BERLIN – The head of the Washington Institute’s Stein Program on
Counterterrorism and Intelligence, Dr. Matthew Levitt, on Wednesday issued a
report detailing the intensified and reorganized collaboration between Hezbollah
and Iran’s Quds Force to commit terror acts against Western countries and
Israel.
According to the report, “the Hezbollah-Quds Force threat has
sometimes eclipsed that of al-Qaida.“
The 17-page study notes that “Iranian
decision-makers settled on a campaign of violence based on a three-tiered threat
stream targeting the following: Israeli tourists, government figures (diplomats,
retired officials), and targets broadly representative of Israel or the Jewish
community (community leaders, prominent Israeli companies).”
Levitt wrote
that Iran’s leaders “assigned the task of targeting Israeli tourists – a soft
target – to Hezbollah, and maintained for the Quds Force operations targeting
Israeli, American, British, or Gulf States’ interests. The latter would be
carried out by a new special external operations unit known as Unit
400.”
The report comes shortly before the slated release this week of the
results of the Bulgarian authorities investigation into the suicide bombing of
an Israeli tour bus in July 2012. The terror act resulted in the deaths of five
Israelis, a Bulgarian bus driver, and injuries to over 30 Israelis. US and
Israeli intelligence officials attributed the suicide bombing to a joint Iran-
Hezbollah operation.
Levitt, widely considered the leading authority on
Hezbollah’s global operations, says that, “In January 2010, the Quds Force – the
elite unit of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps – decided that it and
Hezbollah, its primary terrorist proxy, would embark on a new campaign of
violence targeting not only Israel, but the US and other Western targets as
well.”
The United States designated Hezbollah and the IRGC as foreign
terrorist organizations.
The European Union has declined to include both
groups on its EU terror list.
Levitt notes that “The net effect of Iran’s
shadow war against the West is that Hezbollah and the Quds Force have climbed
back up the list of immediate threats facing the United States and its
allies.”
He quotes the director of the US National Counterterrorism
Center, Matthew Olsen, who said in July, “We’re seeing a general uptick in the
level of activity around the world,” adding that “both Hezbollah and the Quds
Force have demonstrated an ability to operate essentially
globally.”
Counterterrorism experts at a one-day conference in London
last week on the Iranian threat organized by think tanks The Henry Jackson
Society and the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, argued for an EU
designation of Hezbollah.
Writing in the British daily The Times last
week, Lord David Trimble, along with former Spanish prime minister Jose Maria
Aznar, stated “Hezbollah is already present and active on European soil; its
illegal activities and networks cover the continent. It has shown that it is
willing to strike in Europe. That is why European governments must move now to
stigmatize Hezbollah and its activities, vision and goals. Hezbollah is not the
Party of God; it is the Party of Terror and we should treat it as
such.
Benjamin Weinthal is a fellow with the Foundation for Defense of
Democracies.