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| Iraq-Jordan | |
| Jihadi’s diary gives the US insight into Iraq insurgency | |
| 2004-02-11 | |
| The young Saudi drifted about the lawless Iraqi-Syrian border in the chaotic aftermath of the fall of Saddam Hussein, seeking a place where he could channel his urge for holy war. He made it to a training camp in the immense desert of western Iraq, U.S. officials say, before infiltrating the country’s Sunni Muslim heartland. He was captured late last year, the sole survivor of a squad of three Arabs from outside Iraq who launched a virtual suicide attack on a U.S. checkpoint east of here. Military officials say Mohammed Kadir Hussen’s odyssey from his hometown, Jidda, Saudi Arabia, to the battlegrounds of Iraq -- a journey outlined in a diary seized when he was arrested, a document now known as "the Book" -- provides a glimpse into what remains one of the murkiest aspects of the Iraq insurgency: the role of foreign jihadists, or so-called holy warriors of Islam. "’The Book’ talked about the jihad: how the jihad was going to happen whether Saddam Hussein survived the war or not," said Col. David A. Teeples, commander of the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment, which occupies a great swath of western Iraq and seized the young Saudi and his unusual travelogue. "People were coming from all over to fight and kill Westerners." From the sounds of it, this sounds like an updated version of The Afghan Guide to Jihad, the al-Qaeda training manual, a good chunk of which was written by Ali Mohammed in the late 1980s. Looks like somebody’s had some time do some revising during the run-up to war in Iraq, my guess is that that someone is Saif al-Adel, given his background as a former colonel in the Egyptian special forces. So many foreign fighters are said to have congregated in Qusaybah, a longtime smuggling hub, that the military nicknamed it "the jihad Super Bowl," Teeples said. The Army says the primary threat in Iraq remains loyalists of the former regime. The foreign contingent may represent no more than 5 percent to 10 percent of the overall insurgent force of up to 5,000 people, said Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, the chief military spokesman in Baghdad. But commanders also say the foreign fighters’ impact has been significant and has probably yielded the bulk of what has become perhaps the insurgents’ most potent weapon -- suicide bombers. However, the Army adds that no successful suicide bomber has yet to be positively identified.
U.S. commanders say it is extremely difficult to determine if the detained foreign fighters are linked to al-Qaida or other terror organizations, such as Ansar al-Islam, a Kurdish extremist group suspected of having connections to the twin suicide attacks last week at Kurdish political party headquarters in northern Iraq that killed more than 100 people. Some of those captured boast of international terror affiliations; others deny such ties. Proving or disproving it can be almost impossible. "No one is walking around with an al-Qaida identity card, as far as I know," said Col. Joe Anderson, who oversaw the occupation of the northern city of Mosul and surrounding areas with the 101st Airborne Division, which is returning home after almost a year in Iraq. Many fighters captured or killed carry no identification whatsoever, so their origins remain murky. In such cases, officials rely on clues such as foreign currency found in their possession or, in the case of prisoners, their accents. Foreign fighters, frequently embracing martyrdom, are also more likely to fight to the death than other insurgents, commanders say. Many of the foreign jihadists appear to be disaffected young men harboring an abiding hatred of the West, but having little or no previous experience in training camps or the battlefield -- a common profile among Saudis and others who have gravitated to holy war venues such as Afghanistan and Chechnya. This seems to have been the case with Mohammed Kadir Hussen. "He was a poor Saudi guy without a lot of prospects," said a U.S. military intelligence official familiar with Hussen’s travelogue. "He started out wanting to help other Muslims, and it evolved into this jihad." Army officials agreed to talk in general terms about the young Saudi’s life and diary but declined to provide a copy. The document has been translated into English and distributed among intelligence agencies. U.S. authorities say they have traced efficient networks bringing in foreign jihadists. Middlemen known as "facilitators," mostly Iraqis, help guide the young fighters and direct them to safe houses where they can stay, arrange for basic training and acquire arms. Eventually they are deployed against U.S. forces. The facilitators are likely a mixture