It’s from the WSJ, so registration required, but it helps to tie a lot of the different threads together.
On the second day of the war in Iraq, more than 40 U.S. cruise missiles rained down near the northern town of Khurmal, destroying what Gen. Tommy Franks called a "massive terrorist facility." The U.S. was hoping to kill terrorist leader Abu Musab Zarqawi. Among the dead was one of Mr. Zarqawi’s top lieutenants, known by the alias Abu Taisir. But Mr. Zarqawi, who had lost a leg in a previous U.S. attack in Afghanistan, had slipped out of the camp before the missiles hit, U.S. intelligence officials now believe.
| Damn. I hate it when that happens. |
"He’s the most active and frenetic terrorist commander out there today," says Matthew Levitt, a former Federal Bureau of Investigation terrorism analyst. U.S. officials believe, for instance, that he was involved in the massive bombing of the United Nations headquarters in Iraq in August, an attack that effectively drove much of the U.N. operation out of the country.
| We've been saying that all along. But then, we pay attention... |
The story of the high-school dropout from the small town of Zarqa, in Jordan, says much about the hurdles the U.S. faces in its war against terrorism. Mr. Zarqawi, whose real name is Ahmad Fadil Nazzal Al-Khalayleh, epitomizes the elusiveness of these foes. He has ascended to the top terrorist tier because of what intelligence officials describe as a rare talent for building overlapping networks of friends, relatives and conspirators of various nationalities. He has repeatedly picked up and moved across borders -- from Jordan to Afghanistan, Iran and Iraq. And he has attracted a following that is as devoted as he is to jihad and the defeat of the U.S.
| The following's there to be picked up. Zarqawi's setup is a little more intricate than most, though... |
In an audio message recently posted on militant Web sites and attributed by intelligence officials to Mr. Zarqawi, he laments the death of Mr. Taisir in northern Iraq and concludes, "O God, destroy the rule of Bush, just as you did with Caesar." He also declared he was "puzzled" why followers elsewhere had "failed to mobilize" to fight American forces. As reported Monday in the New York Times, U.S. officials say that they recently found a document in Iraq, believed to be written by Mr. Zarqawi, in which he appeals to al Qaeda leaders to send more help to fight the American occupation.
| That's a good sign. That's a very good sign... |
In the last two years, Mr. Zarqawi’s involvement has been detected in terrorist plots in France, Germany, Jordan and Israel, according to intelligence officials. He also is believed to have been behind an unsuccessful plot to launch an attack in London using the poison ricin and to have orchestrated the October assassination of U.S. diplomat Laurence Foley in Amman, Jordan. It is strongly suspected that Mr. Zarqawi was behind four recent bombings of British and Jewish sites in Istanbul, Turkish officials say. When the Jordanian embassy in Baghdad was struck by a truck bomb in August killing 17 people, suspicion immediately focused on Mr. Zarqawi because of his hostility to the Jordanian regime.
| He's not that subtle. Smart, elusive, but not that subtle... |
Mr. Zarqawi’s journey was reconstructed through six months of interviews with intelligence and security officials in the U.S., Middle East and Europe, and from court documents and government reports. It began as it did for thousands of young Arab militants: He traveled to Afghanistan in the late 1980s to fight the Soviets when he was about 20 years old. When he returned in 1991 to Zarqa -- from which he took his alias -- he was more religious, said his mother, Um Sayef al-Khalayleh, in an interview in September in Jordan. He spent hours memorizing the Quran in the family home, a two-story concrete structure furnished with foam mattresses. After returning from Afghanistan, Mr. Zarqawi married and settled in his home town. But he couldn’t find work in Jordan. His father had died in the 1980s, leaving a small monthly pension to support his family. A video-rental store Mr. Zarqawi opened failed. His mother says he shunned suggestions that he finish high school and attend college, saying it was pointless. Jordanian authorities, worried about veterans of Afghanistan fomenting unrest, harassed him, says his mother. In 1992 he was jailed. Released in 1999 under a general amnesty, he was soon in trouble again. He had fallen under the influence of a Jordanian cleric who called for the overthrow of Jordan’s monarchy and the creation of an Islamic state.
That would be Abu Qatada, IIRC ...
