Killing of Nasrallah is a key prize for Israel, but it’s too early to write off Hezbollah

On Saturday, Hezbollah confirmed that its leader, Hassan Nasrallah, is dead after Israel announced he was killed in an airstrike in Beirut on Friday.

His death marks a major moment in recent Middle East history, but the long-term consequences are uncertain. It raises a key question: Do “decapitation strikes” killing the leaders of terrorist groups cripple them? The short answer is not really.

Israel should know from its own history that such strikes don’t always succeed in crippling a militant group. In 2008, Israel killed Hezbollah’s military leader, Imad Mughniyeh, in Damascus, Syria, yet the group only gathered strength in the years that followed.

Four years earlier, Israel killed a founder of Hamas, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, in an airstrike. Yet, the group did not collapse, and almost two decades later it still carried out the October 7 attacks in Israel, killing some 1,200 Israelis in a single day.

More recently, in July, Israel said it killed one of the October 7 masterminds, Mohammed Deif, a key Hamas military commander, yet the militant group fights on in Gaza.

The US has its own history of killing terrorist leaders in the hope that it will cripple its foes. When Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al Qaeda in Iraq, was killed in a US bombing raid in 2006, it was treated as a major breakthrough because al Qaeda in Iraq was significantly contributing to the civil war that was then tearing the country apart.

Yet eight years later, al Qaeda in Iraq eventually morphed into ISIS, which took over territory the size of Portugal and presided over a population of some eight million people in Iraq and Syria. ISIS also carried out devastating terrorist attacks in the West, for instance, in Paris in 2015 that killed 130 people.

What actually ended ISIS’s geographical “caliphate” was not a strike on its leadership but a ground campaign against the terrorist army from 2014 to 2019 waged by the Iraqi military and Syrian Kurdish forces backed by thousands of US troops and significant American airpower. ISIS’s base, the second largest city in Iraq, Mosul, was largely destroyed during this war.

In May 2016, then-President Barack Obama authorized a drone strike in Pakistan that killed the overall leader of the Taliban, Mullah Akhtar Mohammad Mansour. Yet, today, the Taliban control all of Afghanistan.

Then-President Donald Trump ordered a strike in Baghdad, Iraq, in early January 2020 that killed Qasem Soleimani, the commander of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Quds Force who was crucial to Iran’s relationships with its proxy forces in the region such as Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis in Yemen and Shia militias in Iraq.

After Soleimani was killed, Trump said, “Soleimani was plotting imminent and sinister attacks on American diplomats and military personnel, but we caught him in the act and terminated him.”

Yet, his death had no lasting impact on Iran’s regional power and ambitions, and Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis in Yemen have continued their attacks on Israeli targets and Shia militias continued their attacks on American targets in Iraq.

The United States has designated the Taliban, the Houthis, Hamas, ISIS and Hezbollah as terrorist groups.

What can cripple a terrorist group is a sustained campaign to take out as many of its leaders and middle managers as possible. A CIA drone campaign that was ramped up in 2008 in Pakistan’s tribal regions bordering Afghanistan killed many of al Qaeda’s leaders, according to New America, a research institution (where I am a vice president).

Documents recovered by the US Navy SEALs who killed Osama bin Laden in his compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, in 2011 show that al Qaeda’s leader regularly wrote to his followers living in the country’s tribal regions, urging them to move around only on cloudy days when the drones were less effective. As a result, bin Laden was planning to pull all his followers out of the tribal region and resettle them in other parts of Pakistan.

Bin Laden’s death certainly significantly contributed to undercutting al Qaeda’s appeal to terrorists and its abilities to carry out attacks since it was bin Laden who had founded the group, had directed its most lethal operations, and members of the group had sworn a personal oath of allegiance to him.

Bin Laden’s successor, Ayman al-Zawahiri, didn’t have the charisma or the organizational skills to resuscitate al Qaeda, and Zawahiri himself was killed in a US drone strike in Afghanistan two years ago. The UN estimates there are about four hundred members of al Qaeda living in Afghanistan today.

While al Qaeda is a relatively small terrorist group, Hezbollah has been in existence for four decades and is backed by Iran, which is a key player in the region and has an army of some 30,000 soldiers armed with an extensive arsenal, including some 150,000 rockets and missiles.

The killing of Nasrallah is a key prize for Israel as part of its larger wave of attacks on Hezbollah that intensified earlier this month with its covert action exploding thousands of pagers and walkie-talkies followed by massive airstrikes that have taken out infrastructure and other senior leaders.

But it’s too early to write the militant group off, though it’s clearly in disarray. History suggests it will reorganize and appoint other leaders to continue its long fight against Israel.