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COMMENTARY
February 11, 2004
Zarqawi's trolls
The New York Times's Dexter Filkins -- a journalist I would normally not mention favourably -- has put us all in his debt by publicizing a document that has fallen into U.S. military custody in Iraq. It is a 17-page plea apparently from Abu Musab al-Zarqawi to his Al Qaeda colleagues elsewhere. The document is the terrorist equivalent of a grant application. Since the liberal media will not tell you more about Zarqawi than that he has "alleged ties to Al Qaeda" I will tell you about him (on the basis of intelligence sources that are mostly German). He is a Palestinian with a Jordanian passport who ran a terror training camp in Afghanistan near Herat that investigated chemical and biological weapons. His own personal branch of the jihadist international Jund al-Shams enjoys the material support of Iran's ayatollahs and specialized briefly in providing Al Qaeda members escaping from Afghanistan with new identities and documentation. His foot soldiers are now trained by Iran's Revolutionary Guards in camps in Persian Baluchistan then forwarded through Lebanon's Bekaa Valley and Syria into Iraq with logistical help from Hezbollah. Some may now be entering Iraq through Saudi Arabia. Zarqawi also has a history of contacts with the former Ba'athist regime in Iraq and was at one time the centre of a triangle whose points were Hezbollah's Imad Mughniyah Al Qaeda's Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein's pet Palestinian terrorist the late Abu Nidal. His lieutenants run the Ansar al-Islam operations in Iraq. He also recruits young jihadis from Germany France and Britain through al-Tawhid and several other European-based terror networks. More than 100 of his operatives have been arrested over the last couple of years many of them in Turkey and across Europe but also as far afield as Latin America. Oh and he is on one leg having lost the other in an incident in Afghanistan. Saddam's doctors fitted him with a prosthetic replacement in Baghdad during the summer of 2002. Interesting guy almost certainly now in Iraq himself and probably at the top of the current American most-wanted list. His "grant application" -- the contents of which I only know through Mr. Filkins's transcriptions -- make sense to me because they confirm what I have previously tried to explain to my readers. The purpose of the insurgent attacks in Iraq are not to drive the U.S. and British troops out immediately -- the terrorists themselves don't think that can be done and Zarqawi gives an assessment of the situation there from the terrorists' point of view which is every bit as bleak as the one we heard in the last smuggled tape of Osama. The more immediate objective is to create total chaos in Iraq. Zarqawi is appealing for funds weapons and men to help mount attacks that will focus less on U.S. army and marine targets (which have anyway proved hard to hit) and much more on police stations and at symbolic Shia Islamic targets to the south of Baghdad. (Note the car bomb that exploded yesterday at a police station near Hilla; after some rumour-mongering to persuade the mob that the U.S. was plotting with the Sunnis against the local Shia.) Why? The ambition is to bait the Shia through gratuitous massacres by Sunni operatives into retaliating generally against Sunni civilians. Not only would that make Iraq ungovernable by the Americans or anyone it would provide a magnet for Saudi Arabian-based jihadis to then join in the fray on behalf of Iraq's Sunnis. Zarqawi -- if indeed he is the author of the document or someone very much like him if he is not -- is chiefly troubled by the possibility the U.S. will succeed in handing over power to a functioning Iraqi government dominated by the majority Shia before his agents can get a proper civil war started. Hence the tone of pessimism and urgency verging on despair. Among his more amusing laments is that Iraq south of Kurdistan lacks serious mountains which makes it hard for his own jihadis to hide. The blanket media coverage of successful terror strikes in Iraq thus helps to conceal the real pattern of activity there while advancing the terrorists' political interests. The truth is that Iraqis of both Sunni and Shia persuasion have not proved easy to radicalize or bait and that imported jihadis feel increasingly claustrophobic in post-Saddam society. Their best hope continues to be goading either the Shia leadership which looks for direction to Grand Ayatollah Sistani or the U.S. authorities into over-reacting to the Iraqi domestic security problems and thus playing into jihadist hands. My impression is that both the Americans and the Shia leadership are coming to a more mature appreciation of the threat against them and thus their common interest in fighting a remarkably well-integrated international Islamist terror infrastructure. It worries me however that in an election year the U.S. public has been so badly misinformed by the media about what is at stake in Iraq and how the battle is going. For while the terrorists know they are being beaten on the ground they still hope that sooner or later they can bomb people into forgetting what their interests are. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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