|
|
|
Jewish World Review Feb. 15, 2008 / 9 Adar I 5768 Hizbullah mastermind's true legacy By Caroline B. Glick
On January 30, French security services raided a Paris apartment and
arrested six Arab men. Three of the men — two Lebanese and one Syrian — were
travelling on diplomatic passports. According to the Italian
Libero newspaper, the six were members of a Hizbullah cell. Seized
documents
included tourist maps of Paris, London, Madrid, Berlin and Rome marked up
with red highlighter to indicate routes, addresses, parking lots and "truck
stopping points."The maps pointed to several routes to Vatican back
entrances.
Libero's report explained that the "truck stopping points" aligned with
information the French had received the week before from Beirut. There,
Hizbullah chief Hassan Nasrallah convened a conference of his senior terror
leaders where he ordered them to activate Hizbullah cells throughout Europe
to kidnap senior European leaders.
The day of the arrests, French Defense Minister Herve Morin was meeting with
his American counterpart Defense Secretary Robert Gates and with Secretary
of State Condoleezza Rice in Washington on a previously unannounced visit.
During his public appearances, Morin criticized the US Intelligence
Directorate's National Intelligence Estimate on Iran's nuclear program from
November. Morin stated, "Coordinated information from a number of
intelligence services leads us to believe that Iran has not given up its
wish to pursue its [nuclear] program," and is "continuing to develop" it.
Other recent reports relayed French concern that their embassy in Beirut is
being targeted for attack by Hizbullah. On January 15 terrorists targeted a
US embassy car in Beirut killing four and wounding sixteen. This week,
French President Nicholas Sarkozy's chief of staff told L'Express newsweekly that the threat of terror against France "remains quite high."
All of the feared terror attacks against French and European targets have
the classic earmarkings of Hizbullah operations chief and Iranian
Revolutionary Guards officer Imad Mughniyeh. Mughniyeh was the pioneer of
embassy bombings and high-profile kidnappings.
Most of the reports of his death treated Mughniyeh as a has-been. Coverage
was devoted to his attacks against American, Israeli and Jewish targets in
the 1980s and early 1990s. Yet at the time of his death, Mughniyeh remained
one of the most dangerous and prolific terror operatives in the world.
Mughniyeh's broad-based leadership role in the global terror nexus was made
clear by the reaction of seemingly unrelated terror groups to his death.
Representatives of the reputedly nationalist, secularist Fatah terror group
expressed their pride in his life's work. "We're very proud to have had a
Palestinian holding such a high position in Hizbullah," one Fatah official
who worked with Mughniyeh in the 1970s and 1980s told The Jerusalem Post.
Every Palestinian terror group — from Fatah to Hamas to Islamic Jihad, the
Popular Resistance Committees, the PFLP, and DFLP mourned the loss of
Mughniyeh as a hero and martyr and called for revenge against Israel and the
US.
In Iraq, Shiite and Sunni terrorists alike bemoaned his death and called for
revenge. Shiite militia leader Muqtada el Sadr whose forces were trained and
organized by Mughniyeh and Iran condemned Mughniyeh's killing. Sadr's
supposedly arch-foe, Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, who leads Al Qaida in Iraq and
whose operational commanders are in Iran, responded to his death by calling
for attacks against Israel.
And of course, Hizbullah, and its state sponsors Iran and Syria all
condemned Mughniyeh's death in the strongest terms and vowed to avenge his
killing.
These condemnations were not nostalgic pinings for a has-been. These uniform
reactions from across the terror spectrum were the cries of Mughniyeh's
soldiers for their commander. Through Iran, Mughniyeh was in effect the
commander or godfather or both of all of these forces. His life's work
embodied the growth, development and modus operandi of the forces of global
terror and jihad. And understanding his life's work is a key to
understanding the nature of the jihadist forces arrayed against the Western
world and Israel.
Mughniyeh began his terror career in the 1970s in Fatah leader Yassir
Arafat's Force 17 in Lebanon. There, in addition to terrorizing Lebanese
Christians, he and Arafat trained Iranian Shiite jihadists. These men
arrived at PLO camps in Lebanon in the early 1970s to train to overthrow of
the Shah of Iran and install their leader Ayatollah Khomeini as the head of
a new Islamic state. In 1979 they became the backbone of the newly formed
Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps.
When Israel forced Arafat and his Fatah terror army to flee Lebanon in 1982,
Arafat gave Fatah's arsenal to Mughniyeh, who at that time, as an officer in
the new IRGC was forming Hizbullah. As Fatah's terror heir, Mughniyeh and
his colleagues set out to throw the US, the French and the Israelis out of
Lebanon and to disenfranchise Lebanese Christians and Sunnis. They
accomplished their goals through a mix of terror tactics including car
bombings, suicide bombings, airline hijackings, kidnappings, assassinations,
and embassy bombings; and guerilla warfare tactics like ambushes, RPG
attacks on convoys, sniper fire, popular indoctrination and psychological
warfare operations. Most of these operations were carried out in Lebanon.
In the 1990s, Mughniyeh and Iran took their show on the road. Not only did
they reenact their car bombings in South America. They also expanded their
terror nexus to the then nascent Sunni Wahabist al Qaida organization. As
Thomas Joscelyn documents in his short book Iran's Proxy War Against
America, Iran through Mughniyeh was instrumental in the training, arming
and sheltering al Qaida since the early 1990s.
