[Editor’s note: In light of the historic significance of the events which unfolded in Beirut on September 27, 2024, I’ve published an ad hoc Letter in lieu of September’s previously-planned Monthly]

Hassan Nasrallah’s dead.

Hezbollah dug his lifeless body from the rubble in Dahiya on Saturday. The group’s announcement came around 18 hours after the IDF dropped six-dozen bombs on a neighborhood in the Beirut suburb, where Nasrallah was gathered with the group’s senior officials in an underground bunker that doubled as Hezbollah’s headquarters, according to the Israeli military.

Nasrallah’s death marks the most significant escalation in tensions with Iran since Donald Trump ordered the assassination of Quds commander Qassem Soleimani in January of 2020. For decades, Soleimani, Nasrallah and Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, presented themselves as a kind of triarchy comprising the highest echelon of Iran’s sprawling “Axis of Resistance,” a confederation dedicated to, among other things, the destruction of the Israeli state-building project.

Soleimani was the architect and the “executor” — as the US Department of Justice once put it — of the highly effective, well-integrated militia network that spanned the Shiite Crescent a term which, by the time of his death, was almost synonymous with the general. Nasrallah ran the most powerful of those militia for 32 years following the assassination of his predecessor, Abbas al-Musawi, who was gunned down with his wife and young child by Israeli attack helicopters in 1992.

In April, following an Israeli strike on Iran’s diplomatic compound in Damascus, I wrote that Soleimani’s network was being systematically dismantled by the US and Israel. That day, IDF warplanes eliminated Mohamad Reza Zahedi, a uniformed IRGC officer twice-appointed by Soleimani to run the Quds’ operations in Lebanon, a role which included heavy involvement in the joint Iran-Hezbollah-Russia effort to restore the Bashar al-Assad regime during Syria’s decade-long civil war. Zahedi’s assassination, you’ll recall, prompted Iran’s first-ever direct attack on Israel, a largely ineffectual missile and drone barrage designed more to appease a nervous domestic audience in Iran than to inflict any real damage.

By then, the IRGC, Hezbollah, the Iraqi IRI (a PMF fork comprised entirely of Quds-loyal militia, including Kataib Hezbollah, whose legendary founder Mahdi al-Muhandis was incinerated in the same Baghdad strike that killed Soleimani) and Hamas’s leadership outside of Gaza, had suffered at least half a dozen high-profile casualties in the space of just three months. Among the dead: Arms trafficker Seyed Razi Mousavi; Hamas’s de facto envoy to Hezbollah Saleh al-Arouri; Al-Nujaba commander Mushtaq Taleb al-Saidi; Quds operative Sadegh Omidzade and Abu Bakr Al-Saadi, a Kataib Hezbollah underboss with links to the attack on a remote American base in Jordan that killed three US service members in January.

At the time, I wrote that “Iran’s capacity to strike via its proxies is diminished with each assassination, and those assassinations apparently know no bounds.” I went further. “Esmail Qaani’s a dead man walking,” I said, on April 2, referring to Soleimani’s successor, who’s proven almost entirely useless even with allowances for the size of the shoes he was tasked with filling. I went on: “In my view, it’s just a matter of time before Israel goes after Hassan Nasrallah.” As it turns out, Mossad was already after him.

Time and again this year I assessed that Israel knew where Nasrallah was. Reporting in the hours after he was confirmed dead suggested that was indeed the case. Senior Israeli defense officials cited by The New York Times said Mossad was tracking Nasrallah “for months” before the IDF “decided to strike him this past week because they believed they had only a short window of opportunity before the Hezbollah leader would disappear to a different location.”

To reiterate: It isn’t surprising that Israel was tracking Nasrallah. Remember: The US and Israel tracked Soleimani for years. Mossad and Soleimani traded public taunts, some of them petulant, long before Soleimani found himself engaged in a surreal — and wholly ridiculous — meme war with Donald Trump. Soleimani delighted in being photographed and filmed on the front lines of various regional battles, including, famously, a series of selfies with Hezbollah, the above-mentioned Al-Nujaba and the Syrian government’s depleted forces just prior to the battle for Aleppo, which was then held by Sunni militants.

The aerial bombardment of Aleppo became the calling card of Russian general Sergei Surovikin. That fight — with Hezbollah and Soleimani to recapture Aleppo for Assad — is what earned Surovikin the nickname “General Armageddon.” As one expert told Radio Free Europe, “Though little acknowledged, [Surovikin’s] direct coordination with the Quds [and Hezbollah] unquestionably contributed to the strategic relationship the world now sees between Iran and Russia.” (In October of 2022, Vladimir Putin put Surovikin in charge of Russia’s war in Ukraine with a mandate to run the Aleppo playbook. He was relieved of his command just a few months later and eventually found himself implicated, rightly or wrongly, in Yevgeny Prigozhin’s failed coup.)

