Hezbollah commander Fuad Shukr has long been wanted by the US. On Tuesday, Israel said it killed him.
The Israeli army said Shukr was targeted in an airstrike in Beirut because he was behind a rocket attack in the Golan Heights that killed 12 youths over the weekend.
The veteran warrior among Iran-backed militants had long been on a wanted poster, accused by the US of involvement in the bombing of Marine Corps barracks in Beirut in 1983 during the country’s civil war.
That attack killed about 240 American service members, a scarring strike that established the group that later became Hezbollah, and its backers in Iran, as enduring US enemies. In 2017, Washington offered a $5 million reward for information leading to his location, arrest or conviction.
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Believed to be born in the earlier 1960s in Lebanon, he later joined Hezbollah, and the Israeli military said he became a senior adviser to the group’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah.
He has long played a key role in some of the most high-profile and controversial operations by Hezbollah, designated a terrorist group by the US.
“His loss is a significant one for Hezbollah’s command and control,” said Jonathan Panikoff, director of the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Middle East Security Initiative.
He’s among the roughly 400 or so Hezbollah operatives killed by Israel since Oct. 7, Panikoff said, when Hamas attack southern Israel and set off the war in Gaza that’s drawn in other Iran-backed groups.
Shukr is alleged to have traveled to Tehran in 1994 on behalf of Hezbollah to retrieve a batch of US-made Stinger anti-aircraft missiles originally intended for Afghan rebels during the Afghan-Soviet war, according to the Counter Extremism Project, an advocacy group based in Washington.
Shukr also played a crucial role in Hezbollah’s military campaign in Syria during the country’s civil war, aiding pro-government troops against opposition forces, according to the US Treasury Department.
Shukr, also known as Mohsin Shukr, has served as a member of the group’s highest military body, the Jihad Council, and is reported to be responsible for growing Hezbollah’s precision weapons capabilities, according to Panikoff, who previously served as former deputy national intelligence officer at the US National Intelligence Council.
In 2019, the State Department designated him a Specially Designated Global Terrorist, blocking all property of Shukr subject to US jurisdiction and prohibiting US persons from engaging in transactions with him.