Who was Ibrahim Aqil? The slain Hezbollah commander wanted for ’83 Beirut barracks blast
Operations chief killed in IDF strike had $7 million bounty on his head for two 1983 Beirut truck bombings that killed over 300 people at US embassy and a Marines barracks
BEIRUT – Ibrahim Aqil, the Hezbollah operations commander killed in an Israeli strike on Friday, had a $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 that the veteran terrorist chief was killed in an airstrike on Beirut’s southern suburbs during a meeting of the elite Radwan unit of the Iranian-backed Lebanese terror group. Hezbollah confirmed his death late on Friday night.
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 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.
Hezbollah began targeting northern Israel immediately after October 7, forcing tens of thousands of northern Israeli residents from their homes, and has been pounding the north with rockets at a rate sometimes reaching several hundred a day.
Born in a village in Lebanon’s Beqaa valley sometime around 1960, Aqil had joined the other big Lebanese Shi’ite 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 the $7 million bounty on his head.
Aqil’s cohort of founding Hezbollah operatives helped turn the group from a shadowy militia into Lebanon’s most powerful military, terrorist and political organization, with constant attacks prompting Israel to withdraw from south Lebanon’s the so-called security zone in 2000, and a deadly cross-border attack triggering war in 2006.
Israel’s IDF Spokesman, Daniel Hagari, said Friday that Aqil and the Radwan Force commanders who were targeted alongside him had drawn up Hezbollah’s plan, “to be carried out on the day the order was given, to attack into the northern territory of the State of Israel — what they called ‘The plan to conquer the Galilee’.”
In this planned invasion, said Hagari, “Hezbollah intended to raid Israeli territory, occupy the communities of the Galilee, and murder and kidnap Israeli citizens — similar to what Hamas did on October 7.”
When Shukr was killed in July, it was seen as the heaviest blow to Hezbollah’s command structure since the 2008 assassination of its terrorist commander Imad Mughniyeh.
Aqil, whose bounty was set by the United States at an even higher value than that of Shukr’s, may prove a similar blow.
