☠Assassination of Brig. Gen. Mohammad Suleiman, Bashar's aide and Hezbollah liaison

On 1 August 2008 Brigadier General Mohammad Suleiman, Bashar al-Assad's special adviser for strategic armament files, was shot dead by a sniper near Tartous, months after the assassination of the commander Imad Mughniyeh in Damascus. He was among the Syrian officials closest to Mughniyeh and is believed to have supervised the transfer of weapons to Hezbollah. Damascus kept silent for days; an American cable quoted French officials as favouring an internal liquidation, then a US National Security Agency document in 2015 revealed, and Ehud Olmert later confirmed, that it was an Israeli naval commando operation. His position points to an increasingly interdependent partnership between Bashar's inner circle and the party, with the Syrian political decision remaining in Bashar's hands.