Was Hezbollah's Mughniyeh an unintended target?
A security source from Beirut tells Al-Monitor how the perpetrators of the 2008 assassination of Hezbollah's military commander might not have known they were targeting the elusive Imad Mughniyeh.
For years, Hezbollah’s Imad Mughniyeh remained a ghost. Many had heard of him but only a few had met him outside the inner circles of his organization. Even then he wasn’t known by his real name, but rather by his alias, Hajj Radwan.
Even within the ranks of Hezbollah, many didn’t know that their military commander was the same Imad Mughniyeh who topped, alongside Osama bin Laden, the world's "most wanted" lists. It was only on Feb. 13, 2008, that they discovered who Hajj Radwan really was, when Al-Manar TV reported that he had been assassinated in Damascus by a car bomb the day prior.
According to a well-informed security source in Beirut, that night, Mughniyeh had met Khaled Meshaal and Ramadan Abdullah Shalah, the respective leaders of Palestine's Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Iran’s Quds Forces commander Gen. Qasem Soleimani also attended the meeting, as did an aide of Mughniyeh's.
It wasn’t the first time that these men had met in Damascus — a city they viewed as a safe haven for coordinating among resistance groups. “Mughniyeh started overlooking the Palestinian resistance months before his assassination,” the source said.
