Zarqawi's identity remains a mystery
Lawrence Joffe
The Guardian, UK
_____________
British people will forever associate Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who was killed yesterday in his late 30s, with the kidnap and beheading in October 2004 of Ken Bigley. Zarqawi, the self-styled leader of "al-Qaida in the land of the two rivers", is also believed to have personally decapitated the 26-year-old American hostage Nick Berg earlier that year.
Yet increasingly his targets were Iraqis; the number of Shia civilians that his minions have slain since 2003 grotesquely eclipses the number of foreigners he is known to have dispatched. Despite this worldwide intelligence interest, Zarqawi's identity remains a mystery. He was probably born in Zarqa, an industrial town east of Jordan's capital, Amman. "Zarqawi" merely denoted his birthplace; his true name was likely Ahmad Fadil Nazal al-Khalayleh. Rather than being Palestinian - as was once believed - he probably hailed from the Bani Hassan, a Jordanian desert tribe.
He grew up in poverty, dropped out of school and took to heavy drinking, tattoos and fighting. Allegedly jailed for sexual assault, he embraced militant Islam and travelled in Afghanistan in 1989. With the Soviets already defeated, he was left to edit a magazine for demobilised mujaheddin. In Afghanistan he met bin Laden, and his penchant for expertly synchronised suicide bombings recalled al-Qaida's methods. Yet colleagues said relations between the two men cooled. By 2000 Zarqawi was running training camps for his Jund al-Sham (Levantine Soldiers) in Herat, hundreds of miles from bin Laden's bases.
In 1992 Zarqawi joined Bayat al-Imam (Loyalty to the Imam), a radical Jordanian clique led by another former convict, Issam Barqawi.
Reportedly jailed for possessing arms in 1993, Zarqawi became a taciturn loner; fellow prisoners recalled him intimidating inmates with a mere glare. Released in an amnesty in 1999, he was soon to be sentenced in absentia for plotting to bomb tourists celebrating the new millennium at the Radisson SAS hotel in Amman.
In 2000, Zarqawi escaped with his ailing mother to Peshawar in Pakistan. Late the following year, he was apparently wounded during the US bombardment of al-Qaida's Afghan bases. Surgeons at Baghdad's Ibn Sina hospital operated on his leg in May 2002. American and Kurdish forces destroyed Ansar camps in April 2003, but Zarqawi slipped away.
Soon Zarqawi was back in Iraq, where he revived his group, Tawhid al-Jihad (Monotheism and Holy War, or Unity and Struggle). Its epicentre was Falluja, where four US private security agents were killed in April 2004.
In February 2004 Washington raised Zarqawi's bounty to $25m - the same as it had put on Saddam and bin Laden.
Some detected the outlaw's hand outside Iraq. Spanish officials investigated his possible role in the train bombings that killed 191 in Madrid on March 11 2004. He took credit for car bombs that killed 60 in Najaf and Karbala in December 2004; rocket attacks on Israel and US navy vessels in Jordan the following August, and a triple attack on three Amman hotels which killed another 60 on November 9 2005. Most significantly - and curiously, in the light of his growing unpopularity - bin Laden accepted his oath of allegiance as recently as December 2004, in effect making him an al-Qaida brand franchise. In May last year he justified the collateral killing of Muslims, where necessary. The following month his website launched a slick 46-minute video, All Religion Will be for Allah. The man whose remoteness earned him the nickname al-Gharib (the Stranger) - a moniker he used to sign letters - was videoed that December cradling a gun, swathed in a suicide bomber's vest, and, for the first time, unmasked. It was another stake at self-promotion.
June 09, 2006
Lawrence Joffe
The Guardian, UK
_____________
British people will forever associate Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who was killed yesterday in his late 30s, with the kidnap and beheading in October 2004 of Ken Bigley. Zarqawi, the self-styled leader of "al-Qaida in the land of the two rivers", is also believed to have personally decapitated the 26-year-old American hostage Nick Berg earlier that year.
Yet increasingly his targets were Iraqis; the number of Shia civilians that his minions have slain since 2003 grotesquely eclipses the number of foreigners he is known to have dispatched. Despite this worldwide intelligence interest, Zarqawi's identity remains a mystery. He was probably born in Zarