Friday’s airstrike on Hezbollah headquarters has been confirmed as killing Hezbollah terrorist leader Hassan Nasrallah.
Lebanon’s Hezbollah group confirmed on Saturday that its leader and one of its founding members, Hassan Nasrallah, was killed in an Israeli airstrike in a southern suburb of Beirut.
The killing of the powerful militant group’s longtime leader sent shockwaves throughout Lebanon and the Middle East, where he has been a dominant political and military figure for more than three decades.
Nasrallah, linked by Israel to numerous deadly attacks on Israeli and Jewish targets, has been on Israel’s kill list for decades. His assassination is by far the biggest and most consequential of Israel’s targeted killings in years, and significantly escalates the war in the Middle East. The Israeli military said it carried out a precise airstrike on Friday while Hezbollah leaders were meeting at their headquarters in Dahiyeh, south of Beirut.
Quick reaction:
Good.
Fuck that guy.
Hezbollah is a terrorist organization that has a long history not only of killing Israeli women and children, but also killing Americans, stretching back into the 1980s, and we should celebrate every time a member is killed. Indeed, a whole bunch people who oppose jihad reportedly celebrated Nasrallah’s death in Syria and Iran. Muhannad Alazzeh, former member of the Jordanian Senate, explains:
Hezbollah is an ideological party based on the principle of Wilayat al-Faqih or Guardianship of the Jurist, which is the cornerstone of the Shiite doctrine. It demands the loyalty of its followers to the guardian jurist, who acts on behalf of heaven’s command. That person is Iran’s Supreme Leader, the Ayatollah Khomeini, and Hezbollah’s fealty to Khomeini is what pushed the party without hesitation to engage in civil wars in Syria, Iraq, and Yemen, and to intervene in the protests in Bahrain years ago. These interventions by Hezbollah were not against Israel but against the Muslim citizens in those countries, most of whom were engaged in revolts against tyrannical dictatorial regimes, who built their power off the bodies of their opponents.
Hezbollah’s support for criminal and corrupt regimes in Yemen, Syria, Iraq, and Iran has had a much stronger impact on the Arab and Islamic masses than Hezbollah’s attacks on Israel, which is why the assassination of Hassan Nasrallah is not an event worth shedding tears for most of these masses.
Hezbollah’s involvement in repressive actions in neighboring countries elevated strongman leaders who oppressed their fellow Muslims, which angered enough people that Israel was able to recruit a large base for espionage missions, one which undoubtedly helped in carrying out successive assassinations of Hezbollah leaders, the last but not least of which was the assassination of Nasrallah.
Even at home in Lebanon, Hezbollah is accused by Lebanese citizens (with the exception of the Shiite community) of being an armed militia that undermines and weakens the Lebanese state. This accusation has turned out to be true over the past years; Hezbollah took up arms against Saad Hariri’s Future Movement in 2008 and occupied buildings and facilities in Beirut in a blatant show of force. The group was also accused of being involved in the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri.
From the perspective of the overwhelming majority of Arab and Muslim peoples, Hezbollah is a destructive element that fuels sectarian conflicts and supports authoritarian regimes so long as these regimes share a common sectarian affiliation with Hezbollah and the Supreme Leader of Iran wishes to support them.
Now Israel must deal with Nasrallah’s successor, Hassan Khalil Yassin, who—
Oh wait. They just did. “The IDF eliminated senior Hezbollah intelligence array terrorist Hassan Khalil Yassin in an additional precision strike in the Dahieh district in Beirut on Saturday, the military reported.”
That was quick. They also took out another high ranking Hezbollah leader, one Nabil Kaouk, the deputy head of Hezbollah’s Central Council, just today. Enjoy an Iowahawk meme:
Join Our Team! Now hiring for all positions, no experience necessary. Starting at $15 per hour plus great fringe benefits. Send applications to Tehran Temp Services pic.twitter.com/3SjCuaUtjF
— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) September 27, 2024
He left out “opportunities for rapid advancement.”