Security officials in Jordan accused him and others of planning to gun down and throw acid on U.S. and Israeli tourists during celebrations at Jordanian holy sites. Mr. Zarqawi fled to Peshawar, Pakistan, and went into business selling honey, says his mother. His wife and children joined him and then returned to Zarqa.
| "Hi, Mom! We're back! Hey, lemme tell ya, don't ever go to Pakistan! Those people are crazy!" |
Later Mr. Zarqawi married his second wife, a Jordanian he met in Pakistan. The U.S. claims that while in Pakistan in 1999, Mr. Zarqawi contacted al Qaeda members and asked for help training Jordanians. He crossed into Afghanistan and met senior al Qaeda leaders in Kandahar. Intelligence officials suspect he wanted to develop his own group dedicated to overthrowing the Jordanian monarchy. Though his father had once worked for Zarqa’s local government, Mr. Zarqawi considered the Jordanian regime insufficiently Islamic, the officials say.
| Too much sweet reason, not enough shariah... |
Soon he began creating his own network of followers. In late 2000, officials say, he established a training camp near Herat, in western Afghanistan, far from al Qaeda’s Kandahar base. Soon other Jordanians began to arrive, according to U.S. intelligence reports, many from his large, poor tribe, the Bani Hassan. Mr. Zarqawi controlled a route for bringing men into Afghanistan, according to interrogation reports arising from the 2002 arrest in Germany of a Zarqawi follower named Shadi Abdellah.
| aka The Real Slim Shadi... |
Recruits made their way to the eastern Iranian city of Mashhad and then were smuggled to Herat, about 300 miles away. In need of funds, Mr. Zarqawi drew closer to al Qaeda’s leadership, a move that meant broadening his focus beyond Jordan. In mid-2001 he visited Kandahar and was given $35,000 by al Qaeda along with a promise of more if he organized attacks against Israel. Later in 2001, Mr. Zarqawi sent followers on missions to mount attacks in Israel, though they were arrested in Turkey before they arrived.
Mr. Zarqawi next formed an alliance with a group of exiled religious Iraqi Kurds. The Iraqis, many of them veterans of Afghanistan, had founded Ansar al-Islam, a fundamentalist group that hoped to establish an Islamic enclave in Iraq’s mountainous north, where a haven for Kurds had been set up in 1991. Ansar succeeded in carving out a small sanctuary near Khurmal, a few miles from the Iraq-Iran border. Intelligence officials say that Ansar’s leaders invited other veterans of Afghanistan -- possibly including Mr. Zarqawi -- to join them in Iraq.
| Actually, the organization seems to have been Jund al-Islam, and I suspect it became Ansar when al-Tawhid joined it. It went from being a group of Kurdish hicks, proud of the length of their beards and their prowess at beating women, to an international terror outfit. The hicks got to provide a safe haven for the real Bad Guys... |
The timing proved fortuitous for Mr. Zarqawi because he soon needed a new home. The U.S. had invaded Afghanistan a few months earlier. On Dec. 12, 2001, in a telephone conversation monitored by German authorities, Mr. Abdellah in Germany told a Zarqawi lieutenant that "Habib" -- an alias used by Mr. Zarqawi -- had been badly wounded in the leg and stomach in a U.S. attack. The Herat group was preparing to flee to Iran and had arranged for $40,000 to be transferred from Tehran to Germany for the purchase of fake passports, according to reports of Mr. Abdellah’s interrogation. Nearly 30 passports were smuggled into Tehran for Zarqawi and his followers, who arrived from Afghanistan in late December, according to the interrogation reports. Mr. Zarqawi’s group then split up. Some headed to Chechnya, and others remained in Iran. Their plan was to regroup in northern Iraq, according to Lorenzo Vidino, an analyst with the Investigative Project, a terrorism research organization in Washington. Mr. Zarqawi didn’t get far because of his injured leg. For several months he operated from Iran, according to U.S. officials and European intelligence documents. He planned several attacks, with frustrating results. Mr. Zarqawi, using the codename "Muhannad," made dozens of calls from Iran to Mr. Abdellah and other followers, who were allegedly planning attacks against Jewish targets in Germany. Mr. Zarqawi grew worried that the plot might be uncovered. "Listen, the longer it takes, the harder it will be for you. So try to hurry things up," Mr. Zarqawi said, according to a translated excerpt of a cellphone conversation cited in a German police report. Mr. Zarqawi’s warnings were justified; German police arrested Mr. Abdellah and his cohorts in late April 2002.
