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U.S. Is Tracking Yasin and Zarqawi
EFL/FU:
As United States officials try to determine what role Al Qaeda may have had in recent attacks in Iraq, investigators and Special Forces are also pursuing two men known to have had previous connections to Osama bin Laden. On a half-dozen occasions in recent weeks, one of the men, Abdul Rahman Yasin, slipped through the net. He has been indicted in connection with the World Trade Center bombing in 1993 and is on the F.B.I.’s most wanted terrorist list. He has been living in Iraq for about 10 years. The Americans have also been trying to track Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a more senior Qaeda operative; according to American officials, he has been moving in and out of Iraq since the war ended this spring.
Fox News reported on this yesterday, but I couldn't find their source — duh. I get the Times headlines e-mailed to me every day, and didn't bother looking. Yasin got his villa and a pension from Sammy for his outstanding contribution toward global instability. Zarqawi, of course, is Qaeda's Middle East and Europe operations chief at the moment.
On Friday, L. Paul Bremer III, head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, said at least 19 Qaeda members were in custody, but he offered few details about where and when they had been captured. It was the first public mention by an American official of the detention of Qaeda members in Iraq. Since before the war, United States officials have singled out Mr. Zarqawi to illustrate Al Qaeda’s presence in Iraq. Officials say they believe that Mr. Zarqawi, a Jordanian, has worked with Ansar al-Islam, which the Americans describe as a terrorist group that had a base in the Kurdish region of Iraq.
I think pretty much everyone describes them that way.
German authorities have linked Mr. Zarqawi, who was in Iranian custody for a time, to a militant Palestinian group, and said he ran training camps in Afghanistan alongside Mr. bin Laden.
The "militant Paleostinian group" they're talking about is al-Tawhid. The Times describes it as though it was a junior version of Hamas or IJ. Nor is it only Paleostinian. Its original reason for existence was to overthrow the Jordanian state.
An American law enforcement official said Al Qaeda was seeking to form "new alliances, new associations" with Baathists and other groups putting up resistance to the Americans in Iraq. It is not a natural alliance, however, because the Iraqis are far more secular than the fundamentalists. But lately, an American official here said, some of the Iraqi resistance groups have been wrapping themselves in more religious rhetoric.
Sammy began this process himself, years ago. Building mosques and having a copy of the koran written with his own blood.
It's a tactic directed at getting the rubes on board...
Estimates of the number of Qaeda fighters here range widely, from a few hundred to 2,000. But those numbers are based largely on extrapolating from the number already caught, an American diplomat in the region said.
Plus they don’t carry membership cards.
And since they all have at least a dozen aliases, it's hard to avoid counting the same guy more than once. When this is all over, 30 years from now, we'll discover that the entire Qaeda terror machine consisted of a half dozen patron families and their clients...
Mr. Yasin’s roots in terrorism run deep, but he may have abandoned them.
Not likely.
He was born in 1960 in Bloomington, Ind., where his father was a graduate student, and grew up in Baghdad. He returned to the United States in the early 1990’s, to live with his mother and a brother who were living in Jersey City. It was then that he met Ramzi Yousef, an early operative for Mr. bin Laden long before he had become a notorious public figure. Mr. Yousef recruited Mr. Yasin for the plot to blow up the World Trade Center. Mr. Yasin helped mix the chemicals, at one point severely burning his leg.
The scar should help i.d. his body.
The F.B.I. detained Mr. Yasin after the attack and then released him, but only after he provided information about Mr. Yousef, the mastermind. Mr. Yousef fled to Pakistan, then Manila, where he was plotting to blow up 12 airliners over the Pacific, a precursor to the Sept. 11 attacks. He was later captured. Mr. Yasin returned to Iraq. Ostensibly, Mr. Hussein put Mr. Yasin under house arrest, but American officials said this week that they now have evidence he was being liberally supplied with money, women and alcohol.
So much for the "Saddam didn’t support al-Q meme.
In an interview with the CBS News program "60 Minutes" in June 2002, Mr. Yasin expressed regret for what he had done. "I’m very sorry for what happened," he said. "I don’t know what to do to make it up."
Well, have you thought about sticking a gun in your mouth and pulling the trigger?
There is a $25 million bounty for information leading to his arrest. But officials say it may not be money that brings him in. "It will be some transgression," said an American official involved in the search for Mr. Yasin, Mr. Hussein and others. That was the case with the $30 million reward that was offered for information about Uday and Qusay Hussein, two of Mr. Hussein’s sons, Western officials said. According to that account, the brothers’ landlord gave them away after they started molesting his wife and daughter. Special Operations soldiers killed the brothers at the home.
Hadn’t heard that, but it sounds typical of them.
Posted by: Steve 2003-09-29
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=19220