of Baathists or actual trained al-Tawhid/al-Qaeda members working for Zarqawi. The Army recently detained one such alleged facilitator, Madi Thiab Ruhaybi, an Iraqi man in his 50s known as Abu Mohammed who was captured near the bustling Trebil crossing point on the Iraq-Jordan border. "Abu Mohammed was kind of a runner, a go-to guy, a guy who gets things done," the military intelligence official said. "He would go to the border and pick someone up, move money from here to there, get weapons - he would make all that happen. He was a mid- to lower-level guy, certainly not a decision-maker. If you’re the boss, you need someone like Abu Mohammed to go out and do the dirty work. He knows where to go to get weapons. If you need coordination with your buddy in Syria to get foreign fighters in, he’s the guy who goes out and makes the connection." He is the kind of intermediary with whom Hussen probably hooked up when he arrived in Iraq. The fervent Saudi, in his 20s, is believed to have crossed the border in April or May, after Saddam’s fall. He arrived first at this border outpost, at the time virtually wide open, officials said, and probably made contact with pro-Saddam hard-liners aiding foreign volunteers. That fits with what we know about various Ansar al-Islam members getting orders from al-Douri. A marriage of convenience between former regime allies and foreign jihadists has marked the insurgency, U.S. officials say. "The jihad people who came in had their own agenda. They were not connected to former regime loyalists, but to Islamic extremists," Teeples said. "But as this thing evolved, it became obvious that the best network for anyone coming from outside to fight would be to contact former regime loyalists. Those were the people who knew who to call, where to find safe houses, where to get their hands on money, weapons, transportation. They had intelligence on where the coalition troops were moving convoys, where troops were stationed, where mortars could be set up." Many, including the Saudi, are believed to have passed through what U.S. authorities called a terrorist training camp near the town of Rawah in northwest Iraq, amid Iraq’s wadi country of rolling desert, gulches and wild sheep - ideal places to pitch a tent and lie low. U.S. officials suspect the camp was set up after Saddam’s fall to assist foreign fighters and Iraqis with weapons training and tactics, such as how to make and deploy roadside bombs. The facility didn’t escape the notice of U.S. reconnaissance aircraft. That camp was run by Ansar al-Islam, by all accounts. According to the military, Army and Special Forces, apparently zeroing in on the facility through aerial imagery, bombed the site in a surprise predawn assault in the second week in June, killing at least 57 combatants, mostly foreign fighters. Many died while they slept in their tents. An AH-64 Apache attack helicopter was shot down in heavy fighting, although no U.S. troops were killed. Hussen escaped death, along with several colleagues. But the experience embittered him. "He just kind of ended up in the camp in Rawah: He didn’t know that was going to be his destination until he got there," the military intelligence officer said. "He talked about the anguish of losing the friends he had been training with, his fellow terrorists." Hussen continued drifting toward jihad. He wrote that he was involved in an ambush against U.S. forces in Fallujah. His description coincided with an ambush in which no one was injured, a fact that helped corroborate the Saudi’s story. Hussen’s journey ended on Nov. 19. That’s when he and two other foreign fighters approached a U.S. checkpoint in a vehicle, said Lt. Col. Butch Kievenaar, whose unit was manning the checkpoint. One got out of the car with a pistol and was gunned down. Another pulled out a grenade, which detonated, killing him. Hussen survived. | |
| Posted by:Dan Darling |
| #7 closet - excellent response. The key is that, when in the presence of jihadis or even knowing there will be a future meeting, the closet Muslim moderate will do what he / she thinks is expected of him / her by the jihadis. They fear them far more than us, because we play by civilized rules. Islam's rules are something else, as you pointed out: apostasy = death. In repsonse to your question, I will say that there's nothing to reach out to. If you can tell me how to make this happen, using the logic of their indoctrination, I'll be ecstatic to hear it. I currently believe they will have to do the reaching out. Will it come of their own volition? Not so far. Perhaps, and this won't sit well with you, I presume, they will reach out when they fear us as much or more than their insane jihadis. We didn't invent Islam and its remarkably self-propagating dogma - which is specifically and logically tuned