni jihadis of course, not Shia like Mughniyah), they take them down in shootouts, which shows the high competence of the security services, not their incompetence, which is what a car-bomb in Damascus proves.
Vulnerability is probably the last thing such a regime can manifest for two reasons. On the domestic front, it shows to the people that their security state is not capable of providing security. And on the regional front it suggests to other clandestine services that Damascus is a vulnerable target. With Syria meddling in the internal affairs of so many of its neighbors, one can only imagine what such a message would mean to the spy agencies of Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Turkey to name only a few.
All this speculation about Damascus being behind the assassination depends on two odd assumptions: one, the two-decades-old conviction that it is possible to “pry” Syria away from Iran and here finally is Syria’s opening gambit for such a deal; and two, that the most obvious agent of Imad Mughniyah’s demise could not really have killed Imad Mughniyah. But the Israelis have the resources, history and motivem so why look so far afield? Arab conspiracy theorists hold the Mossad responsible for everything from 9/11 to making matzoh with the blood of gentile children taken from … Damascus! It seems our almost equally credulous analogue is to believe the Israelis are incapable of penetrating the Syrian capital (Does no one remember Eli Cohen?)—when they flew deep into Syrian air space four months ago—to get at a man held responsible for the deaths of hundreds of Jews.
And so why did the Syrians do it? To compromise the domestic and regional standing of the regime and kill a Hezbollah legend and an Iranian pillar, eulogized today by the Iranian foreign minister at Mughniyah’s Beirut funeral? To extend an olive branch to the U.S., when, as David Schenker noted above, they’ve never done it before?
Lee Smith is a visiting fellow at the Hudson Institute.
Syria’s regime has killed many people over the decades, but I think it’s a stretch to assume Imad Mughniyah is one of them. Not just because they would have never done such a thing in Damascus; not just because the Iranian foreign minister went ahead with his visit to Syria, and would surely not have done so had there been suspicion of official Syrian involvement in Mughniyah’s assassination; and not just because the last thing Damascus would do in the midst of a vital Syrian-sponsored political crisis in Lebanon is to kill a leading figure in the ranks of its most powerful ally in Beirut.
But the real problem I have with this theory is that Mughniyah was just not opening-shot material. Assuming for a moment that Syria wanted to give the Americans a present, you don’t start such a process with the most valuable asset you have, for nothing in return, while simultaneously alienating the Iranians and Hezbollah (a reaction we have in fact not seen). You use Mughniyah as the icing on the cake, and start off the process by handing over someone lower on the totem pole, in exchange for concessions. That’s how the Syrians bargain, usually without offering much up on their end.
I would also like to correct Jon Alterman. There may have been speculation that Mughniyah was involved in the Hariri assassination, but that’s all it is. I’ve followed the case closely, and there is no real evidence for this claim based on what we know of the Hariri investigation up to now. We don’t even know whether Hezbollah was involved in the crime.
What really happened with Mughniyah? I accept that we’re so in the dark about this case, that one of us might have unintentionally stumbled onto the truth. It seems that everyone in the media is suddenly an expert on the man, but we might all be repeating fallacies that have been circulating for almost 20 years. However, based on what we have, and on the Syrian, Iranian, and Hezbollah reactions, I still find “the Syrians did it” theory unconvincing.
Michael Young is opinion page editor of the Daily Star newspaper in Lebanon.
Andrew Exum complains that David Schenker is wrong in condemning Syria for letting in Imad Mughniyah if their only reason for doing so was to kill him. This is illogical.
First, Mughniyah was very close to—and arguably an agent of—the Iranians. The loud wails at his death by Iran and Hezbollah indicate that if they had any reason to believe Damascus was responsible, this would be a huge political problem for Syria. We would soon be seeing inescapable signs of a crisis in their relationships. And of course we won’t.
Second, is the humiliation of having him killed in Damascus, which makes the regime look very incompetent. The idea that the Syrian government would welcome this situation is ridiculous.
As for the core of Exum’s argument, he implies that this was Mughniyah’s first trip to Syria. One can hear Bashar on the phone with him saying: “Yeah, you’ve never seen Damascus. Come on over and we’ll give you the tour!” Of course, Mughniyah was no doubt in Syria many times over the last 25 years doing what he did best, coordinating terrorist attacks and other operations. No doubt, he was doing so with the Syrian government completely aware and probably complicit in his efforts. After all, he was working for Hezbollah, Syria’s client, and Iran, Syria’s number-one ally.
Are we to believe that the first 10? 20? 30? times Mughniyah was in Syria don’t matter because this time he was only there to be terminated with extreme prejudice? Does this mean then that David Schenker was wrong or in contradiction to complain about Syria’s close and long-term association with one of the world’s most wanted terrorists—wanted not just by Israel but by the United States of America?
Anyone inclined to ignore Syria’s central role in Middle East instability, the Iraq insurgency, murders in Lebanon, terrorism against the United States, disruption of any progress in the Arab-Israeli peace process, as well as the very strong and deep basis for the Iran-Syria alliance, Syria’s real rejection of peace with Israel, and any number of other issues, should at least try to sound reasonable.
Barry Rubin is a member of MESH.
Allow me especially to thank my friends Michael Young and Lee Smith for lending their intelligent voices to this debate from outside the MESH community. In the end, Occam’s Razor seems to apply here: Given what we know now, the simplest answer is probably the correct one. That doesn’t mean questions of whether or not Syria might have been complicit aren’t worth asking, though for some that question obviously stirs up some strong emotions!
Thanks, everyone, for the lively debate. I think this is the most commented-upon thread we’ve had here at MESH, and I for one appreciated all the comments. Feel free to continue the discussion with me off-line.
Andrew Exum is a member of MESH.
For more on the Mughniyah assassination, proceed to this subsequent post and discussion.
This discussion thread is now closed. —MESH Admin