Iran

A series of high-profile assassinations carried out by Israel against the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah in recent weeks has significantly weakened its leadership structure, analysts say.

An Israeli attack killed Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in Beirut on September 27. Days after that, Israel carried out more airstrikes on Hezbollah’s stronghold in Beirut’s southern suburbs. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Tuesday the Israeli strikes killed Nasrallah’s presumed successor, Hashem Safieddine, even though Hezbollah itself has not confirmed his death.

Since the latest escalation between Israel and Hezbollah, Israeli strikes in Lebanon have killed at least 25 senior commanders of the Shiite group, according to Israeli officials.

The absence of these people is evident in Hezbollah’s performance, according to Hussain Abdul Hussain, a research fellow at the Washington-based Foundation for Defense of Democracies, who said the militia “looks headless.”

“Now it still looks operational in the south, but that’s only because Hezbollah designed itself in such a way that if one part is severed, the other parts would continue to operate independently,” he told VOA. “This is good at an operational level, but bad on strategic level.”

Hezbollah leaders claim the group’s capabilities “are fine.” In a televised speech on Tuesday, Hezbollah deputy leader Naim Qassem said Hezbollah’s command and control were intact, and so was its organizational structure.

“We have overcome the blows that hit us, and we have put alternatives for all positions,” he said in his remarks in Arabic, adding that for each newly filled position, a deputy has been assigned.

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Qassem said that Hezbollah’s continued rocket attacks on Israel showed a high level of coordination between the group’s leadership and its units.

Israeli officials said Hezbollah fired more than 100 rockets at Israel on Sunday, including several at the northern port city of Haifa. At least five people in Haifa were wounded in the attack.

But analyst Abdul Hussain told VOA via WhatsApp that firing projectiles on Israel was not an indicator of any capabilities, noting that Hezbollah and the Palestinian militant group Hamas are just trying to show they have not been defeated.

“What Hamas does is that every few weeks, it launches at least one or more rockets on Israel to prove that it still has a pulse,” he said. “This does not mean Hamas maintains its control-and-command military structure. The same applies to Hezbollah.”

Hussain added that Hezbollah’s command was centralized, but at times of war, its cells of rocket launchers have a license to act independently when the command is taken down.

Iran’s intervention

Ali al-Amin, a Beirut-based analyst and editor-in-chief of the Janoubia News site, said that what keeps Hezbollah’s military and political structure together and prevents it from further deterioration is a direct intervention by Iran, its main backer.

“Iran no longer believes that Hezbollah is able to manage the confrontation with Israel alone,” he told VOA. “Officials from Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps were already here, but more officials and units came to Lebanon after the war erupted to fill the leadership void and reset the structure within [Hezbollah] units on the ground.”

Al-Amin said that Hezbollah is not functioning by its own dynamism as when Nasrallah was alive, noting “the absence of Nasrallah itself has created a major confusion within Hezbollah’s institutions, and Iran wants [to] end confusion by managing the command.”

Qassem, Hezbollah’s deputy general secretary, said in his remarks Tuesday that a new leader for the group will be selected, without setting a specific date.

Given the number of top leaders who were killed in recent Israeli strikes, though, analysts say they doubt a new militant leader will be appointed anytime soon.

“There are no longer figures within Hezbollah that could be compared with Nasrallah, or even with Safieddine,” analyst al-Amin said. “Therefore, I believe that appointing a new secretary general for Hezbollah would take a while.”

“If Hezbollah survived this war and reached a settlement, it could appoint a civilian leader in the next phase,” he said.

This story originated in VOA’s Kurdish Service.

Britain is facing a "staggering rise" in attempts at assassination, sabotage and other crimes on U.K. soil by Russia and Iran, as the two states recruit criminals to "do their dirty work," the head of Britain's domestic intelligence agency said Tuesday.

MI5 Director General Ken McCallum said his agents and police have tackled 20 "potentially lethal" plots backed by Iran since 2022 and warned that it could expand its targets in the United Kingdom if conflicts in the Middle East deepen.

So far, the threats have been aimed at Iranians abroad who oppose the country's authorities. But McCallum said there is the risk "of an increase in — or broadening of — Iranian state aggression in the U.K." if the Middle East crisis escalates with Israel launching a major attack in response to Iran's recent missile barrage.

In a rare public speech setting out the major threats to the U.K. from both states and militant groups, McCallum argued that hostile states, radicalized individuals and a revived Islamic State group have combined to create "the most complex and interconnected threat environment we've ever seen."

McCallum said there also is a risk that Israel's conflicts with Iran-backed groups — the militant Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon as well as the Houthi rebels in Yemen — could trigger attacks in the U.K., though so far the crisis has not translated "at scale into terrorist violence" in Britain.

The number of state-threat investigations undertaken by MI5 has risen by 48% in the past year, with Iran, Russia and China the main perpetrators, McCallum told journalists at the U.K.'s counterterrorism command center in London.

McCallum said that since the death of Mahsa Amini, who died in Iranian police custody in September 2022 after being detained for allegedly violating the Islamic republic's mandatory headscarf law, "we've seen plot after plot here in the U.K., at an unprecedented pace and scale."

He said MI5 and the police have responded to 20 potentially lethal Iran-backed plots since January 2022, up by a third from the figure of 15 the government gave at the end of January.

McCallum said Russia's military intelligence agency was trying to use "arson, sabotage and more" to create "mayhem" on the streets of Britain and other European countries.

Both Russia and Iran often turn to criminals, "from international drug traffickers to low-level crooks," to carry out their illegal deeds, he said.

Several alleged state-backed plots have led to criminal charges. In December, a Chechen man was jailed for allegedly carrying out reconnaissance on the offices of a dissident Iranian broadcaster in London. Separately, several suspects are awaiting trial in London over an alleged Russia-linked plan to attack Ukrainian-owned businesses.

Britain is not alone in pointing a finger at Moscow and Tehran. Germany has arrested several people for allegedly spying or planning attacks on behalf of Russia. In May, Sweden's domestic security agency accused Iran of using criminal networks to target Israeli or Jewish interests in the Scandinavian country.

Past speeches by McCallum and other U.K. intelligence chiefs have emphasized China's increasingly assertive behavior, which in 2022 McCallum called Britain's greatest "strategic challenge." On Tuesday, McCallum stressed the importance of the U.K.-China economic relationship but said there were "risks to be managed."

The U.K.'s official terror threat level stands at "substantial," the middle of a five-point scale, meaning an attack is likely, and McCallum said that since 2017, MI5 and the police have disrupted 43 late-stage plots, saving "numerous lives."

While about three-quarters of the plots stem from Islamic extremist ideology and a quarter from the extreme right, he said those labels "don't fully reflect the dizzying range of beliefs and ideologies we see," drawn from a soup of "online hatred, conspiracy theories and disinformation." Young people are increasingly involved, he said, with 13% of the subjects of MI5 terror investigations under the age of 18.

He also said there were worrying signs that the Islamic State group is attempting a comeback, despite the collapse of its self-declared caliphate in Iraq and Syria several years ago.

McCallum said that "after a few years of being pinned well back, they've resumed efforts to export terrorism," and cited a March attack that killed more than 140 people at a Moscow concert hall and was claimed by IS, as "a brutal demonstration of its capability."

MI5 has faced criticism for its failure to stop deadly attacks, including a 2017 suicide bombing that killed 22 people at an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester.

"The first 20 years of my career here were crammed full of terrorist threats," McCallum said. "We now face those alongside state-backed assassination and sabotage plots, against the backdrop of a major European land war."

MI5, he said, "has one hell of a job on its hands."