Hezbollah commander killed in Beirut was biggest loss for group since 2008

The top Hezbollah commander killed in Beirut by Israel on Tuesday was a founding member of the movement who helped oversee its expansion from a Lebanese civil war militia to a major force in the Middle East. The killing of Fuad Shukr is thus the heaviest blow to Hezbollah’s command since the 2008 assassination of Imad Mughniyeh, underlining the gravity of this week’s escalation in the conflict, which has been rumbling across the region since Israel’s military offensive against the Palestinians in Gaza erupted last year.

While the assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran marked a major political setback for the Palestinian Islamic Resistance Movement and its allies, Shukr’s killing has stripped the “axis of resistance” of one of its top military leaders. Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah is due to speak at his funeral today.

Also known as Al-Hajj Mohsin, Shukr was part of a generation of Lebanese Shi’a Muslims who mobilised in 1982 to fight the Israeli army, which had invaded Lebanon. They were driven by ideological inspiration from Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution.

Shukr was a close associate of Mughniyeh, a shadowy figure remembered in Hezbollah as a legendary commander, but by the United States as a terrorist, accused of plotting attacks including the 1983 bombing of the US Marine barracks in Beirut.

The US says that Shukr played a central role in the bombing that killed 241 American military personnel. In 2017, it put a bounty of up to $5 million on Shukr’s head, according to Washington’s Rewards for Justice website.

According to Israel, Shukr was responsible for the killing of numerous citizens of the occupation state and foreign nationals over the years. It killed the 61-year-old in retaliation for a 27 July rocket attack that killed 12 children and teenagers in a Druze village in the Israeli-occupied Syrian Golan Heights. Hezbollah, which has been trading fire with Israel since 8 October in solidarity with the Palestinians in Gaza, denied any role in the attack.

In 1982, Shukr helped to plan a suicide car bomb attack on Israeli troops at their barracks in the southern Lebanese city of Tyre, along with Mughniyeh and others, according to details of his life published by Al-Akhbar. Photos of Shukr published by the newspaper on today showed him in military fatigues standing between Mughniyeh and Mustafa Badreddine, another Hezbollah veteran commander who was killed in Syria in 2016.

READ: Hezbollah sends condolences to Palestinian people and Hamas after Haniyeh murder

Al-Akhbar also published a photo of Shukr alongside Qasem Soleimani, the commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ Quds Force, who was killed in a US drone strike in Baghdad in 2020.

As a top Hezbollah commander from 1985 until the mid-nineties, Shukr oversaw the evolution of Hezbollah attacks from suicide bombings to operations that included storming Israeli positions, whilst building Hezbollah’s arsenal with the addition of weapons such as anti-tank missiles, reported Al-Akhbar.

He assumed many of Mughniyeh’s responsibilities after his assassination, explained sources familiar with his roles. These included acting as military adviser to Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah.

The Israeli military accused Shukr of being responsible for the majority of Hezbollah’s most advanced weaponry, including precision-guided missiles, cruise missiles, anti-ship missiles, long-range rockets and drones.

Announcing the bounty on his head in 2017, the US Rewards for Justice programme said that he played a key role in Hezbollah’s military operations in Syria, where the group deployed fighters in support of President Bashar Al-Assad in the early years of the Syrian civil war.

At the time, Hezbollah dismissed the allegations against Shukr and Talal Hamiyah, another Hezbollah operative for whom a bounty was offered, saying they were “rejected and void”.

Referring to the bombing of the US Marine barracks and other attacks on Western interests in Lebanon in the 1980s, Hezbollah leader Nasrallah told an Arabic broadcaster in 2022 that they were carried out by small groups not linked to Hezbollah.