Last Friday, May 13, Badreddine, too, met a violent end--killed, according to reports, in a mysterious explosion near Damascus International Airport.
Badreddine's terror activity with Hezbollah went back to 1983, when he led a cell that car-bombed the U.S. embassy in Kuwait. Captured and imprisoned in Kuwait, he managed to escape in 1990 when Saddam Hussein invaded the country.
Badreddine made it back to Beirut, his Hezbollah comrades, and terror activity--both against Israel and against U.S. and British forces in Iraq. But Badreddine's most notorious exploit came on February 14, 2005, when he masterminded the vicious killing of moderate Sunni Lebanese leader Rafiq Hariri in Beirut.
As Israeli investigative writer Ronen Bergman describes it:
....a suicide bomber driving a van loaded with explosives equal in damage power to three tons of TNT collided with Hariri's armored convoy, turning it into a fiery hell.
The attack succeeded, Bergman says, even though
Hariri was one of the best-guarded people in the world, with his security protocol formulated by experts from Germany and the United States. Badreddine's success in killing Hariri (together with 21 other people) had once again proven that apart from Mughniyeh, he was the best operative in the organization.
Badreddine was also--surprisingly, perhaps, for a Hezbollah chief--a hedonist and womanizer who made sure to live life to the fullest, including studying at the American University of Beirut, dining at expensive restaurants, running a jewelry store and having many friends and pleasures that he was unwilling to give up, not even for Hezbollah.
Which still leaves open the question: who was it that finally put an end to Badreddine's versatile career last Friday?