Kamal Ghanaja

Last updated

Kamal Hussein Ghanaja (also known as Nizar Abu Mujahid) was a mid-level military official of Hamas and a former aid to one of its slain external leaders Mahmoud al-Mabhouh. [1] [2] Ghanaja was one of the few Hamas officials that continued to based in the city of Damascus after much of the Syria-based leadership there withdrew from the country as a result of the 2011-2012 Syrian uprising. Following the mass departure, Ghanaja was left in charge of the groups organizational networks within Syria. [2]

Death

On 28 June 2012, Hamas officials reported that Ghanaja was assassinated in his home in the suburb of Qudsaya outside Damascus. [1] Hamas sources stated his "charred, scarred, body was concealed in a ceiling closet and a fire had engulfed the house which apparently the assassins had started." [2] They did not confirm who was behind the killing, although one official blamed the Mossad, Israel's external intelligence agency. Ehud Barak, Israel's Defense Minister responded the allegation was "not necessarily true.". [1] Aw week later Hamas officials claim that he was killed as a result of accident. [3]

Another Hamas official discounted the conjecture that the Mossad was behind the killing because the Mossad is not brutal or reckless enough to kill him and dispose of the body in the way Ghanaja was by decapitation, placement of his severed body parts in a closet, and torching his apartment. [4] Meanwhile, Syrian opposition activists accused the government of Bashar al-Assad of killing Ghanaja as a warning to the group for abandoning support of the Syrian government during the uprising.

His funeral was held in Amman, Jordan and was attended by his family. [5] Hamas secretary-general Khaled Meshaal and Islamic Action Front leader Sheikh Hammam Said also attended the funeral. [6]

Related Research Articles

Ahmed Yassin 20th-century Palestinian imam and politician; founder of Hamas

Sheikh Ahmed Ismail Hassan Yassin was a Palestinian imam and politician. He was a founder of Hamas, an Islamist Palestinian paramilitary organization and political party. Yassin also served as the spiritual leader of the organization.

Imad Mughniyeh Hezbollah commander

Imad Fayez Mughniyeh, alias al-Hajj Radwan, was the founding member of Lebanon's Islamic Jihad Organization and number two in Hezbollah's leadership. Information about Mughniyeh is limited, but he is believed to have been Hezbollah's Chief of Staff and understood to have overseen Hezbollah's military, intelligence, and security apparatuses. He was one of the main founders of Hezbollah in the 1980s. He has been described as "a brilliant military tactician and very elusive". He was often referred to as an ‘untraceable ghost’.

Khalil al-Wazir Palestinian military leader, founder of Fatah

Khalil Ibrahim al-Wazir was a Palestinian leader and co-founder of the nationalist party Fatah. As a top aide of Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) Chairman Yasser Arafat, al-Wazir had considerable influence in Fatah's military activities, eventually becoming the commander of Fatah's armed wing al-Assifa.

Muslim Brotherhood in Syria A branch of the Sunni Islamist Muslim Brotherhood

The Muslim Brotherhood of Syria has been described as a branch of the Sunni Islamist Muslim Brotherhood, and as being very loosely affiliated to the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. In its most recent April 2012 manifesto, it "pledges to respect individual rights", to promote pluralism and democracy and does not mention Islam.

Fathi Shaqaqi was the co-founder and Secretary-General of the Islamic Jihad Movement in Palestine.

General Intelligence Directorate (Jordan) Jordanian intelligence agency

Jordanian General Intelligence Directorate, or GID is the intelligence agency of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan and forms part of the Ministry of Interior. The GID is reportedly one of the most important and professional intelligence agencies in the Middle East; the agency has been instrumental in foiling several terrorist attacks both in Jordan and around the world.

The same Terrorism in Syria has a long history dating from the Islamist Uprising in the early 1980s and to the ongoing Syrian Civil War which witnessed the rise of radical Islamist groups such as ISIL, al-Nusra and other al-Qaeda affiliated groups.

