Blood on the tracks

AFTERTHOUGHT… People hold a sign reading ‘Thank you Nisman for your honesty’ as they attend the arrival of the funeral cortege carrying the remains of Argentine prosecutor Alberto Nisman in Buenos Aires. — AFP

Seven years ago, a strategically placed car bomb claimed the life of Imad Mughniyah on a Damascus street. Last weekend, a report in The Washington Post offered fresh details on the assassination, designating it a joint operation between a CIA team based in the Syrian capital and Mossad operatives in Israel.

Evidently, Mossad provided the intelligence, while the CIA provided the boots on the ground as well as the bomb, which is said to have been rigorously tested in an effort to minimise collateral damage. The Americans placed the bomb in a spare tyre, and the Israelis detonated it. Mission accomplished.

The Post says the hit was authorised at the highest level in the US, which means George W. Bush signed off on it. The target was the Lebanese militia Hezbollah’s international operations chief, and while the latest American grievance against him was based on his involvement in the resistance to the American occupation forces in Iraq, events in which he played a key role apparently stretched back to the 1983 bombings of the US embassy and an American military base in Beirut, and included the 1996 attack on the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia.

Mughniyah is also suspected of being one of the masterminds behind the suicide bombing of the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires in 1992 and, two years later, the bombing of a Jewish community centre in the same city.

It is intriguing, albeit probably coincidental, that details of the Mughniyah hit should emerge just days after the mysterious death of Alberto Nisman, an Argentinean prosecutor who was on the verge of airing purported proof of collusion between his nation’s government and Tehran to bury evidence of Iran’s role in the latter atrocity, which claimed 85 lives. The gruesome development has rocked the government of President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, who initially claimed that Nisman’s death was a suicide; he was found lying in a pool of blood, killed by a bullet from a handgun he is believed to have borrowed the previous day from a colleague, but without any gunpowder residue on his hands.

She changed her mind a day later, stating not only that Nisman was murdered, but that the idea behind the deed was to destabilise her government. She implicitly pointed the finger at the “deep state”, setting in motwion an effort to dissolve Argentina’s Intelligence Secretariat (SI), whose phone intercepts provided Nisman with his ammunition.

The irony is not only that the SI’s original precursor was created by Fernandez’s political hero Juan Peron, but that she and her husband, Nestor Kirchner, who preceded her as head of state, presided over a sharp increase in the agency’s domestic surveillance activities.

Nisman, who had been appointed to his task by Kirchner, was instrumental in preparing indictments that led to Interpol red notices being issued for the five main Iranian suspects, including Mohsen Rabbani, who had served as Tehran’s cultural attaché in Buenos Aires. Taped conversations between Argentinean officials and Rabbani, by then based in Qom, were reportedly a key component of the evidence Nisman was preparing to present to Argentina’s Congress.

The negotiations between the two countries were supposedly prompted in large part by Argentina’s thirst for Iranian oil, and they led in 2013 to an agreement to set up a joint truth commission to investigate the anti-Semitic terrorist act of 1994. It is not terribly clear, though, why Buenos Aires looked upon Tehran as a particularly vital source of oil, given that there is hardly a scarcity of vendors — beginning with Venezuela, with which Argentina developed reasonably warm relations under the Kirchners.

There is inevitably ongoing speculation in Argentina over who was behind Nisman’s death. He is said to have confided to the colleague from whom he borrowed the gun that he feared “pro-government fanatics” more than “foreign terrorists”, and that he did not trust his security detail. Back in Damascus in 2008, according to the Post, the CIA and Mossad had one opportunity to target Mughniyah while he was standing next to Qassem Suleimani, the commander of Iran’s Quds Force, but decided against it in the absence of explicit authorisation regarding the latter.

In Iraq today, the Shia militias aligned with Hezbollah and Quds Force are, of course, effectively on the same side as Western intervention forces combating Daesh, and a degree of coordination at some level would not be surprising.

It’s more complicated in Syria, though, where Hezbollah and Iran back the Assad regime, while Israel has surreptitiously been bolstering the anti-Assad rebels — including, by some accounts, their radical factions. When an Israeli helicopter opened fire last month on a Hezbollah unit in Syria, its victims included an Iranian Revolutionary Guards general (the Israelis have suggested they were unaware of his presence) as well as Jihad Mughniyah, the son of Imad.

Hezbollah’s leader Hassan Nasrallah vowed revenge, and incidents on Israel’s border with Lebanon have heightened fears of broader clashes if not all-out war. As one would expect, Nasrallah had also made a similar pledge following the assassination of Imad Mughniyah. It has recently emerged, though, that Mohammed Shawraba, the lieutenant to whom he entrusted the task of retaliation in 2008, turned out to be an Israeli spy.

There are, as they say, wheels within wheels, leaving tracks — and, all too often, blood on the tracks — all the way from the Middle East to the tip of South America.

Mahir Ali is a journalist based in Sydney