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 Zarqawi:
Everywhere and nowhere
By Dahr
Jamail
AMMAN, Jordan - A remarkable
proportion of the violence taking place in Iraq is
regularly credited to the Jordanian Ahmad
al-Khalayleh, better known as Abu Musab
al-Zarqawi, and his al-Qaeda-linked organization
in Iraq. Sometimes it seems no car bomb goes off,
no ambush occurs that isn't claimed in his name or
attributed to him by the Bush administration. Bush
and his top officials have, in fact, made good use
of him, lifting his reputed feats of terrorism to
epic, even mythic, proportions (much aided by
various mainstream media outlets). Given that the
invasion and occupation of Iraq have now been
proven beyond a shadow of a doubt to be based on
administration lies and manipulations, I begun to
wonder if the vaunted Zarqawi even existed.
In Amman, random interviews with
Jordanians only generated more questions and no
answers about Zarqawi. As it happens, though, the
Jordanian capital is just a short cab ride from
Zarqa, the city Zarqawi is said to be from. So I
decided to slake my curiosity about him by
traveling there and nosing around his old
neighborhood.
"Zarqawi, I don't even know
if he exists," said a scruffy taxi driver in
Amman, and his was a typical comment. "He's like
[Osama] bin Laden, we don't even know if he
exists; but if he does, I support that he fights
the US occupation of Iraq."
Chatting with
a man sipping tea in a small stall in downtown
Amman, I asked what he thought of Zarqawi. He was
convinced that Zarqawi was perfectly real, but the
idea that he was responsible for such a wide range
of attacks in Iraq had to be "nonsense".
"The Americans are using him for their
propaganda," he insisted. "Think about it - with
all of their power and intelligence capabilities -
they cannot find one man?"
Like so many
others in neighboring Jordan, he, too, offered
verbal support for the armed resistance in Iraq,
adding, "Besides, it is any person's right to
defend himself if his country is invaded. The
American occupation of Iraq has destabilized the
entire region."
The Bush administration
has regularly claimed that Zarqawi was in - and
then had just barely escaped from - whatever city
or area they were next intent on attacking or
cordoning off or launching a campaign against.
Last year, he and his organization were reputed to
be headquartered in Fallujah, prior to the
American assault that flattened the city. At one
point, American officials even alleged that he was
commanding the defense of Fallujah from elsewhere
by telephone. Yet he also allegedly slipped out of
Fallujah, either just before or just after the
beginning of the assault, depending on which media
outlet or military press release you read.
He has since turned up, according to
American intelligence reports and the US press, in
Ramadi, Baghdad, Samarra and Mosul among other
places, along with side trips to Jordan, Iran,
Pakistan and/or Syria. His closest "lieutenants"
have been captured by the busload, according to
American military reports, and yet he always seems
to have a bottomless supply of them. In May, a
news report on the BBC even called Zarqawi "the
leader of the insurgency in Iraq", though more
sober analysts of the chaotic Iraqi situation say
his group, Jama'at al-Tawhid wal Jihad, while
probably modest in size and reach, is linked to a
global network of jihadis. However, finding any
figures as to the exact size of the group remains
an elusive task.
Former US secretary of
state Colin Powell offered photos before the
United Nations in February, 2003 of Zarqawi's
"headquarters" in Kurdish-controlled northern
Iraq, also claiming that Zarqawi had links to
al-Qaeda. The collection of small huts was bombed
to the ground by US forces in March of that year,
prompting one news source to claim that Zarqawi
had been killed. Yet seemingly contradicting
Powell's claims for Zarqawi's importance was a
statement made in October, 2004 by Secretary of
Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who conceded that
Zarqawi's ties to al-Qaeda may have been far more
ambiguous, that he may have been more of a rival
than a lieutenant to bin Laden. "Someone could
legitimately say he's not al-Qaeda," added
Rumsfeld.
