“Badreddine is assessed to be responsible for Hezbollah s military operations in Syria since 2011”, the US Treasury Department said, adding that he liaised personally with Assad.
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Enmity runs deep between Israel and Hezbollah.
No cause of the explosion was cited, and no group claimed responsibility, but a TV station allied with Hezbollah blamed Israel.
Badreddine, who was on a USA terror sanctions blacklist and wanted by Israel, was killed in a blast on Thursday night near Damascus global airport.
Hezbollah said the war is necessary to protect Shi’ites from Sunni extremists who have been at the forefront of the Syrian opposition. Though rivals on the ground, IS and al-Qaida’s Syria branch, called the Nusra Front, consider Shiites to be apostates whose blood may be shed. In the 1980s, Badreddine was sentenced to death in Kuwait over a plot to blow up the American and French embassies, and later escaped after Saddam Hussein’s army invaded the country and threw open its prisons.
After that, Badreddine, known among the group’s ranks as Zulfiqar, became Hezbollah’s top military commander.
Lebanese media close to Hezbollah recently reported that Badreddine was in Syria fighting alongside the Assad regime.
“This is not just their commander in Syria”. Saudi Arabia backs Syria’s rebels and is a bitter opponent of Iran, Hezbollah’s patron. “However, Hezbollah sees this as an existential decision because the Syrian government provides a lifeline to the group”. Between it and government-held central Damascus, rebels control a portion of the Eastern Ghouta suburb, which has experienced fighting for most of the conflict now in its sixth year. Hezbollah has never publicly named a successor for Moughniyeh.
Senior Iranian officials have been offering their condolences to Hezbollah over the martyrdom of its top commander Mustafa Badreddine over the past days, showing strong ties between the movement and Iran.
The group announced Badreddine’s death without saying when the attack occurred.
With Badreddine’s death, Hezbollah is likely to rely on a younger generation of commanders, moving away from the veterans who came of age during Lebanon’s 1975-1990 civil war or during Hezbollah’s 18-year war against Israel’s occupation of southern Lebanon, which ended in 2000.
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Between 1,000 and 2,000 of its fighters have been killed in combat there, other experts say.
