By Denis Korkodinov
Most likely, the escalation of the conflict between Washington and Tehran will continue for a long period of time and the parties will be close to the war many times. The main field for confrontation, with a high degree of probability, will be Lebanon.
Following the assassination of Qassem Soleimani, the Hezbollah movement, headquartered in Beirut, may pose a mortal threat to the White House and Tel Aviv administration.
Currently, the United States aims to put pressure on the ayatollah regime by depleting its internal and external resources. For this, tools of economic sanctions and protests are actively used, which make the Iranian leadership virtually incapable of responding to existing threats. At the same time, Tehran does not have the ability to attack the United States directly.
However, the ayatollah regime can create significant obstacles for the main American ally in the Middle East – Israel – by attacking its extremely vulnerable targets in the Golan Heights, in the Gaza Strip and on the West Bank. According to some analysts, Iranian attacks can be carried out from Lebanon with the help of Hezbollah armed groups. The implementation of such a scenario would be a “serious signal” for the United States and a “crushing blow” testifying to the execution of an act of revenge.
In the end, Tehran spends significant amounts of money on the maintenance of Hezbollah, which is why it considers itself entitled to oblige it to fulfill a series of instructions against Israel. In the present conditions, when Iran is covered by protests threatening the overthrow of the Ayatollah regime, and when the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, after recognizing responsibility for the crash of the Ukrainian airliner, cannot directly operate in the region, the only way for Tehran to regain its influence is to use mainly loyal militias to it in Lebanon.
In this regard, Israel takes the Hezbollah threats quite seriously. For this reason, recently the Israeli intelligence services, together with their American counterparts, through their agents around the world, have been trying to establish the exact whereabouts of Hassan Nasrallah and the head of Hezbollah’s Main Intelligence Service, known as Unit 900, to kill them. At least a number of Iranian influential opponents in the international arena have used all their contacts, including in Russia, to collect intelligence information on travel routes and the coordinates of the residences of Hezbollah leaders.
A feature of the Iranian attacks through Lebanon is that in this way Tehran can completely deny its involvement, blaming Hezbollah for all responsibility.
(The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of World Geostrategic Insights)