CNN
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On Saturday, Hezbollah confirmed that its leader Hassan Nasrallah was dead after Israel announced that he had been killed in an airstrike in Beirut on Friday.

His death marks an important moment in the recent history of the Middle East, but the long-term consequences are uncertain. It raises a key question: Do “beheading attacks” that kill the leaders of terrorist groups cripple them? The short answer is not really.

Israel should know from its own history that such attacks do not always result in the disabling of a militant group. In 2008, Israel killed Hezbollah military leader Imad Mughniyeh in Damascus, Syria, but the group only gained strength in the following years.

Four years earlier, Israel killed Hamas founder Sheikh Ahmed Yassin in an airstrike. Yet the group did not collapse and, nearly two decades later, still carried out the October 7 attacks in Israel, which killed about 1,200 Israelis in a single day.

Most recently, in July, Israel said it had killed one of the October 7 masterminds, Mohammed Deif, a key Hamas military commander, but the militant group continues to fight in Gaza.

The United States has a history of killing terrorist leaders in the hope of crippling their enemies. When Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, was killed in a US bombing raid in 2006, it was considered a major breakthrough because al-Qaeda in Iraq contributed significantly to the civil war that was then shaking the country apart.

But eight years later, al-Qaeda in Iraq eventually morphed into ISIS, which occupied an area the size of Portugal and ruled over a population of about eight million people in Iraq and Syria. IS also carried out devastating terrorist attacks in the West, for example in Paris in 2015, in which 130 people were killed.

What actually ended ISIS’s geographical “caliphate” was not an attack on its leadership, but a ground campaign against the terrorist army from 2014 to 2019, led by the Iraqi military and Syrian Kurdish forces, and by thousands of US troops and significant American air assets was supported. The IS base, Mosul, the second largest city in Iraq, was largely destroyed in this war.

In May 2016, then-President Barack Obama authorized a drone strike in Pakistan that killed the Taliban’s supreme leader, Mullah Akhtar Mohammad Mansour. But today the Taliban control all of Afghanistan.

Then-President Donald Trump ordered an attack in Baghdad, Iraq, in early January 2020 that killed Qasem Soleimani, the commander of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ Quds Force who was responsible for Iran’s relations with its proxy forces in the region such as Hezbollah , Hamas, the Houthis in Yemen and Shiite militias in Iraq.

After Soleimani was killed, Trump said: “Soleimani planned imminent and sinister attacks on American diplomats and military personnel, but we caught him in the act and killed him.”

Still, his death had no lasting impact on Iran’s power and ambitions in the region, and Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis in Yemen continued their attacks on Israeli targets, and Shiite militias continued their attacks on American targets in Iraq.

The US has classified the Taliban, Houthis, Hamas, ISIS and Hezbollah as terrorist groups.

What can cripple a terrorist group is a sustained campaign aimed at eliminating as many of its leaders and middle managers as possible. A CIA drone campaign that expanded into Pakistan’s tribal regions bordering Afghanistan in 2008 killed many al-Qaeda leaders, according to New America, a research organization (of which I am vice president).

Documents recovered from the U.S. Navy SEALs who killed Osama bin Laden at his compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, in 2011 show that the al-Qaeda leader regularly wrote to his followers living in the country’s tribal regions, urging them to to move only on cloudy days when the drones were less effective. As a result, bin Laden planned to withdraw all of his followers from the tribal region and relocate them to other parts of Pakistan.

Bin Laden’s death certainly did much to undermine al-Qaeda’s appeal to terrorists and its ability to carry out attacks, since it was bin Laden who founded the group, led its deadliest operations and united members of the group had sworn a personal oath of loyalty to him.

Bin Laden’s successor, Ayman al-Zawahiri, had neither the charisma nor organizational skills to revive al-Qaeda, and Zawahiri himself was killed in a U.S. drone strike in Afghanistan two years ago. According to United Nations estimates, there are approximately four hundred al-Qaeda members living in Afghanistan today.

While al-Qaeda is a relatively small terrorist group, Hezbollah has existed for four decades and is backed by Iran, which is a major player in the region and has an army of about 30,000 soldiers that has an extensive arsenal, including about 150,000 rockets , feature and rockets.

The killing of Nasrallah is a major prize for Israel as part of its larger wave of attacks on Hezbollah, which began earlier this month with the covert operation in which thousands of pagers and walkie-talkies exploded, followed by massive airstrikes, damaging infrastructure and other high-profile targets Leaders destroyed, aggravated .

But it is still too early to dismiss the militant group, although it is clearly in disarray. History suggests that it will reorganize and appoint other leaders to continue its long struggle against Israel.