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Bazzi: Who Killed Imad Mugniyah?

Council on Foreign Relations

Interviewee: Mohamad Bazzi, Edward R. Murrow Press Fellow
Interviewer: Bernard Gwertzman, Consulting Editor

February 14, 2008

Mohamad Bazzi, former Middle East correspondent for Newsday who is working on a book about Hezbollah, says Imad Mugniyah, assassinated on Wednesday in Damascus, had long ago faded from the position of power he occupied in the 1980s. Bazzi notes that Israel has previously carried out such “targeted assassinations” and evidence suggests Israeli agents as the source of this car bombing. Yet he leaves open the possibility of Syrian responsibility, perhaps because Mugniyah, one of the world’s most wanted terrorists, had become a liability.

Reports came out of Damascus yesterday that Hezbollah’s Imad Mugniyah had been assassinated in a car bombing. He did most of his work years ago, right? Or was he still active?

Mugniyah hasn’t really been active since the 1980s. He was the security chief of Hezbollah—which is a very high position—in the 1980s. It’s debatable whether he still had a leading position in Hezbollah up to this day. Hezbollah would refuse to talk about him or answer questions about him for many years. They had really never mentioned him on their TV station and never mentioned him publicly for at least ten years, until yesterday, when everyone was taken by surprise when an announcer on Al-Manar, the Hezbollah TV station in Lebanon, announced “the martyrdom of Imad Mugniyah.” That was really the first public mention of him by Hezbollah in many, many years.

Basically, they brought him back into the Hezbollah fold only in death. They claimed credit for him and they began blaming Israel for his assassination. But for many years Mugniyah was sort of off the radar screen. He’s been blamed by U.S. intelligence and by others as the mastermind of the some of the most spectacular attacks against American targets in the Middle East.

Read the rest of this article on the cfr.org website.

Copyright 2008 by the Council on Foreign Relations. This material is republished on GlobalSecurity.org with specific permission from the cfr.org. Reprint and republication queries for this article should be directed to cfr.org.