Did Syria Assassinate Hezbollah's Imad Mugniyah?

Who killed Imad Mugniyah? (FBI Photo)

It's not exactly a "Who Shot J.R." scenario. J.R. was fictional. Imad Mugniyah was real. J.R. was an oil tycoon. Mugniyah was a terrorist. And J.R., thanks to the magic of television, was able to return--and remains eternal, thanks to the magic of syndication. Mugniyah, despite the promises and projections of martyrdom, is dead and gone, never to be seen again, much to the relief of a few interested parties. Still, the mystery of his death seems to be coming to life.

Back in February, Hezbollah's Imad Mugniyah, one of the world's most lethal terrorists, was assassinated in Damascus.

Eyes immediately fixed on Israel, which considers targeted assassinations legitimate. Israel has many reasons to kill Mugniyah. In 1994, Israel blamed Mugniyah for masterminding the bombing of a Jewish charity’s office in Argentina that killed 85 people and injured 300. Mugniyah was also instrumental in many a bombing during Hezbollah's campaign to rid South Lebanon of Israeli occupation between 1982 and 2000 (when Israel withdrew). Immediately after his assassination by car bomb, Hezbollah's Hassan Nasrallah, without investigating the blast, promised that Israel would pay.

But did Israel really kill Mugniyah? Die Welt, the German newspaper, cast doubt on the theory Saturday. The paper reported that Mugniyah was the reason Syria's president, Bashar al-Assad, foiled a coup attempt by Assad's brother-in-law, Assef Shawkat, four months ago. Shawkat reportedly organized the coup with about 100 intelligence officers, radical Muslims and the backing of al-Qaeda. Al-Qaeda considers Assad an apostate. (Assad is an Alawite, a breakaway Shiite religious sect, which plays into his alliances with Shiite Iran and Hezbollah, a Shiite organization. Syria is a majority-Sunni country. Al-Qaeda is a Sunni organization.)  Mugniyah told Assad of the plot. A few days later, Mugniyah was killed.

Lending credence to the report is the fact that several Syrian intelligence officers were subsequently imprisoned and  Shawkat was relieved of his duties--but hasn't been arrested, possibly because of his family relation to Assad. There's also the bloodily obvious fact of Syria's long tradition of assassinations. If the report is accurate, it should have Nasrallah rethinking his plan to retaliate against Israel. But in the Middle East, confirming who is responsible for what assassinations has never been a more appealing tactic than ascribing blame based on convenient assumptions. Whatever the facts may suggest, it's Hezbollah ideology to blame Israel for as much as possible (just as it's Israeli ideology to blame Arabs for most of the troubles Israel faces, whether those troubles are self-inflicted or not).

See Also:

• Hezbollah and the 1983 Bombing of the U.S. Marines Barracks in Beirut
• The 2006 Lebanon War: Israel and Hezbollah Square Off
• Israel and Syria Talk Peace for First Time Since 2000