The Arab Capital of Culture and Imad Mugniyah
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Imad Mugniyah, left
UNESCO Director-General, Koichiro Matsuura, visited the Syrian capital on Jan. 8-11 to congratulate the Syrians for being nominated Arab Capital of Culture for 2008. While in Damascus, Matsuura, the head of the UN body responsible for promoting education, culture and science, commended Syrian “hospitality.” Syrian President Bashir Assad marked the occasion by proclaiming Damascus as “the capital of resistance culture .” Assad asserted that the tradition of Damascus was to strive for peace “with dignity and pride,” adding that his country will “lead a dialogue among civilisations.”
Giving poignant meaning to Assad’s and Matsuura’s words, on February 12, one of Damascus most famous “resistance” figures, Imad Mugniyah, who in recent years had benefitted from Syrian hospitality, was killed in a car bombing. Mugniyah, a Lebanese Shiite personified the cooperation and links between terrorist groups (aka. resistance groups).
He joined the Palestinian Fatah organization in 1975 and served in Yasir Arafat’s special guard, Force 17. In 1983, he linked up with the newly formed Lebanese Hezbollah organization and became affiliated with Iran’s Revolutionary Guards. Emerging as a terrorist mastermind in his early twenties, Mugniyah was implicated in the Marine Barracks bombing in Beirut in 1983 that left 241 US Marines dead, the kidnapping and killing of US officials in Lebanon, the hijacking of TWA Flight 847, the bombing of the Israeli embassy in Argentina in 1992 and the bombing of the Jewish community center in Buenos Aires in 1994 that killed 86 people.
Mugniyah was also accused of planning the cross-border raid on July 12, 2006 that killed eight Israeli soldiers and kidnapped two others, leading to the summer war between Israel and Hezbollah. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad blamed his demise on “Zionists,” although he was wanted by others, like the US, which offered $5 million for information leading to his capture.
Mugniyah is gone, but Damascus still remains a safe zone for numerous terrorist groups, like Hamas, PFLP, PFLP-General Command, Islamic Jihad and Hezbollah.
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