THE ROVING
EYE Zarqawi - Bush's man for all
seasons By Pepe Escobar
"Oh Allah, America came with its horses and
knights to challenge Allah and his message. Oh Allah,
destroy the kingdom of Bush as you destroyed the kingdom
of Caesar." - Abu Musab al-Zarqawi
audio, February 2004
"You know, I hate to
predict violence, but I just understand the nature of
the killers. This guy, Zarqawi, an al-Qaeda associate -
who was in Baghdad, by the way, prior to the removal of
Saddam Hussein - is still at large in Iraq. And as you
might remember, part of his operational plan was to sow
violence and discord amongst the various groups in Iraq
by cold- blooded killing. And we need to help find
Zarqawi so that the people of Iraq can have a more
bright ... future." - President George W
Bush, June 2004
"If they do not turn
in al-Zarqawi and his group, we will carry out
operations in Fallujah. We will not be lenient."
- Iyad Allawi, Iraqi prime
minister, October 2004
Former US Central Intelligence
Agency (CIA) asset turned Iraqi prime minister, Iyad
Allawi, is set to give the go-ahead to what the US Army
twice could not bring itself to carry out: the leveling
of Fallujah. Following a purely military logic, this is
the next step after the barrage of precision strikes
that are killing dozens of Sunni Iraqi civilians,
according to Fallujah hospital reports.
Negotiations are going on. Allawi's government
sounds optimistic. Sheikh Khaled al-Jumeili is the key
Fallujah negotiator. There seems to be a deal on the
table according to which the Iraqi National Guard -
including a number of Fallujah residents - will control
security in the city of 300,000, and residents with
relatives killed or wounded by the American offensives
and precision strikes may receive compensation.
But the key point is the handover of Abu Musab
al-Zarqawi. Al-Jumeili says there are only a few foreign
jihadis in the city - a fact confirmed to Asia Times
Online by sources in Baghdad close to the resistance in
Fallujah. Al-Jumeili insists they are not terrorists,
but plain mujahideen. One of the Baghdad sources is
adamant, "What the Americans could not get the first
time they are now getting through Allawi. Zarqawi is
just an excuse for them to smash the spirit of the
resistance."
There's another crucial point.
Exactly which "Zarqawi" is everybody talking about?
The making of a legend Before January
2003, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was little known. Very few
people were even aware of the one-legged ethnic
Palestinian Ahmed Fadeel al-Khalayleh, born in the
dreary industrial wasteland of Zarqa in Jordan, who was
basically a semi-literate, tattooed, Shi'ite-hating
thug.
His goal while in Jordan was to topple
King Hussein. It didn't work. He became a jihadi in
Afghanistan in the late 1980s against the Soviets, and
after returning to Jordan in 1992 spent seven years in
jail for possession of guns. In fighting in 2002
following the US-led invasion of Afghanistan to topple
the Taliban, one of his legs was severely injured - and
may have been, or maybe not, amputated. He then found
refuge in Iraqi Kurdistan, protected by the
Anglo-American enforced no-fly zone, with Ansar
al-Islam, a group with a maximum of 400 fundamentalist
Kurdish warriors. And he may have moved to the Sunni
triangle after the fall of Baghdad in April 2003.
Zarqawi stopped being a non-entity on February
5, 2003, when he was spectacularly catapulted onto the
global stage - six weeks before the start of the Iraq
war - by US Secretary of State Colin Powell's weapons of
mass destruction speech at the United Nations. Powell
used Zarqawi to link Saddam Hussein's secular Ba'athist
regime to the "Islamic terror network", and thus partly
justify the invasion and occupation of Iraq.
Asia Times Online confirmed in Amman, Jordan in
February 2003 that practically nobody knew Zarqawi
outside of Jordan - even though in 2002 he had been the
target of a CIA disinformation campaign tying him to the
theocratic regime in Tehran. But soon the Bush
administration was to invest him with the aura of an
"international man of mystery" - the world's most
dangerous man after Osama bin Laden.
Move
over, Osama The US$25 million bounty on his head
makes Zarqawi an equal of bin Laden on America's
most-wanted list. Soon Zarqawi started being
characterized simultaneously as al-Qaeda's top operative
in Iraq, and the number one promoter of civil war in
that country. His organization, al-Tawhid wal-Jihad
(Unity and Holy War), cornered the global market of gory
videos showing hostages chained, caged and beheaded. The
Bush administration went into full gear, wanting the
world to believe that petty criminal Zarqawi was holding
the world hostage.