As an Iranian agent, in the early 1990s, Mughniyeh built operational
alliances with Osama bin Laden, Ayman Zawahiri and al Qaida's military chief
Saif al Adel when al Qaida was based in Sudan. Adel, along with several
hundred other al Qaida operatives travelled to Lebanon to undergo training
at Hizbullah camps. Hizbullah trainers also worked at al Qaida camps in
Sudan and al Qaida operatives also trained at IRGC camps in Iran. From 1996
through 1998, ten percent of bin laden's satellite phone calls were to Iran.
Operational cooperation between Hizbullah and al Qaida quickly followed.
In 1996, Iran ordered Hizbullah to blow up the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia
which housed US military personnel. 19 US servicemen were killed. Although
al Qaida was never officially tied to the bombing, Zahawiri phoned bin Laden
to congratulate him on the attack.
The al Qaida terror cell in Kenya that carried out the Kenyan arm of the
twin US embassy bombings in Nairobi and Dars el Salaam in 1998 underwent
training in Hizbullah camps in Lebanon. That attack had all the markings of
Mughniyeh operations. Like the 1983 attacks on the US Marine barracks and
French paratrooper base in Beirut, the 1998 attacks were double car bombings
carried out in two disparate locations nearly simultaneously.
As Joscelyn recalls, the 9/11 Commission called for further investigation of
Iran's role in the September 11, 2001 attacks on America. Adel, a veteran of
Hizbullah camps, was intimately aware of the bombing plans before it took
place. Ramzi Binalshibh, the plot's mastermind travelled in and out of Iran
several times in the months before the bombings. Then too, eight to ten of
the September 11 bombers transited Iran assisted by Hizbullah and IRGC
officials in late 2000. The Iranians did not stamp their passports. Several
of the bombers transited Iran en route to Lebanon. Mughniyeh himself flew to
Beirut from Teheran aboard the same flight as Sept. 11 hijacker Ahmad
al-Ghamdi.
Although Iran and the Taliban nearly went to war against one another in
2000, in the wake of the US-led invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001,
according to jailed Taliban leaders, Iran pledged to assist the Taliban in
their war against the US. Teheran opened its doors to fleeing Taliban
leaders and senior al Qaida commanders — including Adel and bin Laden's son
and heir apparent Saad and Abu Musab Zarkawi. From Iran, Adel and bin Laden
Jr. planned and ordered attacks in Saudi Arabia.
Moreover, from Iran, Adel and bin Laden worked with Zarkawi in planning the
groups' insurgency in Iraq. Citing an extensive report from the German *
Cicero* magazine, Joscelyn describes how Zarkawi set up his terror network
under the protection of the IRGC. Zarkawi had no problem operating in Iran
in spite of his avowed hatred of Shiite Muslims who, after entering Iraq, he
massacred at every opportunity.
Then too, as Al Sharq al Aswat reported Wednesday, Mughniyeh played a
central role in organizing and training Shiite militia in Iraq. He worked as
the head of Iran's intelligence directorate in southern Iraq, trained al
Sadr's Mahdi army fighters in Iran, Iraq and Lebanon and set up shop in
Basra to facilitate their entry into Iraq from Iran.
After the 1993 Oslo Accord between Israel and the PLO, Iran abandoned Arafat
as a traitor. Mughniyeh was responsible for mending fences. In 1999 he
brought Fatah back under Iranian orbit when he acted as a middle-man in
negotiating the Iranian sale of the Karine-A weapons ship to the
Palestinian Authority which was intercepted by Israeli naval commandos in
January 2002.
After Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005, Mughniyeh worked as a middle-man
bringing Hamas under Iranian control. That control was consolidated in a
meeting between Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal, Iranian President Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad, Syrian President Bashar Assad and Mughniyeh in Damascus in
January 2001, after Hamas's electoral victory in the PA's legislative
ballot.
Later in 2006, Mughniyeh returned to Lebanon to plan the kidnapping of IDF
soldiers which was carried out on July 12, 2006 and precipitated that
summer's war. Mughniyeh reportedly commanded Hizbullah forces during that
war. Since the war, he oversaw Hizbullah's rearmament as well as the
training of Hizbullah and Hamas forces in Iran. Saad bin Laden reportedly
travelled to Syria to oversee weapons shipments to Hizbullah during the war.
It is possible that Mughniyeh was irreplaceable. The pivotal role that he
played in the nexus of global terror was unique. No one else has such
wide-ranging accomplishments. But placing too much stress on Mugniyeh's
uniqueness would serve to obfuscate the basic reality that his life's work
embodied.
Mughniyah embodied the fact that terrorists of all shapes and colors
willingly collaborate with one another against their common enemies in the
West. Mughniyeh personally bridged all the divisions within the world of
Arab and Islamic terrorism. He showed that when it comes to attacking the
West, there is no distinction between secular, nationalist, religious,
Islamist, Sunni or Shiite terrorists.
His work revealed the inconvenient truth so fervently denied by policymakers
and politicians throughout the Western world. He showed that for the
jihadists there is no distinction between terrorists who attack in Israel or
Jewish targets abroad and those who attack non-Israeli and non-Jewish
targets. Moreover, his work as an Iranian agent demonstrates Iran's central
role in sponsoring jihad throughout the world.
Mughniyeh's legacy is not simply a laundry list of massacre and torture. It
is the nexus of global terror. While it is a great thing that he is dead, it
must be understood that his death is insufficient. Hundreds of thousands
converged in Beirut to celebrate his life's work. The West must understand
the significance of that work and unite to destroy it — layer after laye
JWR contributor Caroline B. Glick is the senior Middle East Fellow at the Center for Security Policy in Washington, DC and the deputy managing editor of The Jerusalem Post. Comment by clicking here.
| ||||||||||
