(Hussein Malla / AP)
Hezbollah assassination tied to growing Mideast tensions
There are many suspects in the Lebanese Shiite commander’s killing, which risks stirring sectarian strife.
Hezbollah commander Hassan al-Laqees assassinated outside his Beirut home
Video:
Gunmen assassinated Hassan al-Laqees, a senior Hezbollah commander,
after he parked his car in his apartment building's garage in Lebanon's
capital.
The militant Iranian-backed movement immediately blamed Israel for the assassination and warned that it would suffer the consequences. Israel denied that it was responsible.
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“There are so many players around who could be involved in this,” said Elie Hindy, assistant professor for international affairs at Lebanon’s Notre Dame University. “Hezbollah has created so many enemies around it — regional enemies, Islamist enemies, Israeli enemies — and that does not include invisible possibilities.”
According to a brief statement issued by Hezbollah, veteran commander Hassan al-Laqees was shot late Tuesday in Hadath, a mixed Christian-Shiite neighborhood six miles south of Beirut, as he returned from work near midnight. Lebanon’s Daily Star reported that he was shot five times in the head and neck in his car outside his home by at least one gunman.
“Israel automatically stands accused of responsibility,” the Hezbollah statement said, warning that Israel will bear “all consequences of this heinous crime.”
Although Israel usually does not comment on such allegations, the accusation brought a swift response.
“Israel has nothing to do with this incident,” Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor told the Associated Press. “These automatic accusations are an innate reflex with Hezbollah. They don’t need evidence, they don’t need facts, they just blame anything on Israel.”
Hezbollah indeed routinely blames Israel, with which it fought a brief-but-fierce border war in 2006, for attacks against its interests, and Israel has remained the chief suspect in the 2008 assassination of top Hezbollah commander Imad Mughniyah.
But many Lebanese said the killing of Laqees was more likely linked to the country’s soaring sectarian tensions , which have been aggravated by the war in neighboring Syria and a shift in the region’s balance of power in favor of Hezbollah’s sponsor, Iran.
“No one believes it was Israel,” said a Hezbollah supporter who lives in the Hezbollah-controlled southern suburbs of Beirut. The movement is accusing Israel “because it wants to avoid Sunni-Shiite discord,” he said.
A previously unknown Sunni Islamist group calling itself Ahrar al-Sunna Baalbek Brigade claimed responsibility in a Twitter post , though neither its claim nor its existence could be verified. The group said it killed Laqees in retaliation for Hezbollah attacks on Sunnis in the eastern Bekaa region of Baalbek.
Hezbollah’s dispatch of fighters to support Syrian President Bashar al-Assad also has stirred resentment among Lebanese Sunnis, many of whom are increasingly falling under the influence of extremists. Bombings have targeted the southern suburbs, and last month suicide bombers attacked the Iranian Embassy .
Hours before the assassination, Lebanese television broadcast an interview in which Hezbollah chief Hasan Nasrallah accused Saudi Arabia of supporting Lebanese groups linked to al-Qaeda, including the one that claimed responsibility for bombing the embassy.
The attacks echo the bombings and assassinations that the group known as al-Qaeda in Iraq has carried out against Shiites in an effort to provoke civil strife in Iraq. But militants backed by the Syrian regime also have been caught conducting attacks in Lebanon, and a former government minister with close ties to Assad is awaiting trial on charges he plotted bombings against Sunnis in Lebanon last year.
While there are many possible suspects, the professionalism of the operation suggested “an intelligence service in the region which has an interest in escalating Shiite-Sunni tension,” said Hilal Khashan, professor of political science at the American University of Beirut.
Hezbollah, which has a controlling stake in Lebanon’s government and is the most powerful military force in the country, has no interest in risking its hold on Lebanon by retaliating, he added. “Hezbollah does not want sectarian tensions to go out of control. But its ability to control its supporters is limited.”
Ahmed Ramadan in Beirut and Ruth Eglash in Jerusalem contributed to this report.
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