Western conceptions of terrorists are almost exclusively informed by dramatized accounts of the hunt for Osama Bin Laden, the fight against ISIS and the generalized struggle to rid the world of Sunni extremist ideology which, I’d be remiss not to briefly point out, is institutionalized in the Saudi monarchy. To Westerners, a “fugitive terrorist” is a lunatic with a cane and a slung rifle trekking around the mountains. Or sermonizing in a windswept tent. Or shooting propaganda videos in a cave with a homemade flag taped to the wall. Or donning a black balaclava while reading from a list of nonsensical grievances on camera before decapitating a hostage with a Crocodile Dundee knife. And so on.

As an intelligence agency, you might genuinely not know where those terrorists are. When you do find them, you just kill them. It’s not a discussion, and nobody cares because nobody really likes those terrorists. But those terrorists aren’t these “terrorists.” These “terrorists” — Soleimani, Nasrallah and so on — don’t measure success by how many wholly unrelated office workers they can kill if they fly a plane into a tall building half a world away. Nor by how many concertgoers they can slaughter if they take a bunch of amphetamines and go on a murder spree. There’s nothing to be gained strategically from that sort of thing, and there’s a lot to lose from it which, I should note, is why it was always risky for Hezbollah to overcommit vis-à-vis Hamas. The late Ismail Haniyeh‘s political ambitions and duplicitous “diplomacy” aside, Hamas is a Sunni extremist organization. Sooner or later, it was going to act like one, and not just in the ways it has before.

To be clear, I’m not suggesting — nor would I ever suggest — that there are “good” terrorists and bad ones, and that in modernity, differentiating between the two is as simple as asking “Well, is it a Shiite group or is it a Sunni group?” That’s not true, and it’s anyway so ridiculous as to get you laughed out of the room if you were to have this discussion in educated company. But what I am suggesting is that in life, you have to choose your allies carefully. Just because you have common cause with someone doesn’t mean you want to hitch your wagons such that their mistakes, miscalculations or, in this case, barbarous atrocities, become yours.

Whatever he said publicly after October 7, 2023 (and he said a lot), I can assure you that in private, Nasrallah didn’t want Hezbollah to own everything that happened that day for any number of reasons, some of which are strategic, some of which are existential. Hezbollah’s technically a non-state actor, but functionally, Dahiya — the Beirut suburb where Nasrallah was killed on Friday — is a fiefdom that serves as the de facto capital of a state within a state. Hezbollah’s military capabilities vastly outstrip those of the Lebanese regular army, such as it is. And Hezbollah’s foreign policy is infinitely more consequential around the world than whatever Lebanon’s official state foreign policy happens to be at any given time. Nasrallah ran a sprawling political machine, a functioning bureaucracy and a vast patronage network. Hezbollah’s an extension of the Iranian state and it has nation-state-like alliances with Russia, Syria and, in a limited way, China. In the simplest terms: Nasrallah had a lot to lose.

By contrast, Yahya Sinwar had nothing to lose. Or felt he didn’t. Sinwar’s gamble on October 7 was in part born of desperation and the perception that the Palestinian issue was fading not just into the usual disinterested obscurity, but disappearing altogether as a problem that needs solving, as the allure of economic prosperity and practicality pushed Israel and “friendly” Arab nations ever closer to something like peaceful coexistence. Sinwar wanted to light a fire. And he didn’t care who the subsequent conflagration ultimately subsumed.

On some accounts, Sinwar achieved much of what he set out to accomplish. The October 7 attack thrust the Palestinian issue back to the fore internationally, shattered Israel’s sense of national security, dealt a grievous blow to the IDF’s aura of invincibility, upended Washington’s designs on normalizing ties between Israel and Arab nations and pulled Hamas’s inter-sectarian allies, including and especially Hezbollah, into a full-on, armed confrontation with their common enemy.

But Sinwar’s victories, if you can call them that, came at a terrible cost. Most obviously, nearly 50,000 are dead in Gaza. Sinwar, by his own account, was willing to sacrifice at least that many Gazans for the “cause,” and he might’ve been willing to sacrifice Hamas’s capacity to exist as anything other than a remnant too. But it’s clear now that he jeopardized Iran’s entire regional project which, in Nasrallah’s death, faces an existential crisis.

