The elite Hezbollah commander who was killed in an alleged Israeli
...
KABOOM!...
in southern Leb
...an Iranian satrapy currently ruled by Hassan Nasrallah situated on the eastern Mediterranean, conveniently adjacent to Israel. Formerly inhabited by hardy Phoenecian traders, its official language is now Arabic, with the usual unpleasant side effects. The Leb civil war, between 1975 and 1990, lasted a little over 145 years and produced 120,000 fatalities. The average length of a ceasefire was measured in seconds. The Lebs maintain a precarious sectarian balance among Shiites, Sunnis, and about a dozen flavors of Christians, plus Armenians, Georgians, and who knows what else? It is the home of the original Hezbollah, which periodically starts a war with the Zionist Entity, gets Beirut pounded to rubble, and then declares victory and has a parade. The Lebs have the curious habit of periodically murdering their heads of state or prime ministers...
Monday played a central role in some of the terror group’s most high-profile attacks, including a deadly 2006 cross-border raid that triggered the Second Lebanon War.
Wissam al-Tawil was described by the Iran-backed terror group as a "commander," while a senior source in Lebanon told the Rooters news agency that he was a commander of Hezbollah’s elite Radwan forces and the most senior Hezbollah officer killed so far in the recent fighting along the border.
In Israel, unsourced reports in Hebrew media claimed that Tawil had recently become leader of the Radwan force, an elite unit within Hezbollah thought responsible for a number of skirmishes on the Israel-Lebanon border. However,
you can observe a lot just by watching...
Lebanon’s al-Meyadeen news outlet, considered closely linked to Hezbollah, said reports that Tawil was the commander of Radwan were false, without elaborating.
A security source told AFP that Tawil "had a leading role in managing Hezbollah’s operations in the south," near the Israeli border.
In a statement posted to Telegram, Hezbollah said that Tawil had "led" operations against Israeli forces along the restive frontier, which since the Hamas
...the braying voice of Islamic Resistance®,...-led terror onslaught on October 7 has seen near-daily skirmishes and cross-border strikes from both sides.
Israeli officials have been demanding for weeks that the Radwan force withdraw from the border area to allow tens of thousands of Israelis displaced by the fighting to return to their homes.
On Monday, Tawil was killed when an airstrike hit a car he was in, near his hometown of Khirbet Selm, some 10 kilometers (6 miles) from northern Israel.
The terror group said he joined Hezbollah in 1989, when he was 14 years old, rising through their ranks.
Tawil, whose two brothers were killed fighting with Hezbollah, participated in dozens of attacks against Israeli forces and their Lebanese allies during Israel’s 18-year occupation of southern Lebanon until it withdrew in 2000.
Years later, when Hezbollah joined the civil war in Syria in 2013, Tawil was in charge of coordinating between the Lebanese organization and the Syrian army in the battles against the Islamic State
...formerly ISIS or ISIL, depending on your preference. Before that they were al-Qaeda in Iraq, as shaped by Abu Musab Zarqawi. They're really very devout, committing every atrocity they can find in the Koran and inventing a few more. They fling
Allaharound with every other sentence, but to hear western pols talk they're not
reallyMoslems....
group, according to the Hezbollah official. Tawil was a close aide to Hezbollah’s chief commander in Syria Mustafa Badreddine, who was killed in 2016, the official added.
During his long years with the Lebanese terror group, Tawil was close to Imad Mughniyeh, Hezbollah’s military chief from its founding in 1982 until he was killed in a bombing in the Syrian capital in 2008 attributed to Israel.
Additionally, Tawil had close links with Gen. Qassem Soleimani
, head of Iran’s Quds Force, who was killed in a US dronezap in Baghdad in 2020. Soleimani led the foreign operations of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and played a key role coordinating between Iran-backed groups such as Hezbollah and Hamas.A senior source in Lebanon said Tawil’s death marked a big blow, given his experience including deployments with Hezbollah in Syria and Iraq.