CNN —
Hezbollah confirmed the death of its leader Hassan Nasrallah on Saturday, after Israel announced on Friday that he had been killed in an airstrike in Beirut.
His death marks a significant moment in recent Middle East history, but the long-term impact is unclear. It raises an important question: Do “decapitation attacks” that kill the leaders of terrorist organizations cripple them? Simply put, they don’t.
Israel should learn from its own history that such attacks are not always successful in destroying extremist groups. In 2008, Israel killed Hezbollah military leader Imad Mughniyeh in Damascus, Syria, just as the group expanded in the following years.
Four years ago, Israel killed Hamas founder Sheikh Ahmed Yassin in an airstrike. However, the group did not disintegrate and still carried out the October 7 attack in Israel almost 20 years later, killing approximately 1,200 Israelis in one day.
More recently, in July, Israel announced it had killed Mohamed Deif, a key Hamas military commander and one of the masterminds of the October 7 attacks, but the militant group continues to fight in Gaza.
The United States has a unique history of killing terrorist leaders in hopes of neutralizing their enemies. When al-Qaeda in Iraq leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was killed in a U.S. bombing in 2006, it was treated as a major breakthrough, as al-Qaeda in Iraq had contributed significantly to the civil war that was tearing the country apart at the time. Ta. Especially.
But eight years later, al-Qaeda in Iraq eventually morphed into ISIS, occupying territory the size of Portugal and controlling a population of about 8 million people in Iraq and Syria. ISIS has also carried out devastating terrorist attacks in Western countries, including killing 130 people in Paris in 2015.
What actually ended ISIS’s geographic “caliphate” was not the attack on its leadership, but the Iraqi and Syrian Kurdish forces, supported by thousands of U.S. troops and significant U.S. air power. It was a ground operation against terrorist forces conducted from 2014 to 2019. Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city and an ISIS stronghold, was largely destroyed in the war.
In May 2016, then-President Barack Obama authorized a drone strike in Pakistan that killed Taliban leader Akhtar Mohammad Mansour. However, the Taliban now control all of Afghanistan.
Then-President Donald Trump ordered an attack in Baghdad, Iraq, in early January 2020 to attack Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Quds, which is crucial to Iran’s relations with regional proxies such as Hezbollah, Hamas, and Hamas. Killed the unit’s commander, Qasem Soleimani. Houthis in Yemen and Shiite militias in Iraq.
After Soleimani’s killing, President Trump said, “Soleimani was planning an imminent and sinister attack on American diplomats and military personnel, and we caught him in the middle of it and fired him.”
However, his death had no lasting impact on Iran’s regional power and ambitions, with Hezbollah, Hamas, and Yemen’s Houthis continuing to attack Israeli targets, and Shiite militias targeting American targets in Iraq. continues to attack.
The United States has designated the Taliban, Houthis, Hamas, ISIS, and Hezbollah as terrorist groups.
What can cripple a terrorist group is a continuous campaign to eliminate as many leaders and middle managers as possible. According to the research organization New America (of which I am vice president), intensified CIA drone operations in Pakistan’s tribal areas bordering Afghanistan killed many al-Qaeda leaders in 2008.
Documents recovered by the U.S. Navy SEALs who killed Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad, Pakistan, in 2011 show that the al-Qaeda leader regularly writes letters to his supporters in the country’s tribal areas and threatens security. It turned out that people were encouraged to move only on cloudy days. The effectiveness of the drone was low. As a result, bin Laden planned to pull all his followers out of the tribal areas and resettle them in other parts of Pakistan.
Bin Laden’s death certainly contributed significantly to weakening al-Qaeda’s appeal to terrorists and its ability to carry out attacks. Because it was Bin Laden who founded the group and directed its most deadly operations, and to whom the group’s members were personally sworn allegiance. To him.
Bin Laden’s successor, Ayman al-Zawahiri, lacked the charisma or organizational skills to revive al-Qaeda, and Zawahiri himself was killed in a US drone strike in Afghanistan two years ago. The United Nations estimates that about 400 al-Qaeda members currently live in Afghanistan.
Al-Qaeda is a relatively small terrorist group, while Hezbollah has been around for 40 years and is supported by Iran. Iran is a major player in the region, with an army of about 30,000 soldiers with a large arsenal of weapons, including about 150,000 rockets. And missiles.
Nasrallah’s killing comes as part of a major offensive against Hezbollah that escalated earlier this month with massive airstrikes that detonated thousands of pagers and walkie-talkies in covert operations and later destroyed infrastructure and other senior leaders. , an important prize for Israel. .
But while it is clearly in disarray, it is too early to eliminate extremist groups. According to history, other leaders will be reorganized and appointed to continue the long-term fight against Israel.
