Death of Zarqawi: George gets his
dragon By Sami Moubayed
DAMASCUS - The killing of the world's No 1
terrorist, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, 40, in Iraq on
Wednesday, as announced by Prime Minister Nuri
al-Maliki, will undoubtedly and dramatically
change
the
political landscape in the war-torn country.
Al-Qaeda's leader in Iraq was killed in a
US air strike on an isolated safe house north of
Baghdad at 6:15pm local time on Wednesday, Maliki
said.
The
man who was portrayed as having been everywhere
yet nowhere, and who has been blamed for every
evil in Iraq since the US invasion in 2003, is
finally dead. It is America's single most
important achievement since the arrest of former
Iraqi president Saddam Hussein in December 2003.
Undoubtedly, for now, it will overshadow all the
bad publicity the
Americans have been getting
for the Haditha massacre of last November, where
24 Iraqi civilians were killed by US marines, or
the Ishaqi massacre, where another 11 were killed
by US troops in March.
As the world stands
back to digest the killing of Zarqawi, who had a
US$25 million reward for his head, Iraqis hold
their breath, wondering whether his demise will
actually make their lives any better. Or will his
killing inflame the insurgency and produce many
more Zarqawis?
Zarqawi's death marks a
momentous two days for Maliki. On Thursday, Jawad
al-Bulani, a Shi'ite and a former army colonel
under Saddam, was chosen to lead the Interior
Ministry. General Abd al-Qadir Jasim, a Sunni, was
approved in parliament as defense minister. Jasim
was until now commander of Iraq's ground forces.
The two key security jobs were left
temporarily vacant when Maliki's government of
national unity took office on May 20 because his
coalition partners were unable to agree on
candidates, and has been a major political
stumbling block. Agreement has also been reached
for Shirwan al-Waili to become the new minister
for national security.
Since Zarqawi
appeared on the world stage in 2003, he has been a
phenomenon that has overshadowed his boss, Osama
bin Laden. Many in the Arab world doubted whether
the Jordanian-born Zarqawi even existed. (Some
reports indicate that Jordanian intelligence
provided information on the location where he was
killed.)
Living up to the Arab conviction
in "conspiracy theories", many argued that Zarqawi
was created by the Americans to justify their
problems in Iraq. Whenever something went wrong,
they would blame it on Zarqawi. Or, as Arab
radicals would say, he was created by the
Americans to pin their crimes on him. And even in
the US, on April 10 the Washington Post said the
US military had conducted major propaganda to
exaggerate Zarqawi's role in Iraq.
So
while Zarqawi may not have been created by the
Americans, he certainly was magnified by them, and
inflated to dramatic proportions to justify why
Iraq was in such a mess.
While the US is
basking in Zarqawi's death, as is the United
Kingdom, it should not be forgotten that they were
not the only ones after his blood.
Jordanian intelligence wanted him. So did
Maliki, the Iraqi Kurds and the Mehdi Army of
Muqtada al-Sadr, the rebel Shi'ite cleric. So did
the Badr Brigade of the Supreme Council for the
Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), a leading
Shi'ite organization. So did Iran. So did Saudi
Arabia. So did the average Iraqi citizen.
In a recent audio message, Zarqawi not
only attacked the US and the Sh'ite-dominated
government in Iraq, but also Iran. He had even
claimed that the US, Iran and Shi'ites in general
were collaborating to destroy Islam. He has also
plainly called for continued attacks against
Shi'ites and called Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani
an "an atheist".
Zarqawi, after all, did
not have the religious legitimacy to become the No
1 leader of political radical Islam. Nor did he
have the family heritage, connections and money of
bin Laden.
Nor did he have the education
and record of someone like Dr Ayman al-Zawahiri,
bin Laden's deputy. Zarqawi was a terrorist who
appeared out of seemingly nowhere, to inflict as
much hardship and pain on the Iraqis and the
Americans as he could.
The crucial
question is just how much Zarqawi was responsible
for holding his side of the insurgency together -
that is, will the edifice fall away, or withstand
the blow?
As the British Broadcasting Corp
reported, "It is likely he [Zarqawi] has had a
considerable impact in terms of leadership,
tactics and inspiration. But he was not a one-man
band."
