Car bombings were Imad Mughniyeh's specialty. During his quarter-century as a master terrorist, he sent explosive-laden vehicles to blow up embassies, military barracks and even a community centre.
So it was perhaps only fitting that when he met his demise in Damascus it was in a sudden concussive burst of gas and flames -- a bomb planted in a parked Mitsubishi Pajero.
Mughniyeh's nickname was The Fox.
Despite being one of the world's most wanted terrorists, with a US$5-million reward on his head, he skilfully dodged the security services that were hunting him.
When Hezbollah television announced his death yesterday, calling him a "great jihadi leader," it showed pictures of the bearded 45-year-old looking Che Guevara-esque in combat fatigues.
But photos of Mughniyeh were rare, grainy and indistinct. Early on, he succeeded in erasing himself by destroying all his Lebanese civil records. "He's a guy some denied even existed," said Matt Levitt, director of the counterterrorism and intelligence program at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
Officially, Mughniyeh was the head of the Special Operations Command. He was Hezbollah's military chief, but he was in effect a state-sponsored terrorist of Iran.
A short, chubby Islamic revolutionary, Mugniyeh began his career guarding Yasser Arafat during the Lebanon civil war and then went to work for the Iranians, which helped form Hezbollah as a proxy force that would do Tehran's dirty work internationally.
Mugniyeh cemented his dark reputation in 1983, when he orchestrated the vehicle bombing of the American embassy in Beirut and, six months later, similar attacks at the barracks of French and American peacekeepers.
He followed up with a spate of kidnappings, the 1985 hijacking of a TWA plane flying from Athens to Rome, the 1992 bombing of the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires and the bombing two years later of the city's Jewish community centre. Some 500 died in his attacks in just over a decade. Osama bin Laden has called Mugniyeh's tactics in Beirut his inspiration for "destroying towers in America."
"When he joined Hezbollah -- by the way he is a very fierce fighter -- they carried out many bombings and assassinations," a Hezbollah member captured in Canada told Canadian intelligence officers, according to Federal Court records. "Imad Mugniyeh's group operates in great secrecy. He commands a number of men."
His international network even stretched into Canada, where he was linked to a Hezbollah procurement network that purchased night-vision goggles and army surplus gear in Vancouver and shipped it to Lebanon. The Canadian Hezbollah operatives referred to him as "the Father." He was also known as Hajj.
Mugniyeh survived a 1994 attempt on his life that killed his brother. The funeral marked his last public appearance. Closely guarded by Iran, he shunned publicity, never appearing on Arab television. He never strayed outside his safe haven, the belt of adjoining countries from Lebanon to Iran.
"He was smart. He stayed in the theatre of operations and didn't leave it," said Michael Ross, a Canadian who served in the Israeli Mossad and now lives in British Columbia. He also changed his appearance. "He had plastic surgery at least twice."
Lately, Mugniyeh had been helping train Shiite militias in Iraq and working to get Hamas more sophisticated missiles to rain on Israelis. Intelligence officials suspect Tehran had tasked him with preparing for retaliatory terrorist strikes against Western targets, to begin if Iran were attacked over its nuclear program.
The Israelis denied they were behind the killing, but Mr. Ross said nobody else could have done it and he believes the bombing was the work of Mossad's special covert operations unit, Caesarea.
"There's no doubt that it was a Mossad operation. There's no other intelligence service, including the Americans, that have that kind of capability," said Mr. Ross, author of The Volunteer: A Canadian's Secret Life in the Mossad.
Mass rallies have been called for today but for a man whose legacy consists of collapsed buildings and corpses, some expect Hezbollah will celebrate his death with a bombing, possibly at an Israeli embassy.
Hezbollah's chief Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah said today his group is ready for "open war" with Israel if the Jewish state wanted it.
"Zionists, if you want this type of open war then let the whole world hear: let it be an open war," Nasrallah told mourners at Mughniyeh's funeral.
Hezbollah and Palestinian groups issued statements yesterday hinting that retaliatory attacks were coming. Palestinian Islamic Jihad said the killing was "a match which will explode a new battle in the region.... Jihad, jihad, victory or martyrdom."
Whether Middle Eastern armed Islamic groups are capable of mounting such strikes without their long-time mastermind remains to be seen.
"On the one hand his loss is a major, major blow," said Mr. Levitt, a former U.S. counter-terrorism official and the author of Hamas: Politics, Charity and Terrorism in the Service of Jihad. "On the other hand Hezbollah receives significant and ongoing training from Iranian intelligence and because of that, their capabilities on the covert operation, counter-intelligence side are very, very good."
National Post