One of the primary goals of warfare is to take out an enemy’s C3: command, control and communications. Operation Grim Beeper took out their communications, and the bombing campaign has taken out their command and control. It’s as close to an absolute decapitation strike as I’ve seen in warfare. They’ve taken out all of Hezbollah’s leadership, along with several of their Iranian handlers. Hezbollah’s network is gone, and it will take years to reconstitute those hierarchies of competence, if ever. Does Hezbollah have a written succession chart for this situation? Does the Assistant Undersecretary for Raping Jewish Women move all the way up to the top spot? Expect a lot of power-jockeying and internecine warfare among surviving lower-level terrorists, all of whom, in classic Arab fashion, see no reason why they shouldn’t be the ones running things
The MSM is doing their usual hand-wringing over “escalation” and “a wider war.” With whom? Israel has effectively destroyed Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon. Syria is still mired in its own unending civil war. Israel aircraft are now pounding the snot out of the Houthis in Yemen. And via Instapundit:
There are unconfirmed reports in Iranian media of a helicopter crash in southwestern Iran.
It is reported that Mohammad Abdul Salam, the head of Houthi coordination in Iran, and several others have been killed.
— CaucasusWarReport (@Caucasuswar) September 28, 2024
Is Iran going to send Republican Revolutionary Guard units through Syria to attack the Golan Heights? Are they finally going to pack their much-rumored nuke on one of their missiles and pray really hard it gets past Arrow-2 and -3, David’s Sling and Iron Dome? I’m not even sure the Mahdi personally assuring the mullahs he would unoccult himself would convince them to go toe-to-toe with Israel in a game of nuclear war.
Israel has effectively destroyed its nearest foes and delivered blows to Iran’s prestige it will take the mullahs years, if not decades, to recover from. As I said back in July, Israel is settling all family business.
There’s obviously going to be a lot of fallout:
Benjamin Netanyahu ignored Biden Administration blithering to finish off Israel’s terrorist enemies, much to the consternation of global anti-Israeli political elites. Netanyahu will probably emerge from the Israeli-Hamas not only stronger than ever, but possibly the most significant Israeli leader since David Ben-Gurion.
Tags: Bashar Assad, Beirut, Benjamin Netanyahu, C3 (command, control and communications), Hassan Khalil Yassin, Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah, Houthi, IDF, Iowahawk, Iran, Israel, Israel-Hamas War, Jake Sullivan, Lebanon, March 8 Coalition (Lebanon), Mohammad Abdul Salam, Muhannad Alazzeh, Nabil Kaouk, Operation Grim Beeper, Shiites, Syria, Wilayat al-Faqih, Yemen
There are reports that Iran’s Supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, is now hiding for fear that the Israeli’s are working their way up the terrorist food chain and he is next; let’s hope so.
The sad part is how much we could have done with competent leadership and a will to destroy our enemies.
I’ve said this for years… The idjits that think “escalation” works are utter morons. It didn’t work in Vietnam, it didn’t work anywhere for the last few thousand years.
You do not “moderate” war. Once it gets to the point where you’re killing people? You don’t go in half-hard; you go in and wipe the f*ckers out. Period.
Witness WWI. Regardless of the merits, the raw fact is that the Germans did not receive “enough of a lesson” in that war. They did not leave it thinking they’d been defeated, because the Allies actually did not defeat them; they stopped before they’d done enough moral and physical damage to the Germans. Which basically wasted every single life they expended in that war, because they were doing it all over again in 20 years, like the idjits they were. Fortunately, the second time around, they did enough of a job on the German psyche that the Germans haven’t felt like going out a-conquering again was a good idea. That’s lasted the last, what, seventy years?
So… Amount of damage required to dissuade a culture from their bad habits? Apparently, based on the evidence, it took killing about 15% of the German population, destroying the majority of the country’s infrastructure, and setting occupation forces on the ground for fifty years. You can take it as “WWI; not enough: WWII; enough”.
This being the case, I suspect that 15% was enough to convince the Germans, who’re a fairly smart demographic. They can work things out, and understand cause and effect. The number of people you need to kill for “convince Arabs of the folly of their way” may turn out to be a hell of a lot higher.
So, frankly, if you don’t have the stones to kill 15% of the population of your enemy? You don’t intend to do what we did to Germany, Austria, and Japan? Don’t bother with war; because all you’re going to do is get a lot of good people killed to no real purpose.
We were not effective in Iraq and Afghanistan because we were “too nice”. Same with Vietnam. Same with Korea. You don’t make war with a rheostat; you make war with a sledgehammer, or don’t even bother.
I would encourage the Israelis to keep on killing Hamas and Hezbollah until the point is made. That may be a few million dead Arabs and Persians. Anything short of that ain’t likely to work.
Minor quibble: The Republican Guards were Iraqi; Iran has the Revolutionary Guards.
[Fixed. – LP]
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