The eternal netherworld of
Zarqawi
For anyone trying to assess the
Zarqawi phenomenon from neighboring Jordan,
complicating matters are the contradictory
statements Jordanians regularly offer up about
almost any aspect of Zarqawi's life, history,
present activities, or even his very existence.
"I've met him here in Jordan," claimed
Abdulla Hamiz, a 29 year-old merchant in Amman,
"Two years ago." However, Hajam Yousef, shining
shoes under a date palm in central Amman, insists,
"He doesn't exist except in the minds of American
policy-makers."
In fact, what little is
actually known about Zarqawi sounds like the
biography of a troubled but normal man from the
industrial section of Zarqa. Thirty-eight years
old now, according to the BBC, Zarqawi reportedly
grew up a rebellious child who ran with the wrong
crowd. He liked to play soccer in the streets as a
young boy and dropped out of school when he was
17. According to some reports, his friends claimed
that in his teens he started drinking heavily,
getting tattoos, and picking fights he could not
win. According to Jordanian intelligence reports
provided to the Associated Press in Amman, Zarqawi
was jailed in the 1980s for sexual assault, though
no additional details are available. By the time
he was 20 he evidently began looking for
direction, and ended up making his way to
Afghanistan in the last years of the jihadi war
against the Soviets in that country. While some
media outlets, such as the New York Times, claim
that he did not actually fight in Afghanistan,
there are people in Jordan who believe he did.
He is reported to have returned to Jordan
in 1992, where he was arrested after Jordanian
authorities found weapons in his home. On his
release in 1999, he left once again for Pakistan.
When his Pakistani visa expired, expecting to be
arrested as a suspect in a terror plot if he
returned to Jordan, he entered Afghanistan
instead.
After supposedly running a
weapons camp there, he was next sighted by
Jordanian authorities crossing back into Jordan
from Syria in September of 2002. Some time between
then and May 11, 2004, when he was reported to
have beheaded the kidnapped American, Nick Berg,
in Baghdad, Zarqawi entered Iraq. Many news
outlets have reported that his goal in Iraq is to
generate a sectarian civil war between the Sunni
and Shi'ites.
In September, 2004, the BBC,
among others, reported, "US officials suspect that
Zarqawi ... is holed up with followers in the
rebellious Iraqi city of Fallujah," though their
sources, as is true of more or less all sources in
every report on Zarqawi, were nebulous. During the
second siege of Fallujah, last November, Newsweek
reported that "some US officials say that Zarqawi
may actually be directing or instigating events in
the town by telephone from elsewhere in Iraq".
Though they, too, cited no specific
sources and provided no evidence for this,
Newsweek then summed Zarqawi's importance up in
this way: "His crucial role in the deteriorating
security situation in Iraq, however, cannot be
underestimated." Meanwhile, the BBC was reporting
that his "network is considered the main source of
kidnappings, bomb attacks and assassination
attempts in Iraq" - another statement made without
much, if any, solid evidence.
In the end,
the vast mass of reportage on Zarqawi amounts to
countless statements based on anonymous sources
hardly less shadowy - to ordinary readers - than
him. He exists, then, in a kind of eternal
netherworld of reportage, rumor and attribution.
It could almost be said that never has a figure
been more regularly written about based on less
hard information. While we have a rough outline of
who he is, where he is from, and where he went
until he entered Iraq, evidence that might stand
up in a court of law is consistently absent. The
question that remains to be answered in this
glaring void of hard information is: who benefits
from the ongoing tales of the mysterious Zarqawi?
The search for Zarqawi's past
My own little journey only seemed to
repeat this larger phenomenon on a more modest
scale. It was the sort of story where, from
beginning to end, no one I met ever seemed willing
to offer his or her real name (or certainly let a
real name be used in an article). From second one,
Zarqawi and an urge for anonymity were tightly -
and perhaps appropriately - bound together.
Abdulla (not his real name, of course), the man
who agreed to drive my translator Aisha and me to
al-Zarqa for this excursion, was a Jordanian, by
the look of things about 30 years old, who
chain-smoked nervously throughout the trip. We
decided to go with him after running into him
while I was conducting my own informal Zarqawi
reality poll in Amman.
