Killed Hezbollah commander Ibrahim Aqil was wanted for deadly US embassy, Marine blasts

BEIRUT: Ibrahim Aqil, the Hezbollah operations commander killed in an Israeli strike on Friday (Sep 20), had a US$7 million bounty on his head for two 1983 Beirut truck bombings that killed more than 300 people at the American embassy and a US Marin barracks.
He headed the militant group’s elite Radwan Force and had been in a meeting of the unit when he was killed in an airstrike on Beirut’s southern suburbs. Radwan Force fighters spearhead Hezbollah’s operations on the ground.
Aqil has also used the aliases Tahsin and Abdelqader.
He was the second member of Hezbollah’s top military body, the Jihad Council, to be killed in two months after an Israeli strike in the same area targeted Fuad Shukr in July.
Israel escalated its attacks on the group this week after months of border fighting triggered by the conflict in Gaza that began on Oct 7 with a deadly raid and hostage-taking in Israel by Hezbollah’s Palestinian ally Hamas.
Like Shukr, Aqil is a veteran of Hezbollah, which was founded by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards in the early 1980s to battle Israeli forces that had invaded and occupied Lebanon.
Born in a village in Lebanon’s Beqaa valley sometime around 1960, Aqil had joined the other big Lebanese Shi’ite political movement, Amal, before switching to Hezbollah as a founding member, according to a security source.
The United States accuses him of a role in the Beirut truck bombings at the American embassy in April 1983, which killed 63 people, and a US Marine barracks six months later that killed 241 people.
It further accused him of directing the abduction of American and German hostages in Lebanon and listed him as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist in 2019, putting a US$7 million bounty on his head.
Referring to the bombing of the US Marine barracks and other attacks on Western interests in Lebanon in the 1980s, Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah said in a 2022 interview with an Arabic broadcaster that they were carried out by small groups not linked to Hezbollah.
Aqil’s cohort of founding Hezbollah operatives helped turn the group from a shadowy militia into Lebanon’s most powerful military and political organisation, pushing Israel from its occupation of the south in 2000 and fighting it again in 2006.
When Shukr was killed in July, it was seen as the heaviest blow to its command structure since the 2008 assassination of Imad Mughniyeh, remembered by Hezbollah as a legendary commander but by Israel and the United States as a terrorist.
Aqil, whose bounty was set by the United States at an even higher value than that of Shukr’s, may prove a similar blow.
Hezbollah has already lost the commanders of two of its three regional units in the south since October: Mohammed Naameh Nasser, killed in an Israeli airstrike on his car in south Lebanon on Jul 3, and Taleb Abdallah, killed in a strike on a house in the south a month earlier.
The Radwan Force also lost top commander Wissam Tawil, who was killed in January.