to achieve Islam's goal of World Dominion. We don't stop them from reaching out to us. We don't control their Imams who foment new jihadis. We don't run their dictatorships which impoverish them and leave many of their young men with no choices because they have no future. We don't run a charity system which promotes overpopulation to augment and intensify the no future demographics, thus producing more jihadi fodder. And, lastly, we didn't attack them - they attacked us. We have been under attack diplomatically and economically via Saudi Sunnis since '73 when we resupplied Israel and were punished with the oil embargo. The Shi'a joined the game in '79 - when we became The Great Satan - resulting in a unified Islam vs. the US. We didn't create the direct confrontation, they did. They will have to stop it. I am afraid the only way is for us to give them the biggest reason available to do so: the "or else" option of annihilation. |
| Posted by: .com 2004-2-11 1:06:14 PM |
| #6 .com -- there are moderate Muslims, but they are scared to death -- and for good reason. In all Islamic leagal schools the penalty for apostacy is death, and any sign of moderation (for example, believing in the separation of mosque and state)is going to be viewed as apostacy by the jihadis. Question: can we reach out to, and make common cause with, moderate Muslims? I'm not sure -- but it does seem vitally important. In the long run, what I really fear is "demographic jihad." The average woman in Yemen has more than 7 children. |
| Posted by: closet neo-con 2004-2-11 11:49:11 AM |
| #5 Actually, from the Islamic Blame Society's POV, this guy's progression from point A to point B makes sense... (Please pardon my pedantic tone in the following...) When combined with a few other aspects, such as the fact that the currently passive Muslims always defer to the jihadis (yes, they do) and the "We're all Muslims first..." mantra (taught from birth), it demonstrates rather clearly (to anyone paying attention) the Myth of the Moderate Muslim... The group-think of Islam via deference to the Mullahs (who are dominated by the jihadi view, thanks to the Saudi-Wahhabi money), the whole religious society of Islam as practiced and taken in toto, means we will eventually have to fight or subjugate them all. They cannot be placated... and they are divided only momentarily - until the Mullahs can spread the word and reinforce the Muslim Mantra. As for successfully dealing with them, we have to drop our own views out of the equation completely. A good example of our dilemma is the Clinton model of tossing a cruise missile at them. It is a useless gesture, though in his mind he obviously thought this would be very skeery to them, cuz the idea apparently was frightening to him. Pfool. Let's not repeat such idiocy. What matters is how they think - and that means we have to be very selective about who is leading our fight and who is involved in our planning and strategy. The most dangerous problem for the West is the quaint, but very common and amazingly persistent, notion that we're all the same underneath. No, we're not. Not even close. It's called indoctrination - and they do a much more thorough job of it than anyone else I've ever come across. Bush gets it. Clinton and his precessors as well as the current crop of Presidential wannabees (with the likely exception of McCain) did not and do not. I don't fear them - or the fight that has begun - I fear one thing: overconfidence that Bush will be re-elected. He is the key to doing this right on the first pass. |
| Posted by: .com 2004-2-11 10:35:20 AM |
| #4 One got out of the car with a pistol and was gunned down. Another pulled out a grenade, which detonated, killing him. Hussen survived. I take it this is not their "A" team... |
| Posted by: tu3031 2004-2-11 10:24:26 AM |
| #3 "He was a poor Saudi guy without a lot of prospects... He started out wanting to help other Muslims, and it evolved into this jihad." I think this is actually very sad. Too bad the guy didn't find Christianity instead of jihad. I'm beginning to understand why Christian nations have fared so much better than the Muslim ones...they provided education, faith, hope and charity instead of jihad. Nevertheless...this made me lol! "Flypaper, from the fly's perspective" |
| Posted by: B 2004-2-11 8:41:53 AM |
| #2 Flypaper, from the fly's perspective. Fighting us must be like fighting the Borg--"our tactics no longer work Achmed, they've assimilated them!!! What now---urk?" |
| Posted by: N Guard 2004-2-11 8:16:19 AM |
| #1 All this points out just how important it's going to be to upgrade, equip and train the Iraqi Border Guard. I was fine with the flypaper strategy last year but it's time to seal the borders and get some control. |
| Posted by: Steve White 2004-2-11 12:48:05 AM |