Indeed, writes Syed Saleem
Shahzad, Zarqawi's killing could be a blessing
for the Iraqi resistance, in which his notoriously
awkward personality was a problem: he resisted
strict orders from the al-Qaeda leadership to
reconcile differences between Sunnis and Shi'ites.
In fact, he did his best to exacerbate sectarian
strife.
And Zarqawi was even a major
problem for the nationalist Iraqi resistance in
the hands of Sunni tribes of the north. Many
times, they clashed with Zarqawi over strategy.
The Iraqi tribes in Samarra and Mosul have
ties with the southern tribes, which are Shi'ite.
Many top Sunni tribal leaders have houses in the
upscale neigborhoods of Basra in the south, and
many top Shi'ite tribal elders have houses in
Baghdad.
These tribal leaders were members
of a chieftains' council during Saddam's time and
they knew one another well. After the US
occupation of Iraq, the Sunni-dominated Iraqi
resistance tried to make a breakthrough with the
southern Shi'ite tribes, but Zarqawi resisted
this.
This bred resentment against Zarqawi
and his followers in Samarra, the nucleus of the
Iraqi resistance, even leading to the sides
killing each other's members.
With
Zarqawi's death, therefore, there is a strong
chance of a major reconciliation between the
Shi'ite groups and the Sunni-dominated Iraqi
resistance: the main irritant in their relations
is dead.
The rise and fall
... Zarqawi (whose real name was Ahmad
al-Khalayleh) was born into poverty in the small
town of Zarka in Jordan (northeast of Amman) on
October 20, 1966. His family lived near a cemetery
and by the time he was 18, both his parents were
dead.
He grew up playing soccer in the
streets of Zarka, and dropped out of Prince Talal
Primary School before obtaining his high-school
diploma, pursuing from here on the life of a
"street boy".
Zarqawi became a delinquent
young man who drank heavily, decorated himself
with tattoos, and was arrested briefly in the
1980s for sexual assault in Jordan. In jail he was
influenced by Islam and, on his release, decided
to travel to Afghanistan to help fight the
Soviets.
It seemed the logical thing to do
for an able young man who could not get a decent
job because he had a criminal record, no education
and no money. The warriors who went to Afghanistan
were well fed and well paid by the resistance
leader, Osama bin Laden.
But to Zarqawi's
surprise, the Soviets left Afghanistan in February
1989, just as he arrived. He did not engage in
combat, but rather, befriended bin Laden. At the
time, bin Laden was an ally of the United States,
fighting a common enemy, the Soviet Union.
Instead of leading guerrilla attacks,
Zarqawi became a newspaper reporter for an Islamic
newsletter published in Afghanistan. Bin Laden
tried to recruit him into al-Qaeda, but Zarqawi
refused, claiming that his only enemies were the
Jews in Israel and the Hashemite Kingdom in
Jordan, whom he described as "perverters of Islam
and a disgrace to the Prophet Mohammed".
Zarqawi eventually returned to Jordan with
the one aim of toppling the Jordanian monarchy of
King Hussein, a longtime ally of the West. He was
arrested for his activities in 1992 and spent
seven years in jail.
During this time,
Hussein signed a peace treaty with Israel in 1993,
adding to Zarqawi's wrath against the Hashemite
family, accusing them of having abandoned the Arab
cause. When he was released in 1999, he vowed to
topple the monarchy (by now under the crown of
current King Abdullah II) and replace it with an
Islamic caliphate.
Contradicting stories
emerged about his years in prison in Jordan. Some
inmates described him as a strong leader who
commanded respect and fear from fellow prisoners,
while others remembered that he was a man with
limited political abilities, completely incapable
of leading a political or military movement.
Out of jail, Zarqawi tried to blow up the
SS Radisson Hotel in Amman, to create havoc in the
Hashemite kingdom and disturb the new reign of
King Abdullah II. When he failed, he fled Jordan
and went to Pakistan, residing near the border
with Afghanistan, where he reportedly met bin
Laden again.
He then moved to Afghanistan
and set up a military training camp, with bin
Laden's support, in Herat, specialized in creating
poisons for warfare. According to Jordanian
intelligence, he also formed a terrorist group
called Jund al-Sham in 1999, with $200,000 from
bin Laden.
