Jump to content

Abu Musab al-Zarqawi

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Mysticfeline (talk | contribs) at 21:54, 15 December 2005 (captured and released section). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

File:Zarqawi.jpg
Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in an undated AP photograph.

Abu Musab al-Zarqawi (Template:Lang-ar) (born October 20, 1966) is a Jordanian-born terrorist, Iraqi insurgent, and guerrilla leader. Zarqawi has allegedly confessed, on multiple audiotapes, to having committed numerous acts of violence in Iraq, including killing civilians and taking hostages. He is additionally suspected of many more acts of violence, including the beheading of hostages in Iraq. Due to his current role in the Iraqi insurgency and his prior activities in Jordan, both American and Jordanian authorities are pursuing his capture. As an Islamist militant, Zarqawi is violently opposed to the presence of U.S., Israeli and Western military forces in the Islamic world. In September 2005, he reportedly declared "all-out war" on Shia Muslims in Iraq [1], and has already sent numerous Al Qaeda in Iraq suicide bombers to target areas with large concentrations of Shia civilians.

Zarqawi is believed to be a long time ally of Osama bin Laden, and is now a high-ranking member of bin Laden's terrorist network Al Qaeda, and since October 2004 has referred to his own organization (Jama'at al-Tawhid wal-Jihad, or Unification and Holy War Group, an insurgent network operating in Iraq) as "Al-Qaida in Iraq." On October 21, 2004, Zarqawi officially announced his allegiance to Al Qaida; on December 27, 2004, Al-Jazeera broadcast an audiotape of bin Laden calling Zarqawi "the prince of al Qaeda in Iraq" and asked "all our organization brethren to listen to him and obey him in his good deeds."[2] Zarqawi is the most wanted man in Jordan and Iraq, [3] having participated in or masterminded a number of violent actions against United States and Iraqi targets. The U.S. government is offering a USD$25 million reward for information leading to his capture, the same amount offered for the capture of bin Laden before March 2004. On 15 October 2004, the U.S. State Department added Zarqawi and the Jama'at al-Tawhid wal Jihad group to its list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations and ordered a freeze on any assets that the group might have in the United States.

One alias, Ahmad Fadeel al-Nazal al-Khalayleh (Template:Lang-ar), is believed to be his real name. The surname Zarqawi literally translates as "man from Zarqa". Zarqawi is a native of the Jordanian town of Zarqa, located 30 minutes northeast of the capital Amman. [4] [5]

Background

The son of a native Jordanian family (al-Khalayleh of the Bani-Hassan tribe), Zarqawi grew up in the Jordanian town of Zarqa amidst poverty and squalor. At the age of 17, he dropped out of school. According to vague Jordanian intelligence reports, Zarqawi was jailed briefly in the 1980s. Subsequently, he was active as a militant in Afghanistan, Jordan, Iraq and elsewhere.

File:ABC Zaqawi.jpg
A photo of al-Zarqawi from CNN

In 1989, Zarqawi traveled to Afghanistan to join the insurgency against the Soviet invasion, but the Soviets were already leaving by the time he arrived. It is thought that he met and befriended Osama bin Laden while there. Instead, he became a reporter for an Islamist newsletter. There are reports that in the mid-1990s, Zarqawi travelled to Europe and started the al-Tawhid militant organization, a group dedicated to killing Jews and installing an Islamic regime in Jordan.

Zarqawi was arrested in Jordan in 1992, and spent seven years in a Jordanian prison for conspiring to overthrow the monarchy and establish an Islamic caliphate. In prison, Zarqawi reportedly became a feared leader among inmates. Yet, upon his release in 1999, Zarqawi was reportedly involved in an attempt to blow up the Radisson SAS Hotel in Amman, Jordan, whose customers are frequently Israeli and American tourists. He fled Jordan and travelled to Peshawar, Pakistan, near the Afghanistan border. In Afghanistan, Zarqawi established a militant training camp near Herat which competed with al-Qaida for recruits. According to the Bush administration, the training camp specialized in poisons and explosives.

Sometime in 2001, Zarqawi was arrested again in Jordan, but was soon released. Later, he was convicted in absentia and sentenced to death for plotting the attack on the Radisson SAS Hotel.[6]

After the September 11 attacks, Zarqawi again travelled to Afghanistan and was reportedly wounded in a U.S. bombardment. He moved to Iran to organize al-Tawhid, his former militant organization. Zarqawi is also said to have traveled to Iraq to have his wounded leg treated at a hospital run by Uday Hussein. In the summer of 2002, Zarqawi was reported to have settled in northern Iraq, where he joined the Islamist Ansar al-Islam group that fought against Kurdish-nationalist forces in the region. [7] He reportedly became a leader in the group, although his leadership role has not been established.

