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In life and death Hezbollah’s ‘untraceable ghost’ haunts the Middle East
© Anwar Amro, AFP | Hezbollah members carry a portrait of Mustafa Badreddine during his funeral in the Ghobeiry neighbourhood of southern Beirut on May 13, 2016.
Text by Leela JACINTO
Latest update : 2016-05-13
Mustafa Badreddine, a senior Hezbollah military commander who was killed in Syria led such a shadowy life, he was dubbed the “untraceable ghost”. In death, his legacy will continue to haunt the region.
In his lifetime, Badreddine was known as the “untraceable ghost”. A senior Hezbollah military commander, he who walked out of jails, survived targeted strikes, juggled a rolodex of aliases and led a shadowy, tough to track life that frustrated prosecutors and international tribunals.
In death, the ghost of Badreddine can be traced back to some of Hezbollah’s deadliest attacks over the past three decades, a period that saw the group emerge as a distinct entity from the myriad Shiite movements embroiled in the 1980s Lebanese civil war.
If the Lebanese civil war enabled the rise of Badreddine to the ranks of an international terrorist wanted by several Western and Arab governments, it was the Syrian civil war that finally ended his dangerous trajectory.
“A man who lives by the sword, dies by the sword,” goes an ancient Biblical proverb and in Badreddine’s case, it’s particularly fitting since his nom de guerre was “Zulfikar” -- after the sword used by Imam Ali, a revered figure in Shia Islam.
But the 55-year-old Hezbollah military commander had several aliases, including Sami Issa, Sami Samino, Elias Fouad Saab and Dhu al-Faqar, or “the cleaver of vertebrae”, as his close associates dubbed him.
It was the mind-boggling mix of names, coupled with his virtually invisible presence on official records that led the UN-backed Special Tribunal for Lebanon (STL) investigating the 2005 assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri to call Badreddine an “untraceable ghost”.
“He has never been issued a passport. He has never been issued a driver’s license. He is not the registered owner of any property in Lebanon. The authorities have no records of him entering or leaving Lebanon,” noted STL prosecutor Graeme Cameron before concluding, “Badreddine passes as an unrecognizable and virtually untraceable ghost throughout Lebanon, leaving no footprint.”
Who killed Badreddine?
Mystery, or a hint of it, followed Badreddine even in death.
On Friday, shortly after Hezbollah announced his killing in Syria, initial reports in the international and Lebanese press said an Israeli strike had killed the senior Hezbollah military mastermind.
The Lebanese-based Shiite group is usually quick to blame Israel -- “the Zionist American project” in Hezbollah parlance -- for attacks targeting its senior members.
These claims are not altogether unfounded. Israel does not officially confirm or deny assassination or assassination attempts in foreign countries, but is widely known to have conducted successful targeted strikes in Syrian territory.
Badreddine’s cousin and brother-in-law, top Hezbollah commander Imad Mughniyeh, for example, was killed in a joint Mossad-CIA operation in Damascus in 2008. Following Mughniyeh’s death, Badreddine took over most of his duties, according to Lebanese media reports.
Seven years later, Badreddine was the target of an Israeli drone strike in the Syrian province of Quneitra, according to the New York Times. That strike failed to kill him, but it did result in the deaths of Mughniyeh’s 20-year-old son, Jihad Mughniyeh, and a number of senior Hezbollah fighters.
More than 1,200 Hezbollah fighters have been killed in Syria since the group joined the Syrian conflict in support of President Bashar al-Assad, who in turn is backed by Iran and Russia.
Hours after Badreddine’s death, a cloak of mystery continued to shroud his death.
While an initial Hezbollah statement provided no details of how or where he was killed, a second announcement said preliminary investigations had revealed “a large explosion” targeting a Syrian Air Force base near Damascus airport had killed Badreddine. “We will investigate the nature and causes of the explosion, whether it was an aerial bombardment, missile strike or artillery fire,” said the statement.
By Friday evening, as thousands gathered for Badreddine’s funeral at a mosque in southern Beirut, a senior Hezbollah leader said there were clear indications of who was behind it. Hezbollah deputy leader Sheikh Naim Qassem promised the gathering of fighters and Hezbollah officials that the “outcome of the investigation” into Badreddine's killing would be announced no later than Saturday morning.
Funeral for Hezbollah leader Badreddine, killed by bomb in Syria
Avoiding a confrontation with Israel
The Shiite group’s failure to immediately blame its old foe, Israel, raised eyebrows among some experts.
“Hezbollah’s statements have been carefully worded. They didn’t want to be too quick blaming Israel, which brings up the question of retaliation. Hezbollah is constrained in how it can retaliate because it is overextended in Syria. The group must be mindful about instigating something with Israel,” noted Mohamad Bazzi, a professor at New York University currently writing a book on the proxy wars between Saudi Arabia and Iran.
