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 Marines barracks.
Two security sources in Lebanon confirmed the veteran fighter was killed in an airstrike on Beirut’s southern suburbs during a meeting of the elite Radwan unit of the Iranian-backed Lebanese militant group.
Aqil, who has also used the aliases Tahsin and Abdelqader, 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.
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