Hezbollah Seeks Russian Arms

Inaugurated early this month under the auspices of secretary-general Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah�s 9th Congress still hasn�t ended. The ambivalent feelings of the movement and its leadership towards Syria partly explain the delay in proceedings. Since the Feb. 12 assassination of Hezbollah�s external security chief Imad Mughniyeh in Damascus, top officials of the Lebanese Shi�ite movement have pulled out of Syria and the movement�s military chiefs have been looking at other ways of bringing weapons into Lebanon for their fighters. Because of the wish of part of Syria�s leadership to improve ties with the West, Paris and Washington were able to bring enough pressure to bear on Damascus to get it to seize a shipment of long-range Zilzal weapons destined for �Hezbollah�. To diversify its sources of supply, the Shi�ite movement has turned to Moscow which already sells weaponry to Damascus and Tehran. Passing themselves off as Iranian officials, Hezbollah�s military chief Fouad Shakar (alias Hajj Mohsen) and two other leading aides -armed forces chief of operations Mohamed Murtada and Nasrallah�s military adviser, Ibrahim Badreddine- travelled to Moscow on May 20 to examine buying Russian anti-aircraft missiles. (Russia�s arms agency Rosoboronexport is negotiating the sale of the 150 km-range S-300 system to Damascus and Tehran). Shi�ite military planners would like to place the missile�s launch pads on the heights of Mount Sannin in the center of Lebanon to strike at Israeli targets. Murtada and Badreddine returned to Russia in mid-August but ran into a flat refusal: while the Kremlin would like to sell the equipment to Tehran it won�t allow the systems to be transferred to �Hezbollah�. Moscow�s refusal angered the chief of Hezbollah�s executive council, Hachem Safieddine.