Portrait of Ali Daqduq, shared by the Israeli army on social media.
According to consistent reports from several Arab and Israeli media outlets, the strike that killed at least nine people on Sunday in a residential building in Sayyida Zeinab, south of Damascus, targeted Ali Musa Daqduq, one of Hezbollah's top commanders in Syria.
Originally from Aita al-Shaab, Ali Daqduq was the head of Hezbollah's ‘Golan Unit,’ a battalion primarily operating within Syrian territory. According to the Arab Center for Extremism Studies, Daqduq joined Hezbollah in 1983 and was quickly appointed to lead Unit 2800, a special operations unit in Lebanon, before going on to coordinate personal security for Hassan Nasrallah.
Arrested by the Americans, then released in Iraq
After training fighters alongside Iran’s Quds Force, the external branch of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, he was assigned by the Islamic Republic and Hezbollah to oversee the formation of pro-Iranian militias in Iraq, including Asaib Ahl al-Haq. This initiative aimed to build a ‘resistance axis,’ modeled after the Lebanese organization, to conduct attacks against American forces.
This led to his designation as a ‘global terrorist’ by the United States, which held him responsible for attacks against American troops in Iraq, including the Jan. 20, 2007, assault in Karbala that killed five U.S. soldiers.
A year later, he was captured by American forces for his involvement in the attack. After negotiations between the Obama administration and Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, he was transferred to Iraq for detention rather than extradited to the United States, where he would have been held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. This allowed him to be released in November 2012 after being acquitted of the ‘terrorism’ charges against him.
After his release, Ali Daqduq swiftly returned to Lebanon to train Hezbollah’s special forces, including the elite ‘al-Radwan’ unit. Beginning in 2018, he was assigned to establish a covert Hezbollah network in Syria along the Israeli border, according to U.S. and Israeli intelligence services.
When contacted, Hezbollah declined to comment on this information.
Son killed in Syria
In December 2023, his son, Hassan Ali Daqduq, was killed in an Israeli drone strike in Syria’s Quneitra region, in the Syrian Golan, along with two other Hezbollah fighters, according to statements released by the party at the time.
Ali Daqduq’s death adds to the growing list of senior Hezbollah commanders eliminated since the start of the war on Oct. 8, 2023. This escalation has been particularly intense since the pager attacks on Sept. 17, for which Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, for the first time, acknowledged Israeli government responsibility on Sunday.
Another long-standing Hezbollah member, Salim Ayash, accused of being one of the assassins of former prime minister Rafic Hariri, was reportedly killed in Syria near Qusayr in recent days by an Israeli strike.
Since the war expanded into Lebanon on Sept. 23, Hezbollah has stopped announcing the deaths of its members through official channels. Up until that date, 513 fighters from Hezbollah had been killed in Lebanon and Syria, according to our records.
The Israeli army, for its part, later reported that it had eliminated 440 fighters from the pro-Iranian militia since the start of its ground offensive in Lebanon. Unverified estimates indicate that there have been over 1,400 deaths within Hezbollah’s ranks. According to the latest figures from the Ministry of Health, the total death toll from Israeli attacks on Lebanon stands at 3,189, including 621 women and 194 children, with 14,078 injured.
