Sayyed Mohsen Shokr: The Commander of the War and Its Martyr

Translated by Al-Ahed News, Al-Akhbar Newspaper

Ali Shokr was neither wealthy nor powerful. He was a poor man from the “belts of misery” on the outskirts of Beirut, namely the Ouzai neighborhood. He was a hard worker, stubbornly struggling with life’s hardships. This made him tough and left a clear mark on his son Fouad.

“He was afraid that I would join one of the parties during the civil war, as he knew that I carried a weapon and was enthusiastic about fighting, so he decided to send me with the rest of the family to Al-Nabi Shayth to keep us away,” Sayyed Mohsen told Al-Akhbar in an interview two years ago on the occasion of 40 years since Hezbollah’s founding.

Fouad returned to Beirut, specifically to Ouzai and the southern suburbs in the late 1970s, during the victory of the Islamic Revolution in Iran led by Imam Khomeini and the arrest and assassination of the martyr Sayyed Mohammad Baqir al-Sadr in Iraq. The two events affected his personality and orientations, and he soon found himself among a group of people influenced by the Islamic Revolution and angry about the assassination of al-Sadr. That group included the two martyred leaders Imad Mughniyeh and Mustafa Badr al-Din.

A few years later, in 1982, “Israel” invaded Lebanon. As its tanks advanced from the south, Imam Khomeini issued his famous fatwa declaring “the necessity of fighting ‘Israel’,” and after that, “36 armed young men arrived at the Ouzai Mosque […] We met and decided that our entire path would be to fight ‘Israel’.”

Fouad Shokr took 12 young men to the Khaldeh area, where a heroic confrontation took place in which the group confronted the advancing enemy forces.

“I distributed them at the Khaldeh Bridge, and I told them: We will advance and will not return alive. You stay here and fight the ‘Israelis’ when they arrive.”

One of those who knew him and accompanied him in that battle said, “Sayyed was a leader and a martyr from the early days. He did not become a leader, he started out as a leader.”

That day, the story was recorded without its hero being known. When journalists filming the battle with enemy soldiers came out of a hotel in Khaldeh, they asked the armed youth about their identity, and Fouad jumped out from among them and shouted: “We are Khomeinis.”

Indeed, after that day, Fouad Shokr, the Khomeini, the martyr and the leader, knew no work other than resistance and fighting “Israel” and its agents.

Around that time, Sayyed Fouad visited the city of Tyre and returned angrily to tell his fellow resistance fighters that “the ‘Israelis’ are comfortable in the south, and their soldiers are swimming on the city’s beach.”

He asked, “Is it reasonable that we fight the ‘Israelis’ here while they are comfortable there?”

Thai was followed by immediate preparations for the operation to blow up the military governor’s building, which was carried out by the martyr Ahmad Qasir in the city [1982], and Sayyed Fouad and Hajj Imad, along with others, planned, prepared, and followed up on it until the moment of the explosion.

Shokr was also among the first to start thinking and planning to capture “Israeli” soldiers with the aim of exchanging them for resistance fighters who were captured.

He himself tried to carry out one such operation in the Jiyeh area, during the siege of Beirut, but the operation failed because the captured soldier was killed, and it was not possible to transfer his body to Beirut.

He personally supervised the operation to capture two “Israeli” soldiers in the town of Kounine in 1986, led by the martyr Samir Matout, a member of his first group. Sayyed Mohsen continued to remember him and recount his qualities and heroism until his last days.

He held the position as first central military official of Hezbollah from 1985 until the mid 1990s. During his leadership, the resistance moved from limited operations at first, then martyrdom operations, most of which he personally supervised, to qualitative operations, such as storming sites and capturing soldiers and building qualitative weapons capabilities, which began with anti-tank missiles, then Katyusha missiles.

After that, Sayyed Mohsen moved to a new phase of “capacity building.” He personally supervised, until his martyrdom, the building of the resistance’s qualitative and strategic armament capabilities. He supervised, with martyr Hassan Laqis, the file of strategic and accurate drones and missiles, and he left the greatest and clearest mark.

The martyr also participated in all stages of formulating tactical and strategic plans as well as preparing training and military programs. He was eager to attend training camps and colleges as much as possible to talk to the resistance fighters and supervise their graduation from the courses.

During the Al-Aqsa Flood Operation, the martyr Sayyed led military operations on the Lebanese support front since its beginning, and it is true that he was the “commander of the war,” although he was eager – in his last days – to always clarify that “what is happening now is not a full-fledged war. There are many controls and restrictions, and that in a full-fledged war, the enemy will see what it expected and what it did not even think of.”

Sayyed read “Israel” like an open book, and he could list, in one session, everything that the entity contains in terms of major population centers, industrial, commercial, and agricultural areas, in addition to the nature of the settler population in each region, their origins, customs, and livelihoods.

In the same session, he was also able to decipher the entire enormous “Israeli” military system, divide it into layers and levels, and enumerate its weaknesses and strengths. He would show the most important military bases, sites, and airports in the entity, and would assure you, with complete confidence, serious language, and a sharp look, that the resistance has the ability to strike all these targets, only “when His Eminence the Sayyed orders.”