This is John Batchel, a conversation with my good colleague David Diyud of the Foundation for

Defensive Democracy about Hezbollah. David analyzes the leadership being picked off,

targeted, exited, decapped, whatever, one at a time, for quite some time, years now.

And how Hezbollah recovers is now the vital question.

They also have a leader who's a bookish man, quiet, David, analyzes why that may be useful to

Hezbollah. In other words, what we have here is a very large army with lots of weapons, more coming in

all the time, biting its time laying low

this reminds me of Hamas before the attack is david dayud go through the list of who is alive

who is dead who is next and the leader of hesbalah now, much more of this later tonight.

So it didn't a big loss.

Look, I mean, any one of these guys, I shook her, you know, when Nalanya was killed,

when Badra Dina was killed, you're losing decades, literally decades in some of these cases,

of organizational experience, building of doctrine, so on and so forth.

Now, the first line, right, the first generation is not entirely wiped up. We have Thalal al-Hmilla who has been elusive and, you know, who's floated as one of the successors of Badrudez in 2016 when he was killed. Was Fad Shukhar and Thal al-Hmiaia. And, you know, he keeps going into this like bridesmaid and never the bride position, it would seem, right? Because every time you expect him, right? Shukh Shukh is killed. You think, oh, Hamiyah is on deck. Turns out Tabatabai was on deck, right? Now it seems like if Tabatabai was cooperating with Hamad Haid Haidah most closely, then perhaps Muhammad Haidhar may be on deck.

So they still have experience.

And, you know, look, how much of this is exaggeration?

Because Hasbullah can't appear weak.

They need to maintain an image of strength domestically.

So you have to take any of these statements that come out of their leadership with a grain of salt.

But what Naim Kassim has said repeatedly is that the second line, the second generation,

have absorbed this experience from the first generation.

And speaking of Naim Kossum, I don't underestimate the man, right?

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