Last week, one of Hizballah’s highest-ranking military commanders, Mustafa Badreddine, was killed in Damascus under mysterious circumstances. But, writes Clifford May, whether he was brought down by an Israeli airstrike, by rivals within his own organization, or by any of the Lebanese and Syrian organizations that would have liked to see him dead, his demise is good news for Israel and the U.S.:
In 2005, the former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq Hariri, a vocal opponent of Bashar al-Assad’s attempts to dominate Lebanon, was assassinated. . . . In 2011, the UN-established special tribunal for Lebanon indicted Badreddine, calling him “the overall controller of the operation.”
Badreddine launched his career in terrorism while still in his teens. Family connections may have helped: his cousin and brother-in-law was Imad Mughniyeh, for years Hizballah’s top military commander. The two worked together to plan the 1983 bombing of the U.S. marine barracks in Beirut that killed 241 servicemen. Additional attacks followed, including at the U.S. and French embassies in Kuwait. . . .
Two years ago, the Iranian foreign minister Javad Zarif, regarded by President Obama as a leading Iranian “moderate,” laid a wreath on Mughniyeh’s grave in Beirut. And on Friday, in a message to Hizballah’s Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah, Zarif expressed his government’s condolences on the death of Badreddine, saying he had died “defending the ideals of Islam.”
Read more on Washington Times: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/may/17/clifford-may-hezbollah-iran-mourn-loss-of-mustafa-/?page=1