"I know him
personally because we fought together in
Afghanistan in the early '90's," insisted Abdulla.
"If you like, I can show you where he is from."
When he picked us up on the late afternoon
of the next day in his beat-up, rusting taxi, he
agreed to a modest fee that was to be paid at the
end of our excursion. As we puttered up a hillside
on our venture to Zarqawi's hometown of al-Zarqa,
he promptly pulled out a small stack of photos. I
flipped through them as we drove towards Zarqawi's
neighborhood and noted Abdulla standing in front
of the huge Faisal mosque in Islamabad, Pakistan,
a giant beard (no longer present) dominating his
flowing dishdasha (robe).
Another
picture had him in Peshawar, Pakistan, a city near
the Afghan border known as a recruiting and
staging area for the Taliban. Others seemed to
have him in the Philippines standing amid dense
forest with a gun slung over his shoulder. In none
of them - why should I have been surprised - did
he have a companion with the now so globally
recognizable Zarqawi sneer.
A little while
into our journey, out of nowhere Abdulla suddenly
said, "Anyone collaborating with the Americans in
Iraq should be killed!"
I took this as a
sign that he felt like talking, and asked him what
he knew of Zarqawi. According to him, he met the
mythic terrorist in Peshawar before being sent
with him to a training camp on the border of
Afghanistan in 1990. "There are several well-known
training camps in the mountains between
Afghanistan and Pakistan," he explained, "And we
were in one of those, along with freedom fighters
from Syria, Jordan, Palestine and Lebanon."
Only fighters for "jihad" were allowed
into the camps, he continued proudly. Only
fighters who were identified by other well-known
mujahideen were granted permission to enter, in an
effort to safeguard those camps against spies.
After three months of training with machine guns
and rocket launchers, Abdulla claims that he and
Zarqawi headed for Afghanistan to fight the
Russians who remained there.
When I looked
at him quizzically - since the Russians withdrew
from Afghanistan in February of 1989 - he replied,
"Many of them stayed after their government
announced they had withdrawn - so we were pushing
the rest of them out."
This was already a
questionable tale, but he went right on. They were
given the choice, he claimed, of where to go in
Afghanistan, and Abdulla proudly stated that most
of the mujahideen went to the "hot" areas where
they expected to find fighting. Our discussion was
then interrupted because we had completed the hop
to Zarqa and arrived in the neighborhood, so rumor
has it, where Zarqawi's brother-in-law lives. We
were dropped off near a small mosque where Zarqawi
supposedly used to pray.
Abdulla says it
isn't safe for him to linger here - though he
doesn't bother to explain why - and we agree
instead that he will call us on my cell phone in
an hour to see if we need more time or not.
So Aisha and I begin to walk around the
quiet, middle-class neighborhood asking people if
they know where the brother-in-law lived. Small
children play in the streets. Behind them young
men and parents sit eyeing us suspiciously. The
wind whips plastic bags along the roads between
the usual stone houses of Jordan. Finally, we find
an old man with a white, flowing beard and tired
eyes sitting in a worn chair at the front of a
small grocery stall. He admits to being the imam
of the mosque, but when asked if he remembers
Zarqawi he dodges the question artfully.
"It is probably true that he used to pray
in my mosque," he responds tiredly, "but I can't
say for sure, as my back is to the people whom I
lead in prayers."
After this he looks
away, down the road. I assume he's wishing we were
gone - undoubtedly like so many Zarqawi seekers
before us. So we thank him and walk on.
Next we find a woman - no names given -
who assures us that Zarqawi is from the Beni
Hassan tribe, the largest tribe in Jordan, before
pointing to a two-storey white house with a black
satellite dish on top.
"That is Ahmed
Zarqawi's home," she says softly, referring to one
of his brothers before warning, "But don't go
there because they will throw rocks on your head.
They are sick of the media."
