Hezbollah’s Badreddine assasinated to help terrorists: Analyst

Press TV has conducted an interview with Hazem Salem, a political activist from Cairo, to discuss the assassination of Mustafa Amine Badreddine, a senior Hezbollah commander involved in battles against terrorists in Syria.

Salem says Israel is well aware that it is not able to achieve its goals in Lebanon and the blockaded Gaza Strip due to the presence of resistance fighters like Hezbollah and Hamas forces.

The regime, therefore, targets Hezbollah resistance fighters in Syria to support the Takfiri terror groups wreaking havoc on the Arab state, he adds.

Israel celebrates the martyrdom of Commander Badreddine because the regime sees the resistance movement as the biggest threat against its existence, said the analyst, adding, however, that such killings only make resistance leaders more adamant in the fight against Israeli crimes.

Commander Badreddine, who had been on the Israeli regime’s assassination list for more than two decades, was fighting the Takfiri terror groups operating as Tel Aviv’s proxies to topple the legal and internationally-recognized government in Damascus.

“Resistance gives the legitimacy to any Arab ruler in power and those who don’t believe in legitimizing themselves by supporting the resistance will take the legitimacy from Israel and the United States,” he added.

The activist further pointed to the first cabinet meeting held by the regime in Tel Aviv in the occupied Golan Heights earlier this month and said the regime’s authorities do not intend to end the occupation of the Syrian territory.

The cabinet meeting served political purposes for Israel which wants to show it maintains a strong presence in the Golan Heights, but the presence of resistance fighters on the Syrian side of the occupied territory is a thorn in the eyes of Israel as it sees its anti-Syria plots doomed to failure.

Who is the late commander?

On Friday, Badreddine was martyred in a strike against the Syrian capital, Damascus. Hezbollah is investigating the incident.

Born in 1961, Badreddine joined the armed wing of Lebanon’s Hezbollah movement in 1982, the year Israel invaded the Arab country and occupied its southern parts. The late commander helped train resistance fighters to confront the Tel Aviv regime’s occupation.

He was appointed as the commander of Hezbollah’s central military unit in 1992 and served as a mastermind of several anti-Israel military operations.

The commander’s sacrifices and heroic acts greatly contributed to the Israeli military’s humiliating withdrawal from southern Lebanon in 2000.

Badreddine, a senior advisor to Hezbollah Secretary General Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, assisted the security forces in dismantling scores of Israeli spy cells on Lebanese soil during his more than three-decade career as a Hezbollah operative.

In 2009, Badreddine became head of Hezbollah’s external operations branch, replacing his cousin and brother-in-law late Hezbollah commander Imad Mughniyeh, who was assassinated by the Israeli regime a year earlier.

With the outbreak of the foreign-backed crisis in neighboring Syria in 2011, Badreddine was among the first Hezbollah commanders to step on the battlefield against Takfiri terror groups.

Prior to his assassination on May 13, Badreddine was helping the Syrian army in the fight against terrorists in the countryside of Syria’s Aleppo city.

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