The Terrorist
THE TERRORIST
by Lawrence Wright
Issue of 2006-06-19
Posted 2006-06-12
Among those quietly celebrating the death of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi last week, no doubt, were Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, the leaders of Al Qaeda, who have watched their nominal ally wreck the standing of their organization among Muslims around the world. After Zarqawi began his bloody operations in Iraq, in 2003, support for suicide bombings—the signature of Al Qaeda since the destruction of the American embassies in East Africa, in 1998—plummeted in Islamic countries. Muslims surveyed in the 2005 Pew Global Attitudes Project reported in substantial numbers that Islamic extremism was a threat to their own countries. Jordan, Zarqawi’s homeland, seemed to be the exception. Then Zarqawi sent suicide bombers to three hotels in downtown Amman, killing sixty people, including prominent Jordanians and Palestinians, many of whom were celebrating a wedding. The next day, tens of thousands of Jordanians poured into the streets to denounce Al Qaeda.
Zarqawi was the herald of a new generation of terrorists whose roots were in street crime, not in Islamic militancy. A former thief and sex offender, he memorized the Koran while he was in prison, and began issuing fatwas and calling himself “sheikh.” “There’s certainly been a downgrading of ideological purity,” Niall Brennan, a special agent on the joint terrorism task force in the New York office of the F.B.I., told me on the morning that Zarqawi’s death was announced. “The next generation is in many respects less disciplined and doesn’t have the same respect for command and control.” Bin Laden, despite his own appetite for slaughter, disdained Zarqawi’s rough manners, prison tattoos, and unruly independence. But after the American invasion of Afghanistan Al Qaeda’s founders were immobilized, reduced to making occasional videotapes designed to rouse aspiring jihadis and berate Western leaders. Deprived of the managerial oversight of bin Laden, an international businessman, Al Qaeda began to shape itself around Zarqawi’s organizational experience, which is to say that it turned into a gang. This was a model easily replicated by would-be jihadis—as in Madrid, London, Toronto—wherever alienated young Muslims yearned for destruction.
Ayman al-Zawahiri, an Egyptian and the No. 2 man in Al Qaeda, was always closer to Zarqawi than bin Laden was. In 2000, Al Qaeda’s Egyptian security chief, Saif al-Adl, helped Zarqawi establish a camp in Afghanistan, near the Iranian border. Young fighters from Jordan, Palestine, Syria, and Lebanon—the area historically called the Sham—gravitated to the camp and formed the Army of the Sham. Although Zarqawi was not yet a member of Al Qaeda, he remained under the protection of the Egyptians. According to Iraq’s former interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, who claims that he discovered the information in the archives of the Iraqi secret service, Zarqawi travelled to Iraq in 1999, around the same time as Zawahiri. Saddam Hussein was courting Al Qaeda at the time. Inspired, perhaps, by Iran’s relationship with Hezbollah, he may have believed that he could use terrorists to conduct his foreign policy without undermining his rule. Contrary to Secretary of State Colin Powell’s assertion before the U.N. Security Council, in February, 2003, that Zarqawi provided the link to Al Qaeda in Iraq, bin Laden and Zawahiri spurned Saddam’s overtures.
After Saddam was overthrown, Zarqawi installed himself as the leader of the Sunni insurgency in Iraq. His ability to act was an affront to the founders in hiding, who were no longer able to control their own organization. Although Al Qaeda was an exclusively Sunni association, neither bin Laden nor Zawahiri had ever authorized an attack on Shiites. One of Zarqawi’s first actions, in August, 2003, was to send his father-in-law on a suicide mission to the Imam Ali Mosque, killing nearly a hundred Muslims at prayer. Among them was Ayatollah Muhammad Bakr al-Hakim, who was expected to be a unifying force in Iraq. Zarqawi explained that his goal was to awaken the Sunnis by dragging the Shia “into the arena of sectarian war.” Ten days earlier, Zarqawi had destroyed the U.N. headquarters in Baghdad, effectively driving the international-aid community out of the country. These attacks were characteristic of Zarqawi’s method, which was to target the people who could turn Iraq into a functioning society—teachers, doctors, courageous political thinkers, anyone with the skill and education to pull the country away from chaos.
Zarqawi also pioneered a new mode of communication. In contrast to bin Laden’s sonorous taped declarations on Al Jazeera, in 2004 Zarqawi beheaded a twenty-six-year-old American, Nicholas Berg, and posted the video live on the Internet. In a way, this was as shocking an image as the planes crashing into the World Trade Center. Al Qaeda’s founders preferred bombs to butcher knives, but the number of Zarqawi’s victims mounted. “It’s estimated that Zarqawi killed six thousand people in Iraq,” Salameh Nematt, the Washington bureau chief for the pan-Arab daily Al-Hayat, told me. “That’s twice as many as bin Laden killed on 9/11.” Indeed, it is more than bin Laden and Zawahiri have killed in all their operations combined.
