Expert: Hezbullah and Iran now bigger threat than al-Qaeda

Counter-terrorism expert Matthew Levitt reports that Hezbullah and Iran are cooperating more than ever and have eclipsed al-Qaeda as the world's biggest terror threat.

According to the report, “the Hezbollah-Quds Force threat has sometimes eclipsed that of al-Qaida.“ 

The 17-page study notes that “Iranian decision-makers settled on a campaign of violence based on a three-tiered threat stream targeting the following: Israeli tourists, government figures (diplomats, retired officials), and targets broadly representative of Israel or the Jewish community (community leaders, prominent Israeli companies).”

Levitt wrote that Iran’s leaders “assigned the task of targeting Israeli tourists – a soft target – to Hezbollah, and maintained for the Quds Force operations targeting Israeli, American, British, or Gulf States’ interests. The latter would be carried out by a new special external operations unit known as Unit 400.”

The report comes shortly before the slated release this week of the results of the Bulgarian authorities investigation into the suicide bombing of an Israeli tour bus in July 2012. The terror act resulted in the deaths of five Israelis, a Bulgarian bus driver, and injuries to over 30 Israelis. US and Israeli intelligence officials attributed the suicide bombing to a joint Iran- Hezbollah operation.

Levitt, widely considered the leading authority on Hezbollah’s global operations, says that, “In January 2010, the Quds Force – the elite unit of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps – decided that it and Hezbollah, its primary terrorist proxy, would embark on a new campaign of violence targeting not only Israel, but the US and other Western targets as well.”

But the Europeans would rather die than declare an enemy of the Jews a designated terror organization. Fools.