In Colin Powell's famed February 2003 speech to the United Nations urging war against Iraq, Zarqawi was cited as an example of Saddam Hussein's support for terrorism. At the time, Zarqawi's group was a rival of bin Laden's. A CIA report in late 2004 concluded that it had no evidence Saddam's government was involved or aware of this medical treatment, and that "There’s no conclusive evidence the Saddam Hussein regime had harbored Zarqawi."[8][9] One U.S. official summarized the report: "The evidence is that Saddam never gave Zarqawi anything."[10] In his speech, Powell mistakenly referred to Zarqawi as a Palestinian, but Powell and the Bush administration continued to stand by statements that Zarqawi linked Saddam Hussein to al-Qaeda. According to MSNBC, the Pentagon had pushed to "take out" Zarqawi's operation at least three times prior to the invasion of Iraq, but had been vetoed by the White House because Zarqawi's removal would undercut the case that war on Iraq was part of the War on Terrorism.

Terrorist activities

Assassination of Laurence Foley

Laurence Foley was a senior U.S. diplomat working for the U.S. Agency for International Development in Jordan. On October 28, 2002, he was assassinated outside his home in Amman. Under interrogation by Jordanian authorities, three suspects confessed that they had been armed and paid by Zarqawi to perform the assassination. U.S. officials believe that the planning and execution of the Foley assassination was led by members of Afghan Jihad, the International Mujaheddin Movement, and al-Qaida. One of the leaders, Salim Sa'd Salim Bin-Suwayd, was paid over USD$27,858 for his work in planning assassinations in Jordan against U.S., Israeli, and Jordanian government officials. Suwayd was arrested in Jordan for the murder of Foley. [11] Zarqawi was again sentenced in absentia in Jordan; this time, as before, his sentence was death.

Murder of Nicholas Berg

In May 2004, a videotape was released showing a group of five men beheading American Nicholas Berg, who had been abducted and taken hostage in Iraq weeks earlier. The speaker on the tape, wielding the knife that killed Berg, is rumoured to be al-Zarqawi. He stated that the murder was in retaliation for US abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison (see Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal); CIA analysis of the voice concluded that it was indeed Zarqawi's [12]. The CIA analysis failed to quell doubts about the validity of the claim because, among other reasons, the man wears a mask in the video and did not resemble Zarqawi in other superficial ways. (see: Nick Berg conspiracy theories and this article in The Sydney Morning Herald.) Various middle east correspondents/experts including CNN's Octavia Nasr have stated that the person talking on the Berg tape might not be al-Zarqawi because he didn't appear to speak with a Jordanian accent.

Other incidents

  • U.S. officials believe that Zarqawi trained others in the use of poison (ricin?[13]) for possible attacks in Europe, ran a terrorist haven in northern Iraq, and organized the bombing of a Baghdad hotel.
  • According to suspects arrested in Turkey, Zarqawi sent them to Istanbul to organize an attack on a NATO summit there on June 28 or June 29.
  • U.S. officials blame Zarqawi for over 700 killings in Iraq during the occupation, mostly from bombings.
  • According to the U.S. State Department, Zarqawi is responsible for the Canal Hotel bombing of the U.N. headquarters in Iraq on August 19, 2003. This attack killed twenty two people, including the UN Secretary-general's special Iraqi envoy Sergio Vieira de Mello. [14]
  • Zarqawi is believed by the former Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq to have written an intercepted letter to the al-Qaida leadership in February 2004 on the progress of the "Iraqi jihad." Many observers do not believe that Zarqawi wrote the letter. (See Zarqawi Letter.)
  • On July 11, 2004, a group reportedly led by Zarqawi, claimed responsibility for a July 8 mortar attack in Samarra, Iraq. Five American soldiers and one Iraqi soldier were killed.
  • Jordan accuses Zarqawi of plotting to release a chemical cloud in Amman. Men were arrested in Amman who purportedly were planning to release the chemical attack. He was convicted in absentia on March 20, 2005, and sentenced to fifteen years in prison in addition to his two death sentences for earlier crimes in Jordan.
  • Zarqawi is believed to have masterminded the 2005 bombings in Amman that killed about seventy people in three hotels. [15]

