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Hassan Ghul was Zarqawiâs delivery man
The Kurds had laid out bait for their prey. In early January, Kurdish security officials spread word in the villages along Iraqâs border with Iran that one stretch of the mountainous frontier was lightly guarded and thus safe for travelers who had reason to slip unnoticed in or out of the country. Then the Kurds waited. "It was like dropping seeds for a chicken, saying âCome, come,â and then catching it," a Kurdish official involved in the sting told TIME. It was a crisp morning in mid-January when the chicken fell into the trap.The tall man in an open-neck shirt, jacket and trousers looked like any of the traveling merchants who frequent the area. When he was stopped at a Kurdish checkpoint near Kalar, officials made an intriguing discovery in his travel bag: two CDs and a computer flash disc the size of a cigarette lighter. With a hunch who their catch wasâthe CIA had given them a heads-up that he might be in the areaâthe Kurdish officials snapped a digital mug shot of the traveler and e-mailed it to their American intelligence contacts. The confirmation came back quickly: the Kurds had nabbed Hassan Ghul, one of the key al-Qaeda operatives still on the run. "When Washington heard we had him," said a Kurdish official in Baghdad, "they were doing cartwheels." The satchel was at least as important as the suspect. On one of Ghulâs discs was a 17-page progress report and future plan of action in Iraq written to "You, noble brothers, leaders of Jihad." The letterâs author claims to have overseen 25 suicide attacks against various targets in Iraq, which would constitute almost all such assaults since the U.S. rolled into Iraq. The report and other files captured with Ghul suggest a long-term strategy by an international terrorism organization to turn occupied Iraq into the front line of the global jihad. Apart from the documents in Ghulâs satchel, U.S. military officials say they have other evidence that the resistance in Iraq is increasingly being fought and led by jihadists rather than Baathists. Since the capture of Saddam Hussein in December, officials say, supporters of the former regime have largely given up the fight. Their role as financiers and organizers of the diverse insurgency has been taken up by religiously motivated groups that are recruiting young foot soldiers to come to Iraq. Itâs unclear, says a U.S. intelligence official in Washington, "how many are, quote-unquote, al-Qaeda." But itâs plain, says a U.S. intelligence official in Iraq, "this is the battleground. It is easy to get here and easy to get weapons." Al-Zarqawi is a central figure in all this. French terrorism expert Roland Jacquard notes that last month an audio recording of al-Zarqawi turned up in extremist circles, in which he urged holy fighters from around the world to join the fight in Iraq under his leadership. Jacquard says Western intelligence agencies believe al-Zarqawi has called for 1,500 to 2,000 jihadists to leave Chechnya for Iraq. Um, according to the Russians, thatâs all of them ... Al-Zarqawi is the focus of a manhunt nearly on the scale of the searches for Saddam and his two sons. U.S. officials say they have no firm idea where he is, but they suspect that he is in the Sunni triangle. Al-Zarqawi operates so inconspicuously that U.S. intelligence is having trouble "tracking him through the traditional ways," says an official. The information yielded by the capture of Ghul, whom the Kurds turned over to the Americans, may help al-Zarqawiâs hunters. "The discs [Ghul carried] were jammed," says a Kurdish security official. "You could not fit one more single word on them." In a small, weathered blue notebook in Ghulâs satchel were names and telephone numbers from around the world, including a few in Western countries, the source adds. Says a U.S. intelligence official in Iraq: "Weâve been busy." Posted by: Dan Darling 2004-02-16 |
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