Meet the Pyromaniac Playboy Leading Hezbollah’s Fight in Syria
To close friends, he is “Dhu al-Faqar,”—the name, meaning, “the cleaver of vertebrae,” of the legendary double-tipped sword given by the Prophet Muhammad to his son-in-law, Ali bin Abi Talib, the patron imam of Shia Islam. To the Kuwaiti government, who sentenced him to death in 1984 for a spate of audacious bombings on targets including the American and French embassies and the airport, he is Elias Fouad Saab. To prosecutors at the Special Tribunal for Lebanon (STL) in The Hague, who are currently trying him in absentia on suspicion of assassinating Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq al-Hariri in 2005, he is Mustafa Amine Badreddine. To genteel dining companions—and multiple mistresses—entertained at his seaside home north of Beirut, he is the boat-owning, Mercedes-driving Christian jeweler, Sami Issa.
Or, rather, he was. The Frank Abagnale Jr. of jihad has found yet another preoccupation in the last few years. According to sources as discrepant as the U.S. Treasury Department and a militantly pro-Hezbollah newspaper in Beirut, the man who also goes by the name Safi Badr is currently leading the Party of God’s military intervention against the Syrian uprising, personally sitting in on meetings between President Bashar al-Assad and Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah. It’s a distinction that earned the “Specially Designated Global Terrorist” a fresh dose of American sanctions just last week.
Not that he’s spending all his days on the road. He was spotted back in Lebanon in January at the funeral of his nephew Jihad Mughniyeh—son of his cousin, brother-in-law, and lifelong partner-in-war-crime, the late Imad Mughniyeh—who had been killed in the Syrian Golan Heights by an Israeli drone strike that, according to a New York Times report, had in fact been intended for Badreddine (his real name) himself. He had “dropped out of the gathering,” at which an Iranian Revolutionary Guards general was also present, “at the last minute.”
Such improbable escapes are seemingly second-nature to the former death row inmate who owes his life to the insane decision by Saddam Hussein to invade Kuwait in 1990, opening the prisons and sending Badreddine on his merry way to the Iranian embassy, to be welcomed and swiftly redeployed to Beirut, where the civil war had conveniently just ended. Under the patronage of the Syrian occupation newly legitimized by the international community in the 1989 Taif Agreement, Dhu al-Faqar and his fellow “Islamic Resistance” mujahideen were about to spend some of their happiest years bringing misery and death to the 1,500 Israeli troops who would remain in south Lebanon till the year 2000.
Source: www.thedailybeast.com