Credibility questions

Some people have purported that Zarqawi's notoriety is the product of U.S. war propaganda designed to promote the image of a demonic enemy figure to help justify continued U.S. military operations in Iraq [16], perhaps with the tacit support of terrorist elements who wish to use him as a propaganda tool or as a distraction. [17] In one report, the conservative newspaper Daily Telegraph described the claim that Zarqawi was the head of the "terrorist network" in Iraq as a "myth". This report cited an unnamed U.S. military intelligence source to the effect that the Zarqawi leadership myth was initially caused by faulty intelligence, but was later accepted because it suited U.S. government political goals. [18]

One Sunni insurgent leader claimed on 11 December that "Zarqawi is an American, Israeli and Iranian agent who is trying to keep our country unstable so that the Sunnis will keep facing occupation."[19]

Reported missing leg/death

Missing leg

Claims of harm to Zarqawi have changed over time. Early in 2002, there were unverified reports from Afghan Northern Alliance members that Zarqawi had been killed by a missile attack in Afghanistan. Many news sources repeated the claim. Later, Kurdish groups claimed that Zarqawi had not died in the missile strike, but had been severely injured, and went to Baghdad in 2002 to have his leg amputated. On October 7, 2002, the day before Congress voted to give President Bush permission to go to war against Iraq, Bush gave a speech in Cincinnati, Ohio that repeated this claim as fact. This was several of President Bush's primary examples of ways Saddam Hussein had aided, funded, and harbored al-Qaida. Powell repeated this claim in his famous February 2003 speech to the UN, urging a resolution for war, and it soon became "common knowledge" that Zarqawi had a prosthetic leg.

In 2004, Newsweek reported that some "senior U.S. military officials in Baghdad" had come to believe that he still had his original legs.[20]. Knight Ridder later reported that the leg amputation was something "officials now acknowledge was incorrect," though it's possible this was merely a restatement of the Newsweek report.[21]

When the video of the Berg beheading was released in 2004, credence was given to the claim that Zarqawi was alive and active. The man identified as Zarqawi in the video did not appear to have a prosthetic leg.

Claims of death

U.S. PSYOP leaflet disseminated in Iraq. Text: "This is your future al-Zarqawi" and shows al-Qaeda in Iraq leader al-Zarqawi caught in a rat trap.

In March 2004, an insurgent group in Iraq issued a statement saying that Zarqawi had been killed in 2002. The statement said that he was unable to escape the missile attack because of his prosthetic leg. His followers claimed he was killed in a US bombing raid in the north of Iraq [22]. The claim that Zarqawi had been killed in northern Iraq "at the beginning of the war," and that subsequent use of his name was a useful myth, was repeated in September 2005 by Sheikh Jawad Al-Khalessi, a Shiite imam. [23]

On May 24 2005, it was reported on an Islamic website that a deputy would take command of Al-Qaeda while Zarqawi recovered from injuries sustained in an attack. Later that week the Iraqi government confirmed that Zarqawi had been wounded by U.S. forces, although the battalion did not realize it at the time. The extent of his injuries is not known, although some radical Islamic websites called for prayers for his health. There are reports that a local hospital treated a man, suspected to be Zarqawi, with severe injuries. He was also said to have subsequently left Iraq for a neighbouring country, accompanied by two physicians. However, later that week the radical Islamic website retracted its report about his injuries and claimed that he was in fine health and was running the jihad operation.

In an September 16 2005 article published by Le Monde, Sheikh Jawad Al-Kalesi claimed that al-Zarqawi was killed in the Kurdish northern region of Iraq at the beginning of the US-led war on the country as he was meeting with members of the Ansar al-Islam group affiliated to al-Qaida. Al-Kalesi also claimed "His family in Jordan even held a ceremony after his death." He also claimed that "Zarqawi has been used as a ploy by the United States, as an excuse to continue the occupation. saying that it was a pretext so they don't leave Iraq."

On November 20 2005, some news sources reported that Zarqawi may have been killed in a coalition assault on a house in Mosul; five of those in the house were killed in the assault while the other three died through using 'suicide belts' of explosives. United States and British soldiers are reported to be searching the remains [24], with U.S. forces using DNA samples to identify the dead. [25] However, none of those remains have reportedly belonged to him.

Reportedly captured and released

According to a CNN report dated December 15 2005, [26], al-Zarqawi was captured by Iraqi forces sometime during 2004 and later released because his captors did not realize who he was. U.S. officials called the report "plausible" but refused to confirm it.

Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/enwiki/w/index.php?title=Abu_Musab_al-Zarqawi&oldid=31524560"