In contemporary times, this approach has been implemented by Israel and the United States (US) in their long campaigns against Islamist terrorist groups such as Hamas, Hezbollah, Al Qaeda, and the Islamic State (ISIS). Whenever a high-value target from these outfits has been taken out, Israel and the US have announced it with dramatic fanfare and declared it would significantly degrade the evil perpetrated by these organisations.

Yet, the decapitation of jihadist organisations has not been decisive or very effective in terminating their violent “holy wars”. The American scholar Jenna Jordan examined a database of 1,276 cases of leadership assassinations between 1970 and 2016 and found that Right-wing Islamist groups are among the most resilient terrorist outfits. Owing to certain inbuilt characteristics, jihadist organisations survive what might be a coup de grâce for other types of terrorist groups.

Firstly, Islamist outfits tend to be “bureaucratised” with diversified structures, division of roles and responsibilities based on specialisation among fighters and commanders, and relatively decentralised in operations. In the case of Hamas and Hezbollah, even though they are hierarchical and built around cults of the personality of their top leaders, they have autonomous cellular fighting units with well-defined mandates and independent decision-making authority.

Secondly, Islamist terrorist movements have legitimacy in their local communities and areas. Jordan argues that terrorist groups with greater “communal support” increase their chances of survival in the face of external shocks like leadership decapitation. Hezbollah is embedded into the daily lives of more than 1.6 million Lebanese Shias and draws from among them some 100,000 or more trained fighters. It is a cultural and social service provider as well as a political platform whose candidates compete in elections and wield considerable influence in Lebanon’s national affairs. Such socially interwoven Islamist groups are not easy to vanquish through the decapitation of leaders.

Thirdly, jihadist terrorist outfits institutionalise their ideologies among adherents and have fanatical belief structures that seep into generations of followers. In the case of Hezbollah, the history of civil war, sectarian divisions and competition for resources and power in Lebanon, as well as the mythology of Shia and Muslim victimhood and resistance against oppression, have mainstreamed its ideology among large segments of Lebanese society.

Nasrallah was undoubtedly a charismatic cleric and reinforcer of this ideology. But even after his death, Shias, mobilised along deeply held religious narratives about shared suffering, sacrifice and struggle, will remain radicalised and willing to pick up guns.

The hand of Iran, which fed and propelled Nasrallah to rule over a de facto “State within a State” in Lebanon, is also there to revive Hezbollah’s ideological spirits after the demoralising losses of not only its chief but also its entire senior leadership under relentless Israeli attacks.

The defiant remarks of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, after Nasrallah’s killing that “the fate of this region will be determined by the resistance with Hezbollah at the top” indicate that Tehran will try to resuscitate its main proxy irrespective of decapitation of its leaders. It is worth recalling that Iran increased its aid and assistance to Hezbollah after Israel assassinated Nasrallah’s predecessor, Abbas al-Musawi, in 1992. Especially because of the sponsorship of a key radical State like Iran, the chances of Hamas and Hezbollah surviving and continuing to vex Israel remain, despite their top leaderships being systematically wiped out.

Even jihadist organisations lacking any State’s financing and shelter have not been easy to suppress through decapitations of leaders. Al Qaeda’s so-called “emirs”, Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, were killed by US special forces in 2011 and by a US drone strike in 2022 respectively. ISIS’s much-vaunted “caliphs”, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurashi, were liquidated in targeted attacks by the US in 2019 and 2022.

These operations did stymie Al Qaeda’s and ISIS’s Islamist supremacist messaging and operational readiness. But their franchise model and global propaganda channels have ensured the revival of newer avatars in different corners of the world. The threat of yet another spectacular Al Qaeda or ISIS attack somewhere or the other is as real today as it was in the heydays of Bin Laden or Baghdadi.

Given these sobering facts, it may be too soon to write Hezbollah’s obituary. Nasrallah and his core team are gone but their mentality, ideology, social base, and international support mechanisms are intact. Targeted assassinations are politically popular and favoured in counterterrorism policymaking, but they do not get to the bottom of the problem which can keep festering and breeding fresh waves of terror.

Sreeram Chaulia is dean, Jindal School of International Affairs. The views expressed are personal