Founded in 1982, the Lebanese paramilitary group now claims to have 100,000 fighters — and has formed an uneasy partnership with Hamas against its old foe Israel
A senior Hezbollah figure was walking along a quiet Damascus street one February evening after dinner in 2008 when a bomb planted in a spare tyre on the back of an SUV exploded.
Imad Mughniyah, Hezbollah’s international operations chief, was killed in the burst of shrapnel. It emerged that the CIA had built the bomb. Mossad, the Israeli foreign intelligence agency, triggered it remotely from Tel Aviv.
Mughniyah was on the “hit list” for his role in a bombing on the American embassy in Beirut, in 1983.
