Word: damascus
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...Iran may have found his continued existence to be an inconvenience. Or, they may have believed it was politically useful to demonstrate that they can be relied on to control terrorism in the Middle East - as long as the U.S. doesn't try to go after the regimes in Damascus or Tehran. With reporting by Aaron J. Klein/Jerusalem
...ever find out who killed Mughniyah, but the fact that the list of suspects is so long in itself is a bad sign. The group with the most to gain are the anti-Syrian factions in Lebanon - the Sunnis, Druze, and anti-Syrian Christians. By assassinating Mughniyah in Damascus, they grievously embarrassed Bashar al-Asad, underscoring what many Lebanese do not want us to forget: Syria harbors terrorists. The fact that Mughniyah was killed on the eve of the anniversary of the assassination of former prime minister Rafiq Hariri is probably not a coincidence...
Hours after announcing his death in a car bomb blast in a Damascus suburb, the Shi'ite Hizballah organization's television channel, Al Manar, broadcast a more recent picture of Mughniyah. It showed a plump, middle-aged man wearing combat fatigues and a forage cap and sporting a thick beard streaked with grey. His wire-framed spectacles gave him a benign, almost professorial, look, belying the fact that Mughniyah stood accused of killing more Americans than any other militant before the attacks of September...
According to Ranstorp, from the early 1990s, Mughniyah was "extraordinarily cautious," in covering his trail, dividing his time mainly between Beirut and Tehran where he moved with his family in 1990. Damascus, therefore, seems an unlikely location for Mughniyah's enemies to catch up with him. "I always thought they would get him in Beirut, so what does it mean that he was killed in Damascus?" asked Robert Baer, a former CIA officer who tracked Mughniyah in 1980s Beirut and is also TIME's intelligence analyst...
Hizballah has blamed Israel, and the organization's expected retaliation will likely aim in that direction. But could the $5 million price tag for Mughniyah's head have proved too tempting for a member of the Syrian regime? Or was it a favor by Damascus to the U.S. in exchange for an easing of international pressure...