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| Syria-Lebanon-Iran | |
| It was the colonel in the airport with the phone bomb: who killed that Hezbollah Number 2? | |
| 2016-05-16 | |
| [IsraelTimes] After the mysterious death of top Hezbollah commander Mustafa Badredinne, Israeli papers try to figure out with who did it and what it means -- and come up with a big fat shrug A top Hezbollah commander was killed and for once it doesn’t look like Israel did it. But that doesn’t stop Israeli papers from playing up the death of Mustafa Badreddine and analyzing who he was, what his killing means for the Lebanese Shiite terror group he helped lead, and the wider ramifications in the rough-and-tumble Middle East.
"Badreddine was clashing with Hezbollah leaders about tactics against Israel as well as the fielding of Hezbollah forces in Syria. Two years ago, a Kuwaiti newspaper reported that Badreddine had been taken to task over his management of operations of units outside Leb. He was accused of being distracted by women, which, it was said, led to the failure of operations including an attempted terror attack in Thailand," he writes. "Mohammed Ataya, the head of Hezbollah’s Unit 113, which is responsible for operations in the West Bank, has been clashing with Badreddine. According to the Kuwaiti paper, Badreddine would go over Ataya’s head to Beirut." The idea that Badreddine was a hopeless romantic in camo jumps from rumor to fact in Yedioth Ahronoth, which tops its report with the headline "Terrorist by day, playboy by night." The paper’s Ronen Bergman reports a number of juicy details about the famously secretive Hezbollah commander, working off information he previously uncovered as part of an investigation together with The New York Times ...which still proudly displays Walter Duranty's Pulitzer prize... "He has 13 different phones, some for operational purposes and some for his love life. Even the fateful night when [Lebanese prime minister Rafik] Hariri was assassinated [in 2005] he didn’t forget his loves. At around 2 a.m. he sent a text message to one of them after she complained that he doesn’t give her enough of his time and wondering if he is spending it with someone," the well-sourced Bergman reports. It wasn’t just the ladies who were weary of Badreddine, but the Hezbollah baddie had a whole host of enemies, according to Yedioth’s Alex Fishman, who ticks them off: the Syrian rebels, the Saudis, the Americans, the Israelis. Whoever did it, though, they were professionals, he writes. "He wasn’t killed by chance by rebel fire in Syria, as a Hezbollah inquiry found. Sources in Beirut reported that when he was killed he was alone in a secret Hezbollah facility near the Damascus airport, and in the room there was a blast that killed him. Nobody else was hurt. The conclusion: somebody followed him and knew exactly when he would arrive and when he would be in the room." | |
| Posted by:trailing wife |