The assassination attempt was the latest move by Israel to steadily decapitate many of Hezbollah’s leadership. This follows Israel’s invasion of southern Lebanon earlier this week.
Here’s what we know about Mr. Saffieddin.
Saffieddine was born in southern Lebanon in the early 1960s and was one of Hezbollah’s earliest members. He joined Lebanon after a Shiite Islamic organization was formed under Iranian leadership in the 1980s during Lebanon’s long civil war. He quickly rose through the ranks with Mr. Nasrallah, serving in a number of roles, serving as political, spiritual and cultural leadership, and at one point directing the group’s military activities.
Like Mr. Nasrallah, Mr. Saffieddin usually appeared wearing a black turban, identifying himself as a respected Shiite cleric who can trace his ancestry to the Prophet Muhammad.
Biographical information reported in various media outlets in the Middle East and Turkey depicts the rapid rise of Hezbollah’s ranks. In 1995, he was promoted to Hezbollah’s highest council, the organization’s advisory council, and shortly thereafter was appointed chairman of the group’s Jihad Council, which controls Hezbollah’s military activities. Just three years later, in 1998, Saffieddin was elected chairman of the party’s executive council, a position Nasrallah also held twice, including before being appointed Hezbollah secretary-general in 1992, the report said. .
Like Nasrallah, he studied abroad in Iran. Mr. Saffieddin developed strong ties with Tehran while studying religious studies in the Iranian city of Qom before returning to Lebanon to work for Hezbollah.
Those bonds are also very personal. He was a close friend of Iranian Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani, who commanded the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ Quds Force until he was killed in a U.S. airstrike in Baghdad in 2020.
Later that year, Saffieddin’s son Reza Hashem Saffieddin made headlines when he married Zeynab Suleimani, the daughter of an Iranian general. The marriage was seen by some analysts and critics as symbolizing Iran’s entrenchment in Hezbollah. The U.S. Treasury Department has designated Mr. Safedine’s brother, Abdallah Safedine, as Hezbollah’s representative to Iran.
Saffieddin was designated a terrorist by the United States and Saudi Arabia in May 2017 for his leadership role in Hezbollah. At the time, the State Department referred to him as a “senior leader” of Hezbollah’s executive council, which oversees “political, organizational, social, and educational activities.” The newspaper said Saffieddin posed a “grave risk of committing acts of terrorism that threaten the national security and foreign policy of the United States.”
The United States designated Hezbollah as a terrorist organization in 1997, and it has carried out hundreds of terrorist attacks, including the suicide truck bombing of the U.S. embassy in Beirut and the U.S. Marine barracks in 1983, and the suicide bombing of the U.S. embassy annex in Beirut in 1984. The group has been blamed for multiple attacks that have killed several Americans. Then there was the hijacking of TWA Flight 847 in 1985.
Farnaz Fassihi contributed reporting.
