SEVEN years ago, a car bomb claimed the life of Imad Mughniyah on a Damascus street. Last weekend, a report in The Washington Post offered fresh details on the assassination, designating it a joint operation between a CIA team based in the Syrian capital and Mossad operatives in Israel.
Evidently, Mossad provided the intelligence, while the CIA provided the bomb. The Americans placed the bomb in a spare tyre, and the Israelis detonated it. Mission accomplished.
The Post says the hit was authorised by President George W. Bush. The target was the Lebanese militia Hezbollah’s international operations chief, and while the latest American grievance against him was based on his involvement in the Shia resistance to the American occupation forces in Iraq, events in which he played a key role stretched back to the 1983 bombings of the US embassy and an American military base in Beirut.
Mughniyah is also suspected of being one of the masterminds behind the suicide bombing of the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires in 1992 and, two years later, the bombing of a Jewish community centre in the same city.
It is intriguing, albeit probably coincidental, that details of the Mughniyah hit should emerge just days after the mysterious death of Alberto Nisman, an Argentinian prosecutor who was on the verge of airing purported proof of collusion between his nation’s government and Tehran to bury evidence of Iran’s role in the latter atrocity, which claimed 85 lives.
The gruesome development has rocked the government of President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, who initially claimed that Nisman’s death was a suicide. She changed her mind a day later, stating that Nisman was murdered in an attempt to destabilise her government. She implicitly pointed the finger at the “deep state”, setting in motion an effort to dissolve Argentina’s Intelligence Secretariat (SI), whose phone intercepts provided Nisman with his ammunition.
Nisman was instrumental in preparing indictments that led to Interpol red notices being issued for the five main Iranian suspects. Taped conversations between Argentine officials and Iranian counterparts based in Qom were reportedly a key component of the evidence he was preparing to present to Argentina’s Congress.
The negotiations between the two countries were supposedly prompted largely by Argentina’s thirst for Iranian oil, and led in 2013 to an agreement to set up a joint truth commission to investigate the 1994 terrorist attack. It is not terribly clear, though, why Buenos Aires looked upon Tehran as a particularly vital source of oil, given that there is hardly a scarcity of vendors.
Then there is the fact that a key figure — and Nisman’s primary contact — in SI was Antonio ‘Jaime’ Stiuso, a wiretapper who was eventually fired by Fernandez. A report by Uki Goñi in The Guardian last week quotes an Argentine intelligence source who worked with both Stiuso and Nisman as saying of the former: “You should have seen how well received he was at the CIA and the Mossad.” Nisman, meanwhile, is said to have been exceptionally close to the US embassy in Buenos Aires.
It does not necessarily follow, of course, that his evidence concerning Iran’s role in the 1994 bombing and subsequent collusion between Buenos Aires and Tehran was concocted on the basis of prejudices or external advice. The available evidence indeed points to an Iranian role in a dastardly crime, and subsequently an attempted cover-up. It’s also easy to see, though, why the US might wish to keep Argentina on the boil as Fernandez approaches the end of her second and final term. There is inevitably ongoing speculation in Argentina over who was behind Nisman’s death.
Back in Damascus in 2008, according to the Post, the CIA and Mossad had an opportunity to target Mughniyah alongside Qassem Suleimani, the commander of Iran’s Quds Force, but decided against it in the absence of explicit authorisation regarding the latter.
In Iraq today, the Shia militias aligned with Hezbollah and Quds Force are, of course, effectively on the same side as Western intervention forces combating Islamic State. It’s more complicated in Syria, though, where Hezbollah and Iran back the Assad regime, while Israel has been bolstering the anti-Assad rebels.
When an Israeli helicopter opened fire last month on a Hezbollah unit in Syria, its victims included an Iranian Revolutionary Guards general as well as Jihad Mughniyah, the son of Imad. Hezbollah’s leader Hassan Nasrallah vowed revenge, and recent incidents have heightened fears of all-out war. Nasrallah had made a similar pledge following the assassination of Imad Mughniyah. It has recently emerged, though, that Mohammed Shawraba, the lieutenant to whom he entrusted the task of retaliation in 2008, turned out to be an Israeli spy.
There are, as they say, wheels within wheels, leaving tracks — and, all too often, blood on the tracks — all the way from the Middle East to the tip of South America.
mahir.dawn@gmail.com
Published in Dawn, February 4th, 2015
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