It was founded by 150 jihadis
whom he had recruited from bin Laden's al-Qaeda.
Its primary purpose was to destroy Jordan, and
create terror in neighboring countries once part
of Bilad al-Sham (Greater Syria), including Syria
and Palestine.
Apparently, he continued to
travel to Jordan, under false passports, and was
arrested again in 2001 but was soon released.
Authorities did not know who he was. Soon
afterward, he was sentenced to death in absentia
for the attempted attack on the SS Radisson.
After the attacks of September 11, 2001, a
joyful Zarqawi went back to Afghanistan to help
bin Laden and Mullah Omar of the Taliban in their
war against the Americans. He was allegedly
wounded in a US attack and traveled to Iraq to
have his leg treated in a hospital owned by the
Iraqi president's son, Uday Hussein.
By
2002, Zarqawi had set up permanent base in
northern Iraq where he joined the radical Ansar
al-Islam to fight against Kurdish militias
striving to maintain Kurdish autonomy in northern
Iraq. Throughout this time, Zarqawi was a nobody
in world politics, unknown outside of Jordan.
His name became famous when then-US
secretary of state Colin Powell gave his famous
speech at the United Nations on February 5, 2003
(six weeks before the war), accusing Saddam of
having weapons of mass destruction and links to
al-Qaeda.
Zarqawi's presence in Iraq was
one of the reasons Powell cited proving that
Saddam was linked to bin Laden. The speech, which
became famed for its inaccuracy, referred to
Zarqawi as Palestinian and not Jordanian. A
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) report in 2004,
however, confirmed that there was no evidence
proving that Saddam was informed of or involved in
Zarqawi's treatment at an Iraqi hospital.
It said, "There is no conclusive evidence
that the Saddam Hussein regime had harbored
Zarqawi." Opponents of this claim say that it
would have been impossible for Zarqawi to slip
into Iraq, and be treated at a hospital run by
Uday Hussein, without the knowledge and blessing
of the Iraqi president. Naturally, this was
challenged by King Abdullah of Jordan, who said
that Jordan knew of his journey to Iraq and
demanded that the Iraqi government extradite him,
but Saddam refused.
According to MSNBC
television, everybody knew that Zarqawi was in
Iraq in 2002. The Pentagon had pushed to carry out
an operation against him at least three times, but
this had been vetoed by the National Security
Council. The administration of President George W
Bush was interested in building up allies for its
upcoming war on Iraq and did not want a small
invasion for the sake of a until-then petty
official in al-Qaeda, to jeopardize the coalition
Bush was working on creating.
Former CIA
official Michael Scheuer later told reporters that
Bush "had Mr Zarqawi in his sights for almost
every day for a year before the invasion of Iraq
and he didn't shoot!"
When the war began,
Zarqawi found himself in the middle of a battle he
had longed avoided. He knew that he could not
fight the Americans and had wanted to concentrate
his operations against Jordan. Prior to the war,
he had carried out a high-profile terrorist attack
in Amman, killing Laurence Foley, a senior US
diplomat based in Jordan on October 28, 2002.
When interrogated by Jordanian
authorities, the three suspects confessed that
they had received money and arms to carry out
their operation from Zarqawi. One of the leaders
of the operation, it was revealed, had received
$27,000 for planning the murder. Zarqawi was again
brought to court in absentia for the killing of
Foley and sentenced to death - for the second time
in his life.
At 36 years old, Zarqawi was
one of the world's youngest terrorists, with two
death sentences hanging over his head. There was
no turning back for his terrorist operations so he
decided to work full time from within Iraq,
leading the al-Qaeda branch against the US Army
after the downfall of Saddam's regime in April
2003.
On October 24, 2004, he officially
announced that he was working with al-Qaeda, and
on December 27, 2004, bin Laden delivered a speech
that was broadcast on the Doha-based Al-Jazeera
TV, calling Zarqawi "the prince of al-Qaeda in
Iraq". He asked all jihadists "to listen to him
and obey him in his good deeds".
A
trail of terror Among Zarqawi's
"achievements" in Iraq are those listed below.
