Hezbollah said on Saturday its top military commander, whose death it announced on Friday, was killed in Syria by Sunni Islamist artillery fire and not by an Israeli airstrike as one member of the Lebanese Shiite terrorist group had said. "Investigations have showed that the explosion, which targeted one of our bases near Damascus International Airport, and which led to the martyrdom of commander Mustafa Badreddine, was the result of artillery bombardment carried out by takfiri groups in the area," Hezbollah said in a statement. But a war monitoring group cast doubt on Hezbollah's version of Badreddine's death, saying there had been no shelling by rebels in that area for more than a week. Damascus International Airport and its surroundings are controlled by the Syrian government and allied forces. Between it and government-held central Damascus, rebels control a portion of the Eastern Ghouta suburb, which has experienced fighting for most of the conflict now in its sixth year. "There has been no recorded shelling or firing from the Eastern Ghouta area onto Damascus International Airport for more than a week," Syrian Observatory for Human Rights director Rami Abdulrahman told Reuters. Hezbollah's statement did not say when the attack took place or when Badreddine died. Badreddine was given a military funeral in Hezbollah's stronghold in southern Beirut on Friday. "The outcome of the investigation [into Badreddine's death] will increase our determination ... to continue the fight against these criminal gangs and defeat them," Hezbollah said. Badreddine had many enemies. He was sentenced to death in Kuwait for his role in bomb attacks there in 1983 and escaped from a Kuwaiti jail after Saddam Hussein's Iraq invaded in 1990. His release from jail in Kuwait was one of the demands made by the hijackers of a TWA flight in 1985, and of the hijackers of a Kuwait Airways flight in 1988. For years, Badreddine masterminded military operations against Israel from Lebanon and overseas and managed to escape capture by Arab and Western governments. "The martyred commander spent years of his life on the front line of the jihad [struggle] against the Zionist entity," Iran's parliament speaker Ali Larijani said in a condolence message to Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah reported by the group's media outlet Al-Manar. Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif also sent a condolence message to Nasrallah. "Badreddine was all passion and devotion in defending the ideals of Islam and the resistant Lebanese people in their fighting against terrorism," Zarif was quoted as saying by Iran's Fars news agency. Badreddine was one of five Hezbollah members indicted by the U.N.-backed Special Tribunal for Lebanon in the 2005 killing of statesman Rafik Hariri, one of Lebanon's most prominent Sunni Muslim figures. Hezbollah denied any involvement and said the charges were politically motivated. A Special Tribunal prosecutor described Badreddine as an elusive character who passed as an "unnoticed and virtually untraceable ghost through Lebanon." U.S. Army Colonel Steve Warren, a Baghdad-based spokesman for the U.S.-led coalition effort against Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, said on Friday that it was too soon to assess what impact Badreddine's death might have on Hezbollah but noted that the group had suffered heavy casualties in Syria. But with regards to this specific strike, who took it and what the downstream impact is going to be of losing this leader -- its simply too soon to tell, Warren said. Warren said the U.S. had no involvement in the strike.
Credit: Reuters
Hezbollah is fighting in the Syrian civil war, backing President Bashar Assad's regime against a range of Sunni groups including Islamic State and the al-Qaida-affiliated Nusra Front.
