Brig. Gen. Hossein Dehghan was a commander overseeing Hezbollah forces in Lebanon in 1983 when the U.S. Marine barracks in Beruit were bombed and has now been “nominated to be defense minister by Iran’s new president Hassan Rouhani.”
According to a report compiled by Brig. Gen. (ret.) Dr. Shimon Shapira, a senior research associate at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Dehghan was sent to Lebanon where he was “a commander of the training corps of the Revolutionary Guard in Syria and Lebanon.”
Dehghan became responsible for “supervising Hezbollah’s military force” in 1982.
In 1983, “two separate suicide bombings killed 241 US Marines and 58 French soldiers in their respective barracks in Beirut.” The order for the attacks “were transmitted from Tehran to the Iranian ambassador to Damascus, and then to forces in Lebanon.”
Shapira doubts that “such orders could have been carried out without the knowledge of Dehghan.”
Dehghan now waits for his nomination to be approved by Iran’s legislature.
Follow AWR Hawkins on Twitter @AWRHawkins.
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