While Badreddine had a fair share of enemies, the fact that he was killed inside a highly secured Syrian airbase near Damascus airport has led some experts to question whether any of the Syrian rebel groups fighting Assad have the expertise for such a targeted attack.
Despite Hezbollah’s promise that it would reveal the outcome of its investigation, an element of mystery could continue to hang over Badreddine’s killing. “Hezbollah’s findings are not publicly released, it’s not like the 9/11 commission -- here, all the pages are redacted,” quipped Bazzi.
Developing his ‘trademark explosive technique’
But in the pages of contemporary Middle East history, Badreddine’s association with some of the region’s deadliest terrorist attacks is a recurring theme.
He was barely 22 when he was implicated in the October 1983 attack on a US Marine barracks in Beirut, which killed 241 servicemen.
While his cousin was climbing up militant Shiite ranks, Badreddine was earning a reputation as Imad Mughiyeh’s bomb maker, according to Matthew Levitt, author and director of the Washington Institute’s Stein Counterterrorism Program. “During the planning stages [of the Beirut attack], Badreddine apparently developed what would become his trademark explosive technique: adding gas to increase the power of sophisticated explosives,” wrote Levitt in his book “Hezbollah: The Global Footprint of Lebanon’s Party of God”.
Barely three months later, Badreddine was in Kuwait, having entered the country on Lebanese passport under the name of Elias Saab. On December 12, 1983, seven bombs exploded at various sites in Kuwait City, including the US and French embassies.
Badreddine was one of 17 suspects, widely known as “the Kuwait 17” arrested in connection with the attacks. A Kuwaiti court later sentenced him to death for masterminding the December 1983 attacks. But the sentence was never carried out as Hezbollah launched a campaign of kidnapping Western nationals in Lebanon, demanding the release of the “Kuwait 17” in exchange for hostage releases.
He was in a Kuwaiti jail in 1990, when Iraq invaded Kuwait and emptied the oil-rich nation’s prisons.
Following his release, Badreddine returned home, where he spent the next few years fighting the Israeli occupation in southern Lebanon.
Kidding around with a girlfriend before an attack
By the time Hariri was assassinated on February 14, 2005, Badreddine had risen up Hezbollah ranks and was one of five Hezbollah members indicted by the UN-backed Special Tribunal for Lebanon.
Badreddine’s STL indictment noted that “His precise address is not known”, although the document went on to list a number of Beirut properties associated with him.
Investigations into the Hariri killings revealed interesting insights into Badreddine’s lifestyle, one seemingly at odds with the austere Islamist vision espoused by Hezbollah.
Prosecutors tracking Badreddine’s several cell phones owned under various names -- including Sami Issa -- found numerous calls and texts to several mistresses. These included a disconcerting text message to a Sunni Muslim mistress the night before Hariri’s killing that read, “If you knew where I have been, you would be very upset.”
“It’s hard to tell whether Issa is confessing to infidelity or to something far worse -- realizing what she, a Sunni Muslim, would have thought if she knew,” noted the New York Times.
“Either way, this text message shows that even amid the intense pressure of finalizing preparations for one of his biggest operations, Badreddine finds time to kid around with a girlfriend.”
Hezbollah is ‘losing its best’ in Syria
But Badreddine was never arrested in the Hariri case, and around 2013, when Hezbollah joined the Syrian civil war on Assad’s side, the senior Hezbollah military commander was using his expertise in the latest conflict to shake up the Middle East.
“The fact that he was in Syria means Hezbollah is putting its best in Syria,” noted Wassim Nasr, FRANCE 24’s expert on jihadist groups.
But it also means Hezbollah is losing its best in Syria.
“Mustafa Badreddine’s death is definitely the most significant loss Hezbollah has suffered in Syria since the [2011] uprising broke out,” said Bazzi. “Hezbollah is definitely losing a lot of fighters, at a larger rate even than during their [1985 – 2000] fight with Israel. But they’re training more people and they are a larger force than they were when the Syrian war started.”
According to Nasr, one of Badreddine’s roles in Damascus was to receive foreign fighters from countries such as Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan volunteering -- or being forced to “volunteer” -- in Hezbollah’s ranks.
Hezbollah may be losing some of its seasoned commanders, but it is also providing new recruits valuable battle experience in a live conflict zone. And that remains Badreddine’s legacy in death; as in life, his ghost will continue to haunt the conflicts shaping this troubled region.