Unlike Zarqawi, bin Laden and Zawahiri continued to focus their enmity on the West and on the autocratic rulers of their own countries. “They felt the need to fight on the fringes, in Chechnya, Bosnia, Pakistan, Sudan,” Nematt said shortly before Zarqawi was killed. “Once they won on the margins, they would march to the center. Zarqawi turned the tables on them. In bin Laden’s view, Zarqawi is leading the Sunnis in Iraq to hell, and he doesn’t know what to do. Bin Laden and Zawahiri feel that, if Zarqawi forces the Americans to abandon Iraq, the Shia will go into the Sunni triangle and start ethnic cleansing.”
Zarqawi’s obsession with the Shia led Zawahiri to write a letter to him last July. “Why were there attacks on ordinary Shia?” Zawahiri demanded. “Can the mujahideen kill all the Shia in Iraq? Has any Islamic state in history ever tried that?” He also said that the grotesque scenes of execution should stop. “We can kill the captives by bullet,” he counselled. But in the same note he meekly asked for a hundred thousand dollars for Al Qaeda. Money—especially from Saudi Arabia—that used to go to bin Laden was now going into Zarqawi’s treasury.
In recent months, the founders had begun to distance themselves from Zarqawi. Bin Laden’s latest communiqué, in April, urged Muslims to wage jihad in Darfur, Sudan, rather than in Iraq, saying that Western involvement in the Sudanese peace process was part of the “crusades against Islam.” Soon afterward, Zawahiri congratulated Zarqawi for overseeing more than eight hundred suicide operations, claiming, “This is what has broken the back of America in Iraq.” Last week, he offered similar encouragement; still, he directed his attention to Muslims elsewhere. A few days before Zarqawi was killed, Nematt told me, “He is on the edge of declaring total rebellion against bin Laden and Zawahiri. Zarqawi’s recruits are growing exponentially. This kid is eclipsing them.”
With Zarqawi’s death, at age thirty-nine, bin Laden and Zawahiri may try to return Al Qaeda to its more disciplined and popular incarnation, but it is Zarqawi’s example that will inspire many in the new generation of jihadis. “It’s going to be like Afghanistan all over again,” Ali Soufan, a former F.B.I. agent who has interrogated dozens of Al Qaeda members, said. “The difference is that these guys are far more radical.”
by Lawrence Wright
Issue of 2006-06-19
Posted 2006-06-12
Among those quietly celebrating the death of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi last week, no doubt, were Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, the leaders of Al Qaeda, who have watched their nominal ally wreck the standing of their organization among Muslims around the world. After Zarqawi began his bloody operations in Iraq, in 2003, support for suicide bombings—the signature of Al Qaeda since the destruction of the American embassies in East Africa, in 1998—plummeted in Islamic countries. Muslims surveyed in the 2005 Pew Global Attitudes Project reported in substantial numbers that Islamic extremism was a threat to their own countries. Jordan, Zarqawi’s homeland, seemed to be the exception. Then Zarqawi sent suicide bombers to three hotels in downtown Amman, killing sixty people, including prominent Jordanians and Palestinians, many of whom were celebrating a wedding. The next day, tens of thousands of Jordanians poured into the streets to denounce Al Qaeda.
Zarqawi was the herald of a new generation of terrorists whose roots were in street crime, not in Islamic militancy. A former thief and sex offender, he memorized the Koran while he was in prison, and began issuing fatwas and calling himself “sheikh.” “There’s certainly been a downgrading of ideological purity,” Niall Brennan, a special agent on the joint terrorism task force in the New York office of the F.B.I., told me on the morning that Zarqawi’s death was announced. “The next generation is in many respects less disciplined and doesn’t have the same respect for command and control.” Bin Laden, despite his own appetite for slaughter, disdained Zarqawi’s rough manners, prison tattoos, and unruly independence. But after the American invasion of Afghanistan Al Qaeda’s founders were immobilized, reduced to making occasional videotapes designed to rouse aspiring jihadis and berate Western leaders. Deprived of the managerial oversight of bin Laden, an international businessman, Al Qaeda began to shape itself around Zarqawi’s organizational experience, which is to say that it turned into a gang. This was a model easily replicated by would-be jihadis—as in Madrid, London, Toronto—wherever alienated young Muslims yearned for destruction.
