A report released by Al Arabiya said that late Lebanese commander of Hezbollah Mustafa Badreddine did not die in a battle in Syria, but he was assassinated. The report claimed that the leader of Hezbollah Hassan Nasrallah was involved in this operation.
Lebanon was surprised on 19 May 2016, as Nasrallah delivered a speech mourning his militia commander Mustafa Badreddine. The Lebanese media accepted the story of Badreddine’s death, but some questions were raised within a few days after his death.
Hezbollah was asked to fight in Syria against Sunni Islamic factions and ISIS militants, where Nasrallah had commissioned Badreddine to lead the fighters there. Badreddine was also accompanied by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard forces led by Qassem Soleimani, who aspires to lead the entire battle.
Several questions were raised about the murder of the most dangerous figure in the Lebanese Hezbollah militia. Who is he? And how was he killed? Who did accompany him in his last moments? All these questions will be answered by a special investigation aired by Al-Arabiya on Tuesday.
Mustafa Badreddine, Hezbollah’s highest ranking commander, was killed in a mysterious explosion near Damascus International Airport. Hezbollah blames Islamic State, but the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights disputes this.
Born in the southern Beirut suburb of Ghobeiry on 6 April 1961, Badreddine had a pronounced limp, believed to have been sustained while he fought alongside pro-Palestinian and pan-Arabist militias during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982.
His nom de guerre was Sayyed Zul Fikar: Sayyed indicating a claimed descent from the prophet Muhammad; Zul Fikar being the name of the legendary forked sword of Imam Ali, the prophet’s cousin and one of the most revered figures in Shia Islam.
Badreddine was arrested and sentenced to death in Kuwait in 1983 over his suspected involvement in a string of coordinated bombings in the tiny Gulf emirate that also targeted the US and French embassies. They were believed to be retribution for Kuwait and the west’s support for Iraq in its war with Iran.
The sentence, which had to be formally approved by the emir, was never carried out, perhaps as a consequence of a series of attacks and plane hijackings demanding the release of the Kuwait attackers, and which allegedly involved Mughniyeh. It was also never carried out because when the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in August 1990, he threw open the doors of the country’s prisons, allowing Badreddine to escape.
This is where the trail disappears. It only emerges again in 2011, when UN prosecutors investigating a 2005 Beirut bombing that killed Lebanon’s prime minister, Rafik Hariri, indicted Badreddine. They alleged he was the coordinator of a sophisticated network that tracked and ultimately assassinated the popular billionaire.