With Hassan Nasrallah’s Demise, Hizballah Is At Its Lowest Ebb
With Hassan Nasrallah’s Demise, Hizballah Is At Its Lowest Ebb
I have a brief article at UnHerd looking at the aftermath of Israel killing Hassan Nasrallah, the secretary-general of Iran’s Hizballah unit in Lebanon.
The published version was obviously edited, for space apart from anything else. The version that was submitted is reproduced below.
Hizballah has now confirmed that its secretary-general, Hassan Nasrallah, was killed in the Israeli airstrikes on the group’s headquarters in Dahiyeh yesterday.
Nasrallah’s demise is the culmination of an Israeli campaign, particularly intense for the past week, to cripple Hizballah’s military and terrorism capacities. It has brought Hizballah to its most vulnerable condition since its creation.
Contrary to the myth-making that Hizballah emerged in 1982 as a “resistance” organisation against Israel’s invasion of Lebanon and becoming a “proxy” of Iran’s, in reality the group was created earlier. Indeed, it comprises an integral unit of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), the vanguard of the Islamic Revolution that rules Iran. Nasrallah’s life history testifies to this.
Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini forged a jihadist cadre on Lebanese territory in the late 1970s, with assistance from the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), and Nasrallah was part of this milieu. Some of these jihadists went back to Iran to lead the Revolution in 1978-79 and were labelled the IRGC. Those who stayed in Lebanon officially took the name Hizballah in 1985.
Rising to the top of Hizballah in 1992, Nasrallah’s department of the IRGC was the one Tehran often used in its international murder spree that decade, which included bombing Jewish targets as far away as Argentina and assassinating Iranian dissidents in Europe. The nature of the Islamic Revolution, a transnational jihadist network that recognises neither nationality nor borders, can be seen in Nasrallah having a senior IRGC officer, Abbas Nilforoushan, alongside him when he was killed.
For all the anger in the region against Israel over Gaza, many are celebrating Nasrallah’s demise, especially in Syria, where Hizballah led the IRGC’s international jihad to rescue the Iran-dependent tyrant Bashar al-Assad. On the other hand, there is sorrow: the rapidity and relative ease of Israel’s decimation of Hizballah demonstrates how little it would have taken, and how low the cost would have been, to spare the Syrians so much death and destruction.
Israel could have killed Nasrallah at almost any moment over the last 30 years and always chose not to because of concerns the alternative would be worse. Jerusalem has clearly decided to change the rules, and perhaps the whole game. The leading candidates to replace Nasrallah are Naim Qassem, the deputy secretary-general, and Hashem Safieddine, the head of Hizballah’s Executive Council. But it is unclear if either will still be alive once Israel’s offensive has finished.
Thousands of Hizballah’s troops were incapacitated by MOSSAD’s exploding pagers and radios operation, and Israel’s relentless decapitation strikes have devastated Hizballah’s leadership. In just the last week, Israel has killed Ali Karaki, the effective military commander of Hizballah after the rest of the Jihad Council (military executive committee) were eliminated; Talal Hamiyah, the leader of Hizballah’s external operations; Ibrahim Qubaisi, the missile commander; and Muhammad Surur, the head of the drones unit.
Israel has said that returning the 70,000 people displaced from the north by Hizballah’s missile attacks is a core war aim. That is only possible if Hizballah is pushed away from the border. Eighteen years of diplomacy has failed to demilitarise the border area—and even with continued Israeli military pressure from the outside, it seems unlikely for political reasons Hizballah will back down. If Israel chooses to secure this outcome by invading Lebanon, the ground has been well-prepared.
To be sure, while Hizballah’s command-and-control infrastructure is in tatters and it would not cope well with an Israeli invasion, it would likely survive. The Iranian control of Syria gives Hizballah significant strategic depth and, despite the recent losses, Hizballah is a very large organisation that is deeply woven into Lebanon’s Shi’a population, the largest sect in the country. But that does not mean Hizballah will be the same after this, no matter what happens next.
With or without an invasion, however, the mystique around Hizballah has been broken. Its prestige, built on “resistance” to Israel, has been irreparably damaged, not least by the revelation of how extensively Israeli spies have infiltrated its ranks. Hizballah’s ability to dominate Lebanon is open to challenge in a way it has not been for decades, all the more so if it is left with the responsibility for rebuilding the country after dragging it into a needless war.