They have either been attributed to Zarqawi, or
proudly claimed by Zarqawi.
1. Bombing of
the Jordanian Embassy in Baghdad on August 7,
2003, killing 19 people. 2. Bombing the United
Nations headquarters at the Canal Hotel in Baghdad
on August 19, 2003, killing 22 people, including
the UN envoy Sergio Vieira de Mello. 3. A car
bomb in the holy Shi'ite city of Najaf on August
29, 2003, killing 85 people, including Mohammad
Baqir al-Hakim, the leader of SCIRI. 4. Four
car bombs at different police stations in Baghdad
and the headquarters for the International Red
Cross on October 27, 2003, killing 35 people and
wounding 220. 5. A suicide bombing at the
headquarters of Italy's police force in Iraq,
killing more than 30 people on November 12, 2003.
6. An armed attack on the office of the
governor of Karbala (another Shi'ite holy city) on
December 27, 2003, killing 19 people. 7. A car
bomb at the gates of the Green Zone on January 18,
2004, killing 31 people. 8. Two car bombs at
police stations in Iraq on February 10-11, 2004,
killing 100 people. 9. A truck bomb at a
Polish base on February 18, 2004, killing 10
people. 10. A series of bombing on the holy
Shi'ite day of Ashoura, carried out in Baghdad and
Karbala on March 2, 2004, killing 181 people.
11. A car bomb at Baghdad's Mount Lebanon
Hotel on March 17, 2004, killing seven people.
12. A bombing in Basra, killing 74 people on
April 21, 2004. 13. An attack on US marines in
Ramadi on May 2, 2004, killing six Americans.
14. The kidnapping then beheading of American
businessman Nicolas Berg on May 11, 2004. He was
shown live on videotape being beheaded by a masked
man, believed to be Zarqawi himself. He claimed to
be killing the American in retaliation to the Abu
Ghraib prisoner-abuse scandal. 15. A car bomb
assassinating Izz al-Din Salem, the interim
president of the Iraqi Governing Council, on May
18, 2004. 16. A failed assassination of Iraqi
Deputy Interior Minister Abdul-Jabbar Yusuf on May
22, 2004. 17. A car-bomb attack on a convoy in
Baghdad on June 14, 2004, killing 13 people,
including three employees of General Electric.
18. The kidnapping and killing of Korean
hostage Kim Sun-Il on June 22, 2004. 19. The
kidnapping of two Americans (Jack Hensley and
Eugene Armstrong) and a Briton (Kenneth Bigley)
from their homes in Baghdad on September 16, 2004.
20. A car bomb in the Shi'ite town of Karbala,
killing 60 people on December 19, 2004. 21.
Zarqawi asked his followers to boycott the Iraqi
parliamentary elections and unleash hell on those
who participate, because by doing so, he claimed,
they were legitimizing the US occupation of Iraq.
No elections are free or real so long as the
Americans are in Iraq, he added. On the day of the
elections on January 30, 2005, more than 40 people
were killed by Zarqawi's men. 22. A car bomb
killed 125 people in Hillah on February 28, 2005.
23. A series of attacks in April-June 2005
after the formation of the Iraqi parliament led to
the killing of an estimated 800 Iraqis. 24. A
suicide bombing on July 16, 2005, killed 98 people
in Mussayib. 25. A car bomb killed 112 people
in Baghdad on September 14, 2005. 26. Car
bombings at two hotels in Baghdad killed 17 Iraqis
on October 24, 2005. 27. The deadly terrorist
attacks at hotels in Amman on November 9, 2005,
killing 60 people, including Palestinian officials
and Syrian-born Hollywood director Mustapha
al-Akkad, who had produced a film about tolerant
Islam in Hollywood in the 1970s. 28. Another
car bomb attack at the Hamra Hotel in Baghdad
killed six on November 18, 2005. Bombers in two
mosques killed 74 Iraqis. 29. About 180 Iraqis
were killed in suicide attacks on January 4-5,
2006.
Sami Moubayed is a Syrian
political analyst. He is the author of Steel
& Silk: Men and Women Who Shaped Syria
1900-2000 (Cune Press 2005).
(Copyright 2006 Asia Times Online Ltd. All
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the
political landscape in the war-torn country.