In life and death Hezbollah’s ‘untraceable ghost’ haunts the Middle East - France 24
couple video clips in video too
The way they hunted this man's family down
© Anwar Amro, AFP | Hezbollah members carry a portrait of Mustafa Badreddine during his funeral in the Ghobeiry neighbourhood of southern Beirut on May 13, 2016.
Text by Leela JACINTO
Latest update : 2016-05-13
Mustafa Badreddine, a senior Hezbollah military commander who was killed in Syria led such a shadowy life, he was dubbed the “untraceable ghost”. In death, his legacy will continue to haunt the region.
In his lifetime, Badreddine was known as the “untraceable ghost”. A senior Hezbollah military commander, he who walked out of jails, survived targeted strikes, juggled a rolodex of aliases and led a shadowy, tough to track life that frustrated prosecutors and international tribunals.
In death, the ghost of Badreddine can be traced back to some of Hezbollah’s deadliest attacks over the past three decades, a period that saw the group emerge as a distinct entity from the myriad Shiite movements embroiled in the 1980s Lebanese civil war.
If the Lebanese civil war enabled the rise of Badreddine to the ranks of an international terrorist wanted by several Western and Arab governments, it was the Syrian civil war that finally ended his dangerous trajectory.
“A man who lives by the sword, dies by the sword,” goes an ancient Biblical proverb and in Badreddine’s case, it’s particularly fitting since his nom de guerre was “Zulfikar” -- after the sword used by Imam Ali, a revered figure in Shia Islam.
But the 55-year-old Hezbollah military commander had several aliases, including Sami Issa, Sami Samino, Elias Fouad Saab and Dhu al-Faqar, or “the cleaver of vertebrae”, as his close associates dubbed him.
It was the mind-boggling mix of names, coupled with his virtually invisible presence on official records that led the UN-backed Special Tribunal for Lebanon (STL) investigating the 2005 assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri to call Badreddine an “untraceable ghost”.
“He has never been issued a passport. He has never been issued a driver’s license. He is not the registered owner of any property in Lebanon. The authorities have no records of him entering or leaving Lebanon,” noted STL prosecutor Graeme Cameron before concluding, “Badreddine passes as an unrecognizable and virtually untraceable ghost throughout Lebanon, leaving no footprint.”
Who killed Badreddine?
Mystery, or a hint of it, followed Badreddine even in death.
On Friday, shortly after Hezbollah announced his killing in Syria, initial reports in the international and Lebanese press said an Israeli strike had killed the senior Hezbollah military mastermind.
The Lebanese-based Shiite group is usually quick to blame Israel -- “the Zionist American project” in Hezbollah parlance -- for attacks targeting its senior members.
These claims are not altogether unfounded. Israel does not officially confirm or deny assassination or assassination attempts in foreign countries, but is widely known to have conducted successful targeted strikes in Syrian territory.
Badreddine’s cousin and brother-in-law, top Hezbollah commander Imad Mughniyeh, for example, was killed in a joint Mossad-CIA operation in Damascus in 2008. Following Mughniyeh’s death, Badreddine took over most of his duties, according to Lebanese media reports.
Seven years later, Badreddine was the target of an Israeli drone strike in the Syrian province of Quneitra, according to the New York Times. That strike failed to kill him, but it did result in the deaths of Mughniyeh’s 20-year-old son, Jihad Mughniyeh, and a number of senior Hezbollah fighters.
More than 1,200 Hezbollah fighters have been killed in Syria since the group joined the Syrian conflict in support of President Bashar al-Assad, who in turn is backed by Iran and Russia.
Hours after Badreddine’s death, a cloak of mystery continued to shroud his death.
While an initial Hezbollah statement provided no details of how or where he was killed, a second announcement said preliminary investigations had revealed “a large explosion” targeting a Syrian Air Force base near Damascus airport had killed Badreddine. “We will investigate the nature and causes of the explosion, whether it was an aerial bombardment, missile strike or artillery fire,” said the statement.
By Friday evening, as thousands gathered for Badreddine’s funeral at a mosque in southern Beirut, a senior Hezbollah leader said there were clear indications of who was behind it. Hezbollah deputy leader Sheikh Naim Qassem promised the gathering of fighters and Hezbollah officials that the “outcome of the investigation” into Badreddine's killing would be announced no later than Saturday morning.
Funeral for Hezbollah leader Badreddine, killed by bomb in Syria
Avoiding a confrontation with Israel
The Shiite group’s failure to immediately blame its old foe, Israel, raised eyebrows among some experts.
“Hezbollah’s statements have been carefully worded. They didn’t want to be too quick blaming Israel, which brings up the question of retaliation. Hezbollah is constrained in how it can retaliate because it is overextended in Syria. The group must be mindful about instigating something with Israel,” noted Mohamad Bazzi, a professor at New York University currently writing a book on the proxy wars between Saudi Arabia and Iran.