| Zarqawi: The Early Years... He knew what he wanted to do, but he wasn't yet really good at doing it. |
Whether the Iranian government condoned Mr. Zarqawi’s presence in their country is unknown. But a counterterrorism official at the FBI says he believes that Mr. Zarqawi established covert ties to Iranian officials that enabled him to stay. Mr. Abdellah told German police that Mr. Zarqawi had the tacit support of Iranian officials. At the time, Iran was being warned by U.S. officials not to give sanctuary to al Qaeda members. Diplomatic and intelligence officials suspect Mr. Zarqawi was one of dozens of al Qaeda suspects rounded up or quietly expelled. Iran disclosed recently that it had expelled Mr. Zarqawi’s nephew, Umar Jamil al-Khalayleh, around this time because they suspected that he had ties to al Qaeda. After the crackdown, Mr. Zarqawi moved to Iraq, looking for a safe haven. In May, he turned up in Baghdad seeking medical treatment. He had his leg amputated and was fitted with an artificial limb. While he was recuperating in Baghdad, new recruits -- some Zarqawi followers -- were converging on northern Iraq.
| Significantly, this sojourn in Baghdad seems to be when he became a real threat. Prior to that he was just one of several. This was also the period when the boyz started showing up in Kurdistan. I don't think it's coincidence... |
The CIA traced half a dozen satellite phones used in northern Iraq by suspected Islamic militants. Among them, according to information provided to Italian officials by the CIA, was a number belonging to Abu Taisir, 33, who is believed to be a Jordanian lover relative of Mr. Zarqawi’s. Abu Taisir, whose real name is Abdul Hadi Daghlas, had gone from Tehran to the Khurmal camp. Soon after, Mr. Zarqawi was tracked to northern Iraq, according to Jordanian authorities. His mother says she received a phone call from her son around this time. Apologizing that he could no longer send money home, Mr. Zarqawi told her, "Life is too hard."
| Takes a lot of money to run an international criminal enterprise, and Binny had been turned into paste. How to get the money flowing again? |
In late December 2002, the CIA unraveled a plot by Mr. Zarqawi’s group to carry out poison attacks in several European capitals. The breakthrough came when a senior al Qaeda leader, Abu Zubaydah, who had been arrested in April in Pakistan, disclosed the details under interrogation. A Zarqawi operative named Abu Atiya, operating out of a remote area of the Caucasus, had dispatched nine North African men to Europe to prepare the attacks in 2001. Mr. Atiya, a veteran of Mr. Zarqawi’s Herat camp, was later captured in the Azerbaijani capital of Baku and turned over to the CIA for interrogation, according to U.S. and foreign intelligence officials. U.S. intelligence officials suspect that Abu Atiya is a Zarqawi family member and that his father had helped run Mr. Zarqawi’s Herat camp.
| Still more family affair... |
The CIA sent reports about the Zubaydah interrogation to European governments. In a raid near Paris in December 2002, the French police recovered a chemical suit as well as cyanide. Three of those arrested had been named by Mr. Zubaydah, according to U.S. officials. A few weeks later in London, traces of the poison ricin were found in an apartment of several other North African men arrested by British police. Investigators believe that they had been dispatched by Mr. Atiya, the Zarqawi operative, to attack the London subway.
| I believe the cover story at the time was that they were dry cleaning chemicals... |
By the time the U.S. invaded Iraq, intelligence officials believe, Mr. Zarqawi already had fled Khurmal, across the border to Kurdish areas of Iran. When Jordan sent its top security officials to Tehran last summer to ask about Mr. Zarqawi, Iranian officials said that he had been in their custody but had been released because he had a Syrian passport.
"Youse gotta lemme go! I gotta Syrian passport!"
"That's a Pak passport!"
"Sorry. This one's real!"
"It's printed on a brown paper bag!"
"This one?"
"Ummm... It's a Moon Mullins pocket porno."
"Sorry. How 'bout this one?"
"Uhhh... That looks Syrian. Hokay. You can go." |
During the summer, Mr. Zarqawi was reported to have been spotted back again in Iraq, intelligence officials say. U.S. special forces in Iraq mounted several unsuccessful raids hoping to capture him. Little was heard from Mr. Zarqawi until last month, when the audio statement attributed to him was noticed by CIA analysts. The CIA is unsure whether the voice on the recording is Mr. Zarqawi’s but suspects that the statement was written by him or someone close to him. The decision to post the words on militant Web sites signals the growing appeal Mr. Zarqwai holds among Arab radicals. In a 60-minute diatribe mixing references to the Quran, Arab history and the life of Muhammad, the speaker bemoans the death of his comrades and prods young Arabs, whom he accuses of failing in large numbers to come to Iraq and Afghanistan, to attack the U.S. "We swear our actions will inflict harm on the enemies," he says. "We will pursue jihad against them by all available means." |