Assassination: Covert Operations and Strategic Strikes in Modern Warfare

By Fouad Sabry

What is Assassination

Assassination is the willful killing, by a sudden, secret, or planned attack, of a person-especially if prominent or important. It may be prompted by grievances, notoriety, financial, military, political or other motives. Many times governments and criminal groups order assassinations to be committed by their accomplices. Acts of assassination have been performed since ancient times. A person who carries out an assassination is called an assassin or hitman.

How you will benefit

(I) Insights, and validations about the following topics:

Chapter 1: Assassination

Chapter 2: Ahmed Yassin

Chapter 3: The Day of the Jackal

Chapter 4: Rafic Hariri

Chapter 5: Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi

Chapter 6: Imad Mughniyeh

Chapter 7: Salvadoran Civil War

Chapter 8: History of terrorism

Chapter 9: List of Israeli assassinations

Chapter 10: History of assassination

(II) Answering the public top questions about assassination.

Who this book is for

Professionals, undergraduate and graduate students, enthusiasts, hobbyists, and those who want to go beyond basic knowledge or information for any kind of Assassination.

• Language: English
• Publisher: One Billion Knowledgeable
• Release date: Jun 3, 2024

Book preview

Chapter 1: Assassination

Assassination is the political killing of a notable or influential person, such as a head of state, head of government, politician, world leader, member of the royal family, or chief executive officer. An assassination may be motivated by political and military reasons, financial gain, vengeance, the desire for celebrity or infamy, or a command from a military, security, insurgent, or secret police force to carry out the assassination. Assassinations have been carried out since antiquity. The one who commits an assassination is known as an assassin or hitman.

The word assassin may be derived from the Arabic asasiyyin (أَسَاسِيِّين‎, ʾasāsiyyīn) from أَسَاس‎ (ʾasās, foundation, basis) + ـِيّ‎ (-iyy), meaning those who are faithful to the foundation It alluded to the Order of Assassins, an organization of Nizari Ismailis who worked against various political targets.

The Assassins, founded by Hassan-i Sabbah, were active in the Near East from the eighth through the fourteenth century and grew into a de facto state by seizing or constructing numerous fortresses. For political and theological motives, the organization murdered members of the Abbasid, Seljuk, Fatimid, and Christian Crusader elites.

Assassination is one of the oldest political tools. It dates back to at least the beginning of written history.

It is believed that the Egyptian king Teti was the earliest known victim of assassination. Between 550 BC and 330 BC, seven Achaemenid Dynasty Persian kings were killed. The Art of War, a Chinese military treatise from the fifth century BCE, discusses the virtues of assassination methods.

Regicide was uncommon in Western Europe during the Middle Ages, but a common occurrence in the Eastern Roman Empire. Bathtub strangulation was the most prevalent method. In Western Europe, tyrannicide or assassination for personal or political purposes became more prevalent throughout the Renaissance.

In the sixteenth and seventeenth century, international lawyers began to condemn the assassination of leaders. It has been said that Balthazar Ayala was the first famous judge to oppose the use of assassination in international politics.

Most major powers repudiated Cold War assassination tactics, but many contend that this was merely a smokescreen for political gain, and that covert and illegal training of assassins continues to this day, with Russia, Israel, the United States, Argentina, Paraguay, and Chile among those accused of conducting such operations.

In India, Prime Ministers Indira Gandhi and her son Rajiv Gandhi (neither of whom were related to Mahatma Gandhi, who was assassinated in 1948) were murdered in 1984 and 1991, respectively, in relation to separatist movements in Punjab and northern Sri Lanka.

In 1994, the assassination of Juvénal Habyarimana and Cyprien Ntaryamira during the Rwandan Civil War sparked the Rwandan genocide.

On November 4, 1995, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was murdered by Yigal Amir, an opponent of the Oslo Accords. The 14 February 2005 assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri sparked an investigation by the United Nations. The conclusion in the Mehlis investigation that Syria was involved spurred the Cedar Revolution, which expelled Syrian forces from Lebanon.

Assassination for military goals has long been advocated: Sun Tzu, writing circa 500 BC in The Art of War, argued in favor of deploying assassination. In his book The Prince, published over two thousand years later, Machiavelli encourages monarchs to execute adversaries whenever feasible to keep them from becoming a threat. An army or even a nation may be built around a particularly powerful, shrewd, or charismatic leader, whose demise could cripple their ability to wage war.

Assassination has also been employed occasionally in the conduct of foreign policy for similar and other reasons. Calculating the costs and benefits of such interventions is tough. It may not be clear whether the assassinated leader is replaced by a more or less competent successor, whether the assassination provokes anger in the state in question, whether the assassination causes domestic public opinion to deteriorate, and whether the assassination provokes condemnation from third parties.

In both military and foreign policy murders, there is the possibility that the target will be replaced by an even more capable leader, or that such a killing (or failed attempt) will inspire the masses to despise the killers and support the leader's cause more fervently. Faced with exceptionally intelligent leaders, this potential has been risked on multiple occasions, such as the Peloponnesian War assassination attempts against the Athenian Alcibiades. Several further incidents from World War II illustrate the use of assassination as a tool:

Reinhard Heydrich was assassinated in Prague on May 27, 1942, by the British and Czechoslovak governments in exile. This case demonstrates the challenge of weighing the benefits of a foreign policy objective (in this case, bolstering the legitimacy and power of the Czechoslovak government-in-exile in London) against the potential consequences of an assassination (the Lidice massacre).

During World War II, the Americans intercepted Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto's jet after decrypting his trip path.

Operation Gaff was a British commando mission designed to capture or eliminate the German field marshal Erwin Rommel, better known as The Desert Fox..

In more recent battles, assassinations have continued to be employed:

During the Vietnam War, the United States executed Viet Cong leaders and sympathizers under the Phoenix Program. It killed between 6,000 and 41,000 individuals, with monthly targets of 1,800.

The US assassinated the commander of Iran's Quds Force, General Qasem Soleimani, and the leader of Iraq's Popular Mobilization Forces, Abu Mahmoud al-Muhandis, along with eight other high-ranking military officers, during an airstrike on Baghdad International Airport on January 3, 2020. The murder of the military officers contributed to growing tensions between the United States and Iran and the American-led invasion of Iraq.

Insurgent groups have frequently used assassination to further their aims. Assassinations serve multiple purposes for such groups, including the elimination of specific adversaries and as propaganda weapons to draw public and political attention to their cause.

During the Irish War of Independence from 1919 to 1921, many Royal Irish Constabulary Police intelligence personnel were slain by Irish Republican Army rebels. Michael Collins created a special team, the Squad, for this reason, which intimidated numerous police officers into leaving the department. Bloody Sunday, 1920, marked the zenith of the Squad's actions with the murder of 14 British spies.

During the Troubles in Northern Ireland (1969–1998), the Provisional IRA employed this strategy again. Assassinating Royal Ulster Constabulary officers and unionist leaders was one of the several tactics employed by the Provisional IRA between 1969 and 1997. The IRA also attempted to kill Margaret Thatcher by bombing the Conservative Party Conference in a Brighton hotel. Loyalist paramilitaries replied by randomly assassinating Catholics and Irish nationalist politicians.

Basque secessionists Since the late 1960s, ETA in Spain has murdered numerous security and political elites, including the president of the Spanish government, Luis Carrero Blanco, 1st Duke of Carrero-Blanco Grandee of Spain, in 1973. Early in the 1990s, it