What had he actually done
until 2004? Not much. Unlike bin Laden in 1998, he never
issued a declaration of war against Jews and Crusaders.
Because Zarqawi may have been in northern Iraq at the
time - training Ansar al-Islam fighters - and because he
may have traveled to Baghdad in May 2002 to treat his
injured, or amputated leg, was evidence enough for
Powell to speak of "a sinister nexus between Iraq and
the al-Qaeda terrorist network". Powell of course never
mentioned two crucial facts: even if Zarqawi was really
in northern Iraq, he was in a safe heaven for Iraqi
Kurds; and Ansar al-Islam was a mortal enemy of Saddam's
Ba'athists. Not to mention the fact that the Pentagon
always refused to take out Ansar's base: Secretary of
Defense Donald Rumsfeld was not interested in
obliterating a perfect pretext for the war. Moreover,
Ansar could also be used as an ally against Saddam.
Although the full weight of the Bush
administration described Zarqawi as "a very senior
al-Qaeda leader", strangely enough there was no
meaningful Zarqawi connection whatsoever when one sifted
through the terror information in the global media
between September 11 and Shock and Awe in March 2003.
Senior former CIA agents say that Vice President
Dick Cheney "blew up" when a report proved no links
between Saddam and Zarqawi. No wonder: it was always a
propaganda stunt. Cheney and the neo-conservatives had
always insisted that the Iraqi resistance to the
American occupation came either from "remnants" of
Saddam's regime or from al-Qaeda "foreign fighters",
preferably a partnership. It was not in their interests
to admit to a more widespread indigenous resistance
movement.
Cheney also insisted that Zarqawi
could not have had his leg treated in a Baghdad hospital
without Saddam's Mukhabarat (secret service) knowing it.
But the leg story is a mess. US intelligence thought
that Zarqawi had lost a leg in Afghanistan in 2002. But
then, last May, they concluded that he still had both
legs. The Bush administration's "evidence" of an
al-Qaeda-Saddam link via Zarqawi may be an intercepted
phone call by Zarqawi from a Baghdad hospital in 2002,
while his leg was being attended to. But then "Zarqawi"
shows up in a video with both legs in the 2004 beheading
of hostage Nick Berg.
The truth is more
straightforward. Zarqawi had no connection either with
bin Laden or with Saddam. Secular Saddam hosting an
Islamic radical, of all people, at a time when the
American campaign against the "axis of evil" had reached
a fever-pitch is a ludicrous proposition. A newspaper
editor in the Sunni triangle says Zarqawi may have gone
on an underground trip to Baghdad to have his leg
operated on before scurrying back to Kurdistan. And
sources in Peshawar confirm to Asia Times Online that
Zarqawi never took the all-significant bayat
(oath of allegiance) and so never struck a formal
alliance with bin Laden and the al-Qaeda leadership.
A 'star' is born Zarqawi suddenly had
a global starring role, so he had to live up to it.
Al-Tawhid wal-Jihad was organized in early 2004. It has
since claimed responsibility for the beheading of Berg
in May and Americans Eugene Armstrong and Jack Hensley
in September and and Briton Ken Bigley in October.
Tawhid's videos feature masked, armed militants, either
with the voice over explaining how "Zarqawi" is
beheading yet one more American infidel or the captions
announcing the capture of yet more hostages.
This "film" career ran parallel to his emergence
as a fiery ideologue. That's the thrust of the
exceedingly suspect email allegedly found by the US Army
in a raid of "an al-Qaeda safe house" in Baghdad in
early 2004. In that email - which immediately showed up
at the website of the ultra right-wing Project For a New
American Century - Zarqawi allegedly writes to bin Laden
asking for his help in detonating a civil war between
Sunnis and Shi'ites in Iraq.
The email - good
timing - was found exactly at a juncture when the Bush
administration could not disguise any more the lack of
evidence linking Saddam and al-Qaeda. There's only one
problem - or several, for that matter. Al-Qaeda was
actually encouraging total cooperation among all
factions of the Iraqi resistance, Sunni and Shi'ite,
secular Ba'athist and Islamic. The email could not
possibly have been written by a mujahideen like Zarqawi.