Targeted killings by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) also called targeted prevention or focused foiling, has occurred in the course of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict against persons accused of carrying out or planning attacks on Israeli targets in the West Bank or inside Israel. Nils Meltzer writes that 'The term 'targeted killing' denotes the use of lethal force attributable to a subject of international law with the intent, premeditation and deliberation to kill individually selected persons not in the physical custody of those targeting them".

Muhammad Suleiman was a Syrian Army General and Special Presidential Advisor for Arms Procurement and Strategic Weapons to Syrian president Bashar al-Assad.

Mahmoud al-Mabhouh Hamas commander (1960–2010)

Mahmoud Abdel Rauf al-Mabhouh was the chief of logistics and weapons procurement for Hamas's military wing, the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades. He is remembered for his assassination in Dubai and the diplomatic crisis his assassination triggered after Mossad agents allegedly used forged foreign passports to carry out the killing.

Assassination of Mahmoud Al-Mabhouh

The assassination of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh took place on 19 January 2010, in a hotel room in Dubai. Al-Mabhouh—a co-founder of the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas—was wanted by the Israeli government for the kidnapping and murder of two Israeli soldiers in 1989 as well as purchasing arms from Iran for use in Gaza; these have been cited as a possible motive for the assassination.

Mossad National intelligence agency of Israel

Mossad, short for HaMossad leModiʿin uleTafkidim Meyuḥadim, is the national intelligence agency of Israel. It is one of the main entities in the Israeli Intelligence Community, along with Aman and Shin Bet.

The 2010 Palestinian militancy campaign was a coordinated effort by 13 Palestinian militant groups, led by Islamist group Hamas, to derail peace talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. The campaign consisted of attacks against Israelis in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Israel in which, according to a Hamas declaration in early September, "all options are open". The participating groups also included Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the Popular Resistance Committees and an unnamed splinter group of Fatah. Some Israeli and Palestinian officials and analysts familiar with Hamas believe that the true target of the campaign is the Palestinian Authority, which is led by Mahmoud Abbas of Fatah.

The following is a timeline of the Syrian uprising from September to December 2011. This period saw the uprising take on many of the characteristics of a civil war, according to several outside observers, including the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, as armed elements became better organized and began carrying out successful attacks in retaliation for the ongoing crackdown by the Syrian government on demonstrators and defectors.

The Rif Dimashq clashes were a series of unrests and armed clashes in and around Damascus, the capital of Syria, from November 2011 until a stalemate in March 2012. The violence was part of the wider early insurgency phase of the Syrian Civil War. Large pro-government and anti-government protests took place in the suburbs and center of Damascus, with the situation escalating when members of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) started attacking military targets in November.

The following is a timeline of the Syrian Civil War from January to April 2012, during which time the spate of protests that began in January 2011 lasted into another calendar year. An Arab League monitoring mission ended in failure as Syrian troops and anti-government militants continued to do battle across the country and the Syrian government prevented foreign observers from touring active battlefields, including besieged opposition strongholds. A United Nations-backed ceasefire brokered by special envoy Kofi Annan met a similar fate, with unarmed UN peacekeepers' movements tightly controlled by the government and fighting.

The following is a timeline of the Syrian Civil War from May to August 2012. The majority of death tolls reported for each day comes from the Local Coordination Committees, an opposition activist group based in Syria, and the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, another opposition group based in London.

Khaled Mashal Palestinian politician

Khaled Mashal is a former leader of the Palestinian organization Hamas.

References

  1. 1 2 3 Hamas member 'assassinated' in Syrian capital Damascus. BBC News . 2012-06-28.
  2. 1 2 3 Al-Mughrabi, Nidal. Hamas says member killed in Damascus home. Reuters . 2012-06-28.
  3. ↑ "Report: Hamas official in Damascus was killed in accident, not assassination". Haaretz.
  4. ↑ Peri, Smadar. "Damascus hit 'too cruel for Mossad.'" Ynetnews. 29 June 2012. 29 June 2012.
  5. ↑ Funeral of assassinated Hamas leader to be held in Jordan. Ma'an News Agency . 2012-06-28.
  6. ↑ Mashaal meets Jordan Brotherhood leaders amid election boycott. Ma'an News Agency . 2012-07-01.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.