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.