The characteristic, elaborate Islamic phraseology was
not there. No mujahideen in his right mind would
complain of his imminent martyrdom, as it's implied in
the text. And to top it all, for the many different
strands of the resistance, Allawi's administration is
just a temporary nuisance in the long road of a national
liberation struggle. So the plot didn't fly, and it was
scrapped after a few days.
I did it my
way So, first Zarqawi was used as a
justification for the Iraqi war; then he became the
reason for why there was no peace. Instead, what sources
close to the resistance tell Asia Times Online, is that
Zarqawi is a minor player: most Iraqis, Shi'ite and
Sunni alike, reject his brutal methods, and even Islamic
clerics who support the resistance but criticize
Zarqawi's methods are routinely denounced by Zarqawi as
"collaborators".
Where is his "base"? Zarqawi
may have found plenty of funds and manpower in Saudi
Arabia, especially after the siege of Fallujah in April,
as well as in pockets of the Sunni triangle. Tawhid does
exist as a movement, it may have as many as 1,000
members. Once again, the majority of the Iraqi
resistance refuse to blow up Iraqi policemen or the
desperate urban youth queuing up every day to get jobs
in the security services. But for Tawhid, any Iraqi
collaborating with the occupation in any way is a
legitimate target.
Everything imaginable, in
Iraq and elsewhere, has been attributed to Zarqawi: the
Casablanca and Istanbul bombings in 2003; the
assassination in August 2003, in Najaf, of key Shi'ite
player Ayatollah al-Hakim; bomb attacks in February 2004
where more than 100 unemployed people applying for a job
with the Iraqi police were killed; the Madrid bombings
in March; the beheading of Berg; a wave of attacks in
June, with more than 100 dead; the beheadings of the two
Americans Armstrong and Hensley and Briton Bigley in
September/October. Zarqawi is connected to something
like three dozen "terrorist attacks" in Iraq, not to
mention countless warnings, threats or communiques. But
only half a dozen attacks among roughly 3,000 against
the Americans and the so-called coalition can be
attributed with certainty to Zarqawi.
There's no
shortage of documentation, in print and online, on how
US intelligence agents operating around the world since
the 1950s have created and developed their own terrorist
groups; their own terrorist warnings concerning these
terrorist groups; and then how they applied
multibillion-dollar counterterrorism tactics - including
black psy-ops - to neutralize these terrorist groups
they created in the first place.
Disinformation
and propaganda are key. Creating a "face" to terror is
key. So these black psy-ops always include the creation
of a cipher. One American psy-ops operative recently
leveled with the Australian newspaper The Age: "We were
basically paying up to US$10,000 a time to opportunists
and criminals who passed off fiction and supposition
about Zarqawi as cast-iron fact, making him out as the
linchpin of just about every attack in Iraq."
Will the real Zarqawi please stand
up Zarqawi, described as "a master of disguise
and bogus identification papers", has had a tendency to
appear in several places at the same time, always
eluding the efforts of the multibillion-dollar US
intelligence machine. The Rupert Murdoch-owned The
Weekly Standard, very cosy with the neo-cons, trumpeted
that Zarqawi "is mounting a challenge to bin Laden's
leadership of the global jihad".
But not a
single source, anywhere, claims to have actually seen
"Zarqawi" since late 2001 in Afghanistan. Ask the
Pentagon. Ask the CIA. Ask the Federal Bureau of
Investigation. No one, on the record, is able to
independently verify that "Zarqawi" actually exists.
There are no photos - only that same CIA-owned black and
white. The CIA doesn't even know how tall or how fat
"Zarqawi" is. All the literature on "Zarqawi" since late
2001 springs from dubious "confessions" by prisoners and
"statements" by all sorts of people claiming to be
"Zarqawi".
Even more extraordinary is that
everybody and his neighbor is after Zarqawi: the
Pentagon; the CIA; the Mukhabarat-lite intelligence
services of Allawi; the Mehdi Army of Shi'ite cleric
Muqtada al-Sadr; the bombed residents of Fallujah, where
he apparently is hiding; not to mention millions of
Iraqis who would bless the heavens above for a shot at
laying their hands on a $25 million bounty. Just like
bin Laden, nobody can find Zarqawi. Why?