By the time Iran pauses for the fifth anniversary of Soleimani’s assassination in January, the network he spent two decades building across the Shiite Crescent will be for all intents and purposes destroyed. Sinwar’s fever dream was a suicide mission, and if past is precedent, the plight of Palestine will fall by the wayside in the global consciousness sooner or later. And anyway long before any failure of the Israeli state.

In the meantime, the fallout from Sinwar’s gambit has cost Khamenei one of his closest living compatriots. On September 25, I wondered aloud in these pages about the future for Hezbollah. The next few days, I suggested, would be crucial to the extent Israel’s next targets would indicate whether the IDF was content to wipe out the Jihad Council — Hezbollah’s military panel — or if Benjamin Netanyahu was determined to eliminate the entire leadership.

At the top of Hezbollah’s military command sat Ibrahim Aqil, Fuad Shukr and Ali Karaki. Shukr and Aqil were most famous for their role in the 1983 bombing of Marine barracks in Beirut. Four decades later, Shukr was killed not far from the site and Aqil just weeks later. If it wasn’t obvious already (and it most assuredly was), Shukr’s assassination proved Hezbollah was fatally compromised. The Israelis had infiltrated the group, or at least the group’s communications networks.

Since Israel and the US began picking off operatives, facilitators, go-betweens and commanders late last year, I suggested, over and over again, that Iran’s proxies were operating under false assumptions about the integrity of their organization, from Beirut to Damascus all the way to Tehran. The precision with which the IDF operated and, just as tellingly, the names Israel targeted in succession, were a dead (no pun intended) giveaway: Mossad was inside the network.

Consider this: Every person, without exception, targeted since December was a somebody with name recognition in intelligence circles. That’s not luck. Nasrallah either didn’t see it or didn’t want to believe it. Apparently, this came as a surprise even to ostensible experts, who only accepted it this week. The Times quoted Michael Young, a senior editor at the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut. “[T]hey seem to have known everything,” Young said, of the Israelis. Indeed, Mr. Young. Indeed.

In “Endgame,” published less than 48 hours before Nasrallah was killed, I said, of the last surviving Jihad Council chair, “Next up’s Ali Karaki. I guarantee it.” He too was pulled out of the rubble in Borj al-Brajneh on Saturday during the same morbid excavation that unearthed Nasrallah.

Readers might also recall what I said in the minutes after Friday’s strike about the leadership in the event Nasrallah was confirmed dead. “I assume [Hashem Safieddine] would step in to lead, probably over Naim Qassem if my guess counts,” I wrote. Although Lebanese media suggested Qassem, officially Nasrallah’s No. 2, was “elected” to lead the group, the Times, citing three separate sources, said Safieddine was set to ascend the top spot. If Naim Qassem’s alive and is in fact named Secretary General, my assessment is that the group’s trying to keep a target off Safieddine, who’s Nasrallah’s cousin and whose son is married to Zainab Soleimani (“The Daughter,” proper noun, if you will).

Hezbollah will survive, of course, but in what form? There’s virtually nothing left of the leadership, and the military command structure’s decimated. Their arsenal is, by every account, severely diminished, even as it remains unfathomably impressive for a non-state actor. It sounds as though Safieddine’s absence from Friday’s ill-fated meeting wasn’t an accident. He was the designated survivor. But he won’t be alive for long, and it’s hard to know what a post-Hezbollah politico-security reality might look like for Lebanon. Suffice to say this is a turning point for the region, and a pivotal moment for Iran, where the regime’s staring into the abyss. I’d go so far as to say that if Nasrallah’s fair game, Khamenei is too.

When Shukr was killed in July, I wrote that, “Defiant rhetoric and obstreperous threats aside, Iran can’t go on like this.” If the writing on the wall wasn’t big enough by then, it was after that night in Beirut. As The Wall Street Journal put it, of Shukr, “despite being one of the most important figures in Hezbollah’s history, he lived an almost invisible life… so secretive that Lebanese media outlets reporting on his death published photos of the wrong man.” In the article, The Journal called him “a ghost.” And yet, Mossad knew where he was. Not only that, they had his phone number. Shukr was in his office on the second floor of the building where he was killed when he “received a call from someone telling him to go to his apartment five floors up.”

On Saturday, Khamenei called Nasrallah “the standard-bearer of resistance in the region” who, courtesy of the IDF, “achieved martyrdom and has ascended to the heavens.” The message pinned to the top of Khamenei’s social media account was unchanged. “In the Name of God, the Beneficent, the Merciful,” it reads. The timestamp: January 3, 2020, the day Soleimani was killed.