After being
sidetracked by being shown his brother's home, we
keep doggedly asking for his brother-in-law, but
everyone insists that they simply don't know where
he lives, which seems odd. Just up the hill from
his brother's home, we stumble on a middle-aged
man who is willing to be interviewed. He's a rare
find in this village that has certainly been
inundated with media, not to speak of far more
threatening visits from the intelligence and
police personnel of various countries.
Like our taxi driver, this man agrees to
be interviewed on condition of anonymity. These
are, it seems, a reasonably media-savvy group of
villagers. He tells us that Zarqawi's brother
doesn't know much about the mythic legend of the
Jordanian jihadi outlaw, due to the fact that he
keeps his distance from all the hoopla. He then
laughs and adds, "But all the media went to his
brother's house anyway to film it, because they
thought it was Zarqawi's home!"
He then
points across a shallow valley where lines of
homes sit bathed in the setting sun. "He [Zarqawi]
is from that village, lives near a cemetery, and
his father is mayor of that district, which is
called al-Ma'assoum quarter."
He claims to
have known Abu Musab since he was seven years old,
as they went to Prince Talal primary school
together. "He was a trouble-maker ever since he
was a kid," he explains, "What the media is saying
about him is not true, though. Abu Musab is a
normal guy. What the Americans are saying is not
true. Most of us who know him here and in his
neighborhood don't believe any of this media."
He tells us that Zarqawi left the
neighborhood in the early 1990s to go to
Afghanistan, but that he doesn't believe he is in
Iraq. Along with others in the neighborhood, he is
convinced that Zarqawi was killed in the Tora Bora
region of Afghanistan during the US bombings that
resulted from the attacks of September 11.
"His wife and their three children still
live over there," he adds. "But don't go talk to
them. They won't allow it." He believes Zarqawi
was killed, "100%," and then says emphatically,
"If he is still alive, why not show a recent photo
of him? All of these they show in the media are
quite old."
Like so many Jordanians, he
supports the Iraqi resistance, "All Muslims should
fight this occupation because every day the
Americans are slaughtering innocent Iraqis."
Zarqawi, he tells us, wasn't a fighter until he
went to Afghanistan. "Then his wife covered
herself in black and has worn it ever since."
According to this man, Zarqawi has two brothers
named Ahmed and Sail. He says with a smile, "Most
of the media coming here are Westerners because I
think most of the Arab media know this is all a
myth."
He holds up his hands when one of
his sons brings us coffee and asks, "When they
show hostages in Iraq, why doesn't he put himself
in the film? There is simply no proof he is alive
offered by the Americans or the media."
We
engage in some small talk while drinking our
strong Arabic coffee as we sit under grape vines
lacing the terrace over our heads. As the sun
begins to set, we thank him for the talk and the
coffee, and head off as our taxi driver phones.
I am walking quickly through the streets
to meet him when Aisha, whom I've worked with
often in Baghdad, reassures me: "You can slow
down, Dahr, we are not in danger here. This isn't
like Baghdad where we'll be killed after dark."
Shortly thereafter we meet our driver.
"They didn't tell you where his brother-in-law is
because his home has been raided so many times,"
he states as a matter of fact. "By both Jordanian
and US intelligence."
Our driver insists
that Zarqawi is alive and well in Iraq. "I'm
certain of it, because if he was dead they would
show his picture and make the announcement. He has
always been so strong. When we were in
Afghanistan, any time we got a new machine to
learn or French missiles, he was the first to
learn them."
He drives us by another
mosque Zarqawi is also supposed to have attended.
We are in the al-Ma'assoum quarter now and our
driver tells us that a sister of Abu Musab is the
head of the Islamic Center of the district. He
then adds, somewhat randomly, that he himself has
been in different prisons for a total of seven
years - one of those statements you can't decide
whether you wished you had never heard or are
simply relieved you didn't hear hours earlier just
as you were beginning.
"In Afghanistan
when we beheaded people it was to show the enemy
what their fate was to be. It was to frighten
them."
