Profile: Ibrahim Aqil, who was killed in an Israeli airstrike on Friday. Here is an extract:
Aqil, who was in his early 60s, had risen through the ranks and reached a senior position in the organization. Exact details of his role are unclear, but the Israel Defense Forces described him as “the head of the Hezbollah terrorist organization’s operations team, the acting commander of the Radwan [special forces] unit.”
“He was one of the really senior old-timers but was never really the face of anything. He was always a number two or number three, but had just been promoted in the last five to 10 years,” said Hussain Abdul-Hussain, a research fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies in Washington and an expert on extremism in Lebanon.
Aqil was one of a group of young Shia men originally from the south of Lebanon but living in Beirut who were energized by the 1979 Iranian revolution and recruited by the country’s Revolutionary Guards into a network known initially as Islamic Jihad and then later as Hezbollah.
Their military aim, guided by their Iranian mentors, was to fight the US, which had dispatched a peacekeeping force to Beirut, and Israel, which had occupied much of Lebanon. Their political objective was to turn Lebanon into an Islamic state aligned with Tehran. Almost all have been killed since, probably by Israel.
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