While Badreddine had a fair share of enemies, the fact that he was killed inside a highly secured Syrian airbase near Damascus airport has led some experts to question whether any of the Syrian rebel groups fighting Assad have the expertise for such a targeted attack.
Despite Hezbollah’s promise that it would reveal the outcome of its investigation, an element of mystery could continue to hang over Badreddine’s killing. “Hezbollah’s findings are not publicly released, it’s not like the 9/11 commission -- here, all the pages are redacted,” quipped Bazzi.
Developing his ‘trademark explosive technique’
But in the pages of contemporary Middle East history, Badreddine’s association with some of the region’s deadliest terrorist attacks is a recurring theme.
He was barely 22 when he was implicated in the October 1983 attack on a US Marine barracks in Beirut, which killed 241 servicemen.
While his cousin was climbing up militant Shiite ranks, Badreddine was earning a reputation as Imad Mughiyeh’s bomb maker, according to Matthew Levitt, author and director of the Washington Institute’s Stein Counterterrorism Program. “During the planning stages [of the Beirut attack], Badreddine apparently developed what would become his trademark explosive technique: adding gas to increase the power of sophisticated explosives,” wrote Levitt in his book “Hezbollah: The Global Footprint of Lebanon’s Party of God”.
Barely three months later, Badreddine was in Kuwait, having entered the country on Lebanese passport under the name of Elias Saab. On December 12, 1983, seven bombs exploded at various sites in Kuwait City, including the US and French embassies.
Badreddine was one of 17 suspects, widely known as “the Kuwait 17” arrested in connection with the attacks. A Kuwaiti court later sentenced him to death for masterminding the December 1983 attacks. But the sentence was never carried out as Hezbollah launched a campaign of kidnapping Western nationals in Lebanon, demanding the release of the “Kuwait 17” in exchange for hostage releases.
He was in a Kuwaiti jail in 1990, when Iraq invaded Kuwait and emptied the oil-rich nation’s prisons.
Following his release, Badreddine returned home, where he spent the next few years fighting the Israeli occupation in southern Lebanon.
Kidding around with a girlfriend before an attack
By the time Hariri was assassinated on February 14, 2005, Badreddine had risen up Hezbollah ranks and was one of five Hezbollah members indicted by the UN-backed Special Tribunal for Lebanon.
Badreddine’s STL indictment noted that “His precise address is not known”, although the document went on to list a number of Beirut properties associated with him.
Investigations into the Hariri killings revealed interesting insights into Badreddine’s lifestyle, one seemingly at odds with the austere Islamist vision espoused by Hezbollah.
Prosecutors tracking Badreddine’s several cell phones owned under various names -- including Sami Issa -- found numerous calls and texts to several mistresses. These included a disconcerting text message to a Sunni Muslim mistress the night before Hariri’s killing that read, “If you knew where I have been, you would be very upset.”
“It’s hard to tell whether Issa is confessing to infidelity or to something far worse -- realizing what she, a Sunni Muslim, would have thought if she knew,” noted the New York Times.
“Either way, this text message shows that even amid the intense pressure of finalizing preparations for one of his biggest operations, Badreddine finds time to kid around with a girlfriend.”
Hezbollah is ‘losing its best’ in Syria
But Badreddine was never arrested in the Hariri case, and around 2013, when Hezbollah joined the Syrian civil war on Assad’s side, the senior Hezbollah military commander was using his expertise in the latest conflict to shake up the Middle East.
“The fact that he was in Syria means Hezbollah is putting its best in Syria,” noted Wassim Nasr, FRANCE 24’s expert on jihadist groups.
But it also means Hezbollah is losing its best in Syria.
“Mustafa Badreddine’s death is definitely the most significant loss Hezbollah has suffered in Syria since the [2011] uprising broke out,” said Bazzi. “Hezbollah is definitely losing a lot of fighters, at a larger rate even than during their [1985 – 2000] fight with Israel. But they’re training more people and they are a larger force than they were when the Syrian war started.”
According to Nasr, one of Badreddine’s roles in Damascus was to receive foreign fighters from countries such as Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan volunteering -- or being forced to “volunteer” -- in Hezbollah’s ranks.
Hezbollah may be losing some of its seasoned commanders, but it is also providing new recruits valuable battle experience in a live conflict zone. And that remains Badreddine’s legacy in death; as in life, his ghost will continue to haunt the conflicts shaping this troubled region.
In life and death Hezbollah’s ‘untraceable ghost’ haunts the Middle East - France 24
couple video clips in video too
The way they hunted this man's family down