Trying to figure out who killed “Hezbollah’s master technician and logistics expert,” Hassane Laqees, is an exercise in understanding the complexity of the Middle East. The most obvious culprit would be Israel, perhaps using some unwitting proxy.
Israel’s Mossad spy agency put Mr. Laqees on a hit list years ago, identifying him as one of the five men it most wanted dead. From 2008 to 2011, four perished in cloak-and-dagger style. A car bomb in Damascus, Syria’s capital, killed Hezbollah’s military leader, Imad Mughniyeh. A sniper shot a Syrian general on a beach in Tartus. A Hamas official was strangled in a hotel room in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, by assassins who, in an embarrassment for Mossad, were photographed by elevator cameras. And an Iranian general was killed in an explosion at a Tehran missile depot.
Mr. Laqees was the last on that list to die.
But Israel wasn’t the only country or organization that wanted Mr. Laqees dead.
Yet as Hezbollah shifted course over the past two years, sending its forces into Syria to support the government, its ally, against an armed uprising joined by foreign jihadists, Mr. Laqees earned new enemies. Even among some Shiites there were whispers of disapproval and concerns that the group had aggravated sectarian tensions and opened them up to retaliation.
So Mr. Laqees’s assassination has become a political whodunit infused with all the complexity of a convulsing region’s tangled and shifting alliances and enmities. Saudi intelligence officers, Lebanese Sunni militants, fighters from Al Qaeda, Syrian insurgents — all have been floated as possible killers. Analysts say that because of the secrecy of Mr. Laqees’s work and the professional nature of the killing, an intelligence service was probably involved. But even those least likely to have killed him have been eager to take credit.
This is one of the many reasons that we have zero national interest in getting seriously involved in Syria’s civil war. I think Iraq was much easier to understand and navigate than Syria would be.
And since the US intelligence community is committed to surveillance and drone strikes and the US military tactics seem limited to search and destroy, “understand and navigate” is an orphan stepchild.
Almost a decade has passed since US troops slaughtered protesting Iraqis in Fallujah because, according to a young soldier interviewed by NPR, US troops were not trained to do crowd control and police work; US troops were “trained to kill the enemy”. According to the New York Times, al Quaeda troops are in control of Fallujah.
Given the hesitancy to leave Afghanistan, I’m not sure that the US military has changed its losing strategy and tactics.
What we have is an opportunity to reshape some of the dysfunctional dynamics in the region by normalizing relations with Iran. We also might ask Saudi Arabia to stop supplying al Quaeda; we can no longer afford a policy of wink-wink, nod-nod with Bandar Bush and his cronies.
Finally, we need to stop treating the export of military hardware, especially sophisticated military hardware, as a jobs program. Or even run-of-the-mill military supplies. Every tear gas cannister labeled “Made in the USA” and used to suppress non-violent protest undoes all of our pontifications about respect for human rights.
The nexus in the US government that gets us into these messes are the James Bond wannabes who run the covert operations programs. And their public apologists.
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○ US Iraq veterans watch as Al Qaeda forces capture Fallujah
○ Majid raised money from Arab Gulf wealth for anti-Al Assad fighters
○ Ankara suspected of arming jihadists in Syria
Doesn’t matter whether the Muslims are Salafists, Muslim Brotherhood or Saudi Wahhabists, one common enemy is America and western values [Christian] with exception to the most exclusive shops in London, Paris and New York.
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From NYT link:.
“But Iranian officials also pointed fingers at an Al-Qaeda-linked militant group led by a Saudi fugitive recently captured in Lebanon. Adding to the uncertainty and mystery, that group, the Abdullah Azzam Brigades, claimed last week that Mr. Laqees actually died in the bombing of Iran’s Beirut embassy in November.”
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