Zarqawi
as evil personified is a non-starter: this role has
already been attributed to bin Laden hiding in his cave
along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. The truth may be
that the real one-legged, squat, tattooed thug Zarqawi
is dead, but a composite Zarqawi lives. He may have been
created by a faction, or factions of the Iraqi
resistance as a mobilizing factor, a dashing neo-Saladin
rousing the masses against the infidel occupiers.
Or better yet, he may have been created by US
military intelligence. This American "Zarqawi" is
definitely a Hollywood improvement on the original:
tall, urbane, highly articulate, and with agile legs.
But then something went badly wrong with the plot. A
rogue group, composed of Iraqis or foreign fighters or
both, kidnapped the American Zarqawi identikit and
inoculated its own virus: thus the savage, multiple
beheadings.
Zarqawi exists in audio, but not in
video. Unlike bin Laden, he has never performed
unmasked. In both the Berg and South Korean Kim Sun-il
execution videos, the Zarqawi voice is the same - and
the Zarqawi character as well (although he certainly
doesn't look like the "original" Zarqawi). Both videos
look the same - with the same people, the same orange
jumpsuits, and the same execution where mysteriously
little blood flows. Audio and video are not in synch,
and that suggests heavy editing.
Zarqawi was
extremely useful to defuse attention from the Abu Ghraib
scandal: the Berg video showed up at the height of Abu
Ghraib. The "Zarqawi" in the video does not speak Arabic
with a Jordanian accent. His legs seem pretty normal.
And crucially, he wears a golden ring, which for an
authentic jihadi would be the ultimate affront.
On the same day, June 22, of the release of the
Kim video, "Zarqawi" also released a statement - but
with a different voice, saying he was determined to
"ignite a civil war between Sunnis and Shi'ites".
Curiously enough, that's exactly what US intelligence
wants, a rehashing of the same old British maxim of
"divide and rule".
Tawhid is also venturing into
more elaborate productions. One of its recruiting videos
features plenty of interviews and statements from Saudi,
Algerian, Libyan and Jordanian jihadis. "Zarqawi's"
voice can be heard for a few seconds - but the audio was
taken from another tape released after Abu Ghraib when
he was threatening Allawi's government.
This
cat has nine lives "Zarqawi" is much like a
movie. Fake leg or not, return of the living dead or
not, he is everywhere. American corporate media do not
even bother to examine all the holes in the story. Who
cares? Without Zarqawi, the Bush administration would
have to painfully admit that the Iraqi resistance is a
national liberation struggle. With Zarqawi, the
administration can parrot to oblivion the line that Iraq
is in the frontline of the "war on terror".
If
multi-purpose "Zarqawi" did not exist, he would have to
be invented. The "Zarqawi" myth straddles pre-invasion
and post-invasion, so the neo-cons can use it to justify
just about anything. Cheney and Rumsfeld may keep
exhuming Iraq's "long established ties with al-Qaeda"
and may justify the de facto occupation because
"Zarqawi", "linked to al-Qaeda", is still there, so Iraq
is turning into al-Qaeda's base for more attacks against
the US. It doesn't matter that German intelligence has
consistently pointed out that Zarqawi would be a fierce
rival to bin Laden as the leader of global jihad.
If Bush loses the presidential election in
November, the neo-cons who control his administration
will be totally roasted and cannibalized by traditional
Republicans. But if Bush is re-elected, he will have two
months to launch and complete the all-out subjugation of
Fallujah already announced by the US military and Allawi
- the logical sequence of the current, devastating
precision strikes.
This poses a problem. Zarqawi
would have to be smoked out. But what for? The neo-cons
would lose a formidable asset: after all they now insist
Zarqawi is sponsored by Tehran. Yet another measure of
the neo-cons' ignorance of the Muslim world is how they
put all cats - Wahhabi al-Qaeda, secular Iraqi
Ba'athists and Iranian Shi'ite mullahs - in the same
bag.
So the world should expect more "Zarqawi"
merchandise - emails, threats, communiques, grisly
videos. "Zarqawi" lives. What a legend. He's
unstoppable. And he votes Bush.
(Copyright 2004
Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please
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