Israel has activated a strategy to decapitate Hezbollah by taking out its top military commanders, including Ali Karaki, head of the Lebanese group’s southern front. An Israeli strike targeting Karaki this week put a spotlight on a shadowy figure within Hezbollah’s ranks, but experts are not convinced by Israel’s strategy in a powder keg region.
After a week of deadly attacks targeting Hezbollah’s leadership and military capabilities, the Lebanese-based Shiite militia group on Wednesday fired a missile that reached the Tel Aviv area for the first time ever before being intercepted by Israel's air defences, according to the Israeli military.
Hezbollah on Wednesday said it fired a Qader 1 ballistic missile targeting the headquarters of Israel's Mossad intelligence agency near Tel Aviv. The Israeli military said it struck the launcher which fired the missile in the Nafakhiyeh area of south Lebanon.
The missile attack came after a wearying week for Hezbollah, which included unprecedented attacks via bombs hidden in pagers and walkie-talkies and a targeted Israeli strike in Beirut’s southern suburbs which on Friday killed top Hezbollah commander Ibrahim Aqil, followed by intense barrages of air strikes across swathes of Lebanon. None of them appeared to affect Hezbollah’s capacity to launch a missile targeting central Israel.
On Monday, as Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant was hailing “the most difficult week in Hezbollah’s history”, social media sites were awash with reports of the “elimination” or “liquidation” of Hezbollah commander Ali Karaki in an Israeli strike in the southern suburbs of Beirut.
The reports, however, were denied by the Iran-backed Lebanese militant group.
“Ali Karaki is well and in good health,” said a Hezbollah statement, dismissing rumours of the death of one of its last “historic” commanders.
By Tuesday, Israeli security sources acknowledged that an airstrike in Beirut’s southern suburbs of Dahieh, a Hezbollah stronghold, had failed to eliminate Karaki. Hezbollah insisted that Karaki had not only escaped the attack, but had since been taken to “a safer place”.
A man on the charts
Karaki is often presented in the media as one of Hezbollah's most influential leaders. In the Israeli army’s organisational charts of Hezbollah’s Jihad Council, the armed group’s most important military body, Karaki appears at the head of the Southern Command.
The charts place Karaki under the direct orders of Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah. “This means that he probably organises most of the military operations against Israel carried out from southern Lebanon,” explained Filippo Dionigi, a Hezbollah specialist at the University of Bristol.
As head of Hezbollah’s Southern Command, Karaki is responsible for giving the orders to the militia's forces along Lebanon’s southern border with Israel, and his troops would be “the first line” of defence against an Israeli invasion of southern Lebanon, noted The New York Times.
Lebanon’s southern front with northern Israel has long been considered a vital plank in what Hezbollah calls its resistance against Israel. Its strategic importance has increased since Israel signalled a shift in focus from fighting Hamas in Gaza to targeting Hezbollah to the north.
Karaki’s role as Hezbollah’s southern front commander makes him a critical player in the current conflict with Israel. His importance within the group is likely to have increased following the September 20 killing of Aqil, head of Hezbollah’s elite Radwan force, in an Israeli strike on Dahieh, and the July 30 assassination of Fuad Shukr Fuad, the group’s most senior military commander, according Shahin Modarres, Iran specialist at the International Team for the Study of Security Verona.
Karaki may figure in the top ranks of Hezbollah’s organisational charts, but there is a dearth of information on the southern front commander. That’s not surprising for an organisation “characterised by a culture of secrecy, especially when it comes to its armed wing. Hezbollah generally publishes details of its leaders when they die,” said Didier Leroy, a Hezbollah specialist and researcher at the Brussels-based Royal Higher Institute for Defence (Belgium) and Université Libre de Bruxelles.
But even by Hezbollah’s military secrecy standards, Karaki is particularly shadowy. "He is a central piece of the organisation, but he's one of the less famous characters of Hezbollah and more discreet," noted Modarres.
Arrested in Azerbaijan, released in prisoner swap
Born in 1967 in the southern Lebanese city of Nabatieh, Karaki joined Hezbollah’s ranks in the early 1980s, according to several experts.
He emerged from the shadows in 2008, when Azerbaijani police foiled a plot to attack the Israeli embassy in Baku, according to Dionigi. Karaki was arrested and sentenced to 15 years in prison. But barely two years later, Iran negotiated his release as part of a prisoner exchange with Azerbaijan.
Following his return to the Middle East, Karaki steadily climbed up the ranks of Hezbollah's armed wing to become “one of the central figures along with Talal Hamiyah and Fuad Shukr”, noted Modarres.
Hamiyah is listed as the head of Hezbollah’s “international terrorist branch, the External Security Organisation (ESO)”, in the US State Department’s Rewards for Justice Program, which offers a reward of up to $7 million for information leading to his location or arrest.
In September 2019, Karaki was one of four Hezbollah figures to be hit with US sanctions. In its media note, the US State Department described Karaki as “a senior leader” within Hezbollah’s Jihad Council who was “responsible for military operations in southern Lebanon”.
Leroy notes that not only does Karaki occupy a strategic position, he is also “the notorious survivor of Hezbollah's historic (original) branch”.
Eliminating ‘historical’ commanders
In recent weeks, Israel has dealt “an unprecedented blow to Hezbollah and its historical leaders. Between the targeted assassinations of its leaders and the beeper explosions, this is a very difficult period for the group to overcome,” noted Dionigi.
But experts say it’s difficult to assess the real operational impact of the recent elimination of Hezbollah's armed wing leaders. “It's not like Hamas, which in Gaza has fewer options for replacing leaders who are eliminated. Hezbollah's armed wing has around 50,000 fighters, and the martyr culture developed within the organisation means that a succession mechanism is provided for every position,” explained Leroy.
On Wednesday, Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei insisted that Israel's killing of top Hezbollah commanders would not defeat the Iran-backed Lebanese militant group.
"Some of the effective and valuable forces of Hezbollah were martyred, which undoubtedly caused damage to Hezbollah. But this was not the sort of damage that could bring the group to its knees," said Khamenei during a meeting with military personnel and veterans of the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war.
"The organisational and human strength of Hezbollah is very strong and will not be critically hit by the killing of a senior commander,” Khamenei added.
Dionigi notes that the “moral and probable operational impact” of eliminating high profile targets is “bigger” when it comes to “very charismatic figures” such as Qassem Soleimani, former head of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), who was killed in a January 2020 US strike in Iraq.
But Modarres concedes that the elimination of historical commanders with military knowledge and experience does pose a human resource hit for Hezbollah’s operations, at least for the short term. “Hezbollah's political structure is becoming more and more fragile because of the targeted assassinations against their historical leaders who had the most experience. How much of experience will the new replacements have?" said Modarres.
The recent targeted killings of its leaders have also exposed Hezbollah’s weaknesses. The fact that Israel was able to “track the movements of the most important military leaders with extreme precision makes Hezbollah look really primitive from a technological point of view, compared to its adversary”, noted Dionigi.
The real impact of the hunt for Hezbollah's historical leaders can only be assessed in the light of the Shiite militia's response in the coming weeks, according to the experts interviewed by FRANCE 24. The real risk, they note, is an attempt by Hezbollah to put up a show of force to prove that its ability to stand up to Israel has not been seriously dented.
This is a translation of the original in French.
