The Hezbollah operations commander Ibrahim Aqil was killed in an Israeli strike on Friday.
Beirut:
Ibrahim Aqil, the Hezbollah operations commander killed in an Israeli strike on Friday, had a $7 million bounty on his head for 2 1983 Beirut truck bombings that killed greater than 300 folks on the American embassy and a U.S. Marines barracks.
Two safety sources in Lebanon confirmed the veteran fighter was killed in an airstrike on Beirut’s southern suburbs throughout a gathering of the elite Radwan unit of the Iranian-backed Lebanese militant group.
Aqil, who has additionally used the aliases Tahsin and Abdelqader, was the second member of Hezbollah’s high army physique, the Jihad Council, to be killed in two months after an Israeli strike in the identical space focused Fuad Shukr in July.
Israel escalated its assaults on the group this week after months of border preventing triggered 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, which was based by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards within the early Eighties to battle Israeli forces that had invaded and occupied Lebanon.
Born in a village in Lebanon’s Beqaa valley someday round 1960, Aqil had joined the opposite huge Lebanese Shi’ite political motion, Amal, earlier than switching to Hezbollah as a founding member, in keeping with a safety supply.
America accuses him of a task within the Beirut truck bombings on the American embassy in April 1983, which killed 63 folks, and a U.S. Marine barracks six months later that killed 241 folks.
It additional accused him of directing the kidnapping of American and German hostages in Lebanon and listed him as a Specifically Designated World Terrorist in 2019, placing the $7 million bounty on his head.
Referring to the bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks and different assaults on Western pursuits in Lebanon within the Eighties, Hezbollah chief Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah mentioned in a 2022 interview with an Arabic broadcaster that they had been carried out by small teams not linked to Hezbollah.
Aqil’s cohort of founding Hezbollah operatives helped flip the group from a shadowy militia into Lebanon’s strongest army and political organisation, pushing Israel from its occupation of the south in 2000 and preventing it once more in 2006.
When Shukr was killed in July, it was seen because the heaviest 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 the US as a terrorist.
Aqil, whose bounty was set by the US at an excellent larger worth than that of Shukr’s, could show an identical blow.
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