I think to myself grimly: well, it
works.
He adds, "The jihad in Iraq is not
just Zarqawi. It is up to Allah if we prevail, not
dependent on the hand of Zarqawi. If he is killed,
the jihad will continue there."
I ask him
about civilian casualties. Does he think Zarqawi
cares about the killing of innocent people?
"I have had so many discussions with
Iraqis to tell them that Zarqawi doesn't instruct
his followers in the killing of innocent people.
If he did this, I would be the first to turn
against him. He only targets the Americans and
collaborators."
He's still chain smoking
as we drive through the darkness back to Amman. I
pay him as we thank him for taking us to Zarqa,
and then his beat up taxi rolls off down the busy
street.
The eerie blankness of Zarqawi
After discussions with our driver and
other Jordanians, the only thing I feel I can say
for sure is that Zarqawi is a real person. Whether
or not he is alive and fighting in Iraq or not, or
what acts he is actually responsible for there, is
open to debate. On one point, I'm quite certain,
however: reported American claims that Zarqawi has
affiliations with the secular government of Syria
make no sense. Just as Saddam Hussein opposed the
religious fundamentalism of Bin Laden, the Syrian
government would not be likely to team up with a
fundamentalist like Zarqawi.
As Bush
administration officials have falsely claimed
Saddam had links to bin Laden and to Zarqawi, they
have also conveniently linked Zarqawi to a Syrian
government they would certainly like to take out.
Similarly, Bush officials continue to link Zarqawi
to the Iraqi resistance - undoubtedly another
bogus claim in that the resistance in Iraq is
primarily composed of Iraqi nationalists and
Ba'athist elements who are fighting to expel the
occupiers from their country, not to create a
global Islamic jihad.
Thus, even if
Zarqawi is involved in carrying out attacks inside
Iraq and is killed at some future moment, the
effect this would have on the Iraqi resistance
would surely be negligible. It would be but
another American "turning point" where nothing
much turned.
Right now, when you try to
track down Zarqawi, a man with a $25 million
American bounty on his head, or simply try to
track him back to the beginnings of his life's
journey, whether you look for him in the tunnels
of Tora Bora, the ruined city of Fallujah, the
Syrian borderlands, or Ramadi, you're likely to
run up against a kind of eerie blankness. Whatever
the real Zarqawi may or may not be capable of
doing today in Iraq or elsewhere, he is dwarfed by
the Zarqawi of legend.
He may be the Bush
administration's terrorist of terrorists (now that
bin Laden has been dropped into the void), the
Iraqi insurgency's unwelcome guest, the fantasy
figure in some jihadi dreamscape, or all of the
above. Whatever the case, Zarqawi the man has
disappeared into an epic tale that may or may not
be of his own partial creation. Even dead, he is
unlikely to die; even alive, he is unlikely to be
able to live up to anybody's Zarqawi myth.
Whoever he actually may be, the "he" of
jihadi websites and American pronouncements is now
linked inextricably with the devolving occupation
of Iraq and a Bush administration that, even as it
has built him up as a satanic bogeyman, is itself
beginning to lose its own mythic qualities, to
grow smaller.
I'm sure we'll continue to
hear of "him" in Iraq, in Jordan, or elsewhere as
his myth, perhaps now beyond anyone's control,
continues to transform itself as an inextricable
part of the brutal, bloody occupation of Iraq
where the Bush administration finds itself
fighting not primarily Zarqawi (or his imitators)
but the Iraqis they allegedly came to liberate.
Dahr Jamail is an independent
journalist from Anchorage, Alaska. He has spent
eight months reporting from occupied Iraq, and
recently has reported from Jordan and Turkey. He
regularly reports for Inter Press Service, as well
as contributing to The Nation, The Sunday Herald
and Asia Times Online among others. He maintains a
website at: www.dahrjamailiraq.com
(Copyright 2005 Dahr Jamail )
(Used by permission of Tomdispatch.) |
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