Hassan Nasrallah’s death marks a major moment in recent Middle East history, but the long-term consequences are uncertain. It raises a key question: Do “decapitation strikes” killing the leaders of terrorist groups cripple them? The short answer is not really.
Israel should know from its own history that such strikes don’t always succeed in crippling a militant group. In 2008, Israel killed Hezbollah’s military leader, Imad Mughniyeh, in Damascus, Syria, yet the group only gathered strength in the years that followed.
Four years earlier, Israel killed a founder of Hamas, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, in an airstrike. Yet, the group did not collapse, and almost two decades later it still carried out the October 7 attacks in Israel, killing some 1,200 Israelis in a single day.
The US has its own history of killing terrorist leaders in the hope that it will cripple its foes. When Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al Qaeda in Iraq, was killed in a US bombing raid in 2006, it was treated as a major breakthrough because al Qaeda in Iraq was significantly contributing to the civil war that was then tearing the country apart.
Yet eight years later, al Qaeda in Iraq eventually morphed into ISIS, which took over territory the size of Portugal and presided over a population of some eight million people in Iraq and Syria.
What actually ended ISIS’s geographical “caliphate” was not a strike on its leadership but a ground campaign against the terrorist army from 2014 to 2019 waged by the Iraqi military and Syrian Kurdish forces backed by thousands of US troops and significant American airpower.
The killing of Nasrallah is a key prize for Israel as part of its larger wave of attacks on Hezbollah that intensified earlier this month with its covert action exploding thousands of pagers and walkie-talkies followed by massive airstrikes that have taken out infrastructure and other senior leaders.
But it’s too early to write the militant group off, though it’s clearly in disarray. History suggests it will reorganize and appoint other leaders to continue its long fight against Israel.