Ayman al-Zawahiri, an Egyptian and the No. 2 man in Al Qaeda, was always closer to Zarqawi than bin Laden was. In 2000, Al Qaeda’s Egyptian security chief, Saif al-Adl, helped Zarqawi establish a camp in Afghanistan, near the Iranian border. Young fighters from Jordan, Palestine, Syria, and Lebanon—the area historically called the Sham—gravitated to the camp and formed the Army of the Sham. Although Zarqawi was not yet a member of Al Qaeda, he remained under the protection of the Egyptians. According to Iraq’s former interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, who claims that he discovered the information in the archives of the Iraqi secret service, Zarqawi travelled to Iraq in 1999, around the same time as Zawahiri. Saddam Hussein was courting Al Qaeda at the time. Inspired, perhaps, by Iran’s relationship with Hezbollah, he may have believed that he could use terrorists to conduct his foreign policy without undermining his rule. Contrary to Secretary of State Colin Powell’s assertion before the U.N. Security Council, in February, 2003, that Zarqawi provided the link to Al Qaeda in Iraq, bin Laden and Zawahiri spurned Saddam’s overtures.
After Saddam was overthrown, Zarqawi installed himself as the leader of the Sunni insurgency in Iraq. His ability to act was an affront to the founders in hiding, who were no longer able to control their own organization. Although Al Qaeda was an exclusively Sunni association, neither bin Laden nor Zawahiri had ever authorized an attack on Shiites. One of Zarqawi’s first actions, in August, 2003, was to send his father-in-law on a suicide mission to the Imam Ali Mosque, killing nearly a hundred Muslims at prayer. Among them was Ayatollah Muhammad Bakr al-Hakim, who was expected to be a unifying force in Iraq. Zarqawi explained that his goal was to awaken the Sunnis by dragging the Shia “into the arena of sectarian war.” Ten days earlier, Zarqawi had destroyed the U.N. headquarters in Baghdad, effectively driving the international-aid community out of the country. These attacks were characteristic of Zarqawi’s method, which was to target the people who could turn Iraq into a functioning society—teachers, doctors, courageous political thinkers, anyone with the skill and education to pull the country away from chaos.
Zarqawi also pioneered a new mode of communication. In contrast to bin Laden’s sonorous taped declarations on Al Jazeera, in 2004 Zarqawi beheaded a twenty-six-year-old American, Nicholas Berg, and posted the video live on the Internet. In a way, this was as shocking an image as the planes crashing into the World Trade Center. Al Qaeda’s founders preferred bombs to butcher knives, but the number of Zarqawi’s victims mounted. “It’s estimated that Zarqawi killed six thousand people in Iraq,” Salameh Nematt, the Washington bureau chief for the pan-Arab daily Al-Hayat, told me. “That’s twice as many as bin Laden killed on 9/11.” Indeed, it is more than bin Laden and Zawahiri have killed in all their operations combined.
Unlike Zarqawi, bin Laden and Zawahiri continued to focus their enmity on the West and on the autocratic rulers of their own countries. “They felt the need to fight on the fringes, in Chechnya, Bosnia, Pakistan, Sudan,” Nematt said shortly before Zarqawi was killed. “Once they won on the margins, they would march to the center. Zarqawi turned the tables on them. In bin Laden’s view, Zarqawi is leading the Sunnis in Iraq to hell, and he doesn’t know what to do. Bin Laden and Zawahiri feel that, if Zarqawi forces the Americans to abandon Iraq, the Shia will go into the Sunni triangle and start ethnic cleansing.”
Zarqawi’s obsession with the Shia led Zawahiri to write a letter to him last July. “Why were there attacks on ordinary Shia?” Zawahiri demanded. “Can the mujahideen kill all the Shia in Iraq? Has any Islamic state in history ever tried that?” He also said that the grotesque scenes of execution should stop. “We can kill the captives by bullet,” he counselled. But in the same note he meekly asked for a hundred thousand dollars for Al Qaeda. Money—especially from Saudi Arabia—that used to go to bin Laden was now going into Zarqawi’s treasury.
In recent months, the founders had begun to distance themselves from Zarqawi. Bin Laden’s latest communiqué, in April, urged Muslims to wage jihad in Darfur, Sudan, rather than in Iraq, saying that Western involvement in the Sudanese peace process was part of the “crusades against Islam.” Soon afterward, Zawahiri congratulated Zarqawi for overseeing more than eight hundred suicide operations, claiming, “This is what has broken the back of America in Iraq.” Last week, he offered similar encouragement; still, he directed his attention to Muslims elsewhere. A few days before Zarqawi was killed, Nematt told me, “He is on the edge of declaring total rebellion against bin Laden and Zawahiri. Zarqawi’s recruits are growing exponentially. This kid is eclipsing them.”
With Zarqawi’s death, at age thirty-nine, bin Laden and Zawahiri may try to return Al Qaeda to its more disciplined and popular incarnation, but it is Zarqawi’s example that will inspire many in the new generation of jihadis. “It’s going to be like Afghanistan all over again,” Ali Soufan, a former F.B.I. agent who has interrogated dozens of Al Qaeda members, said. “The difference is that these guys are far more radical.”
posted by Accidental Antagonist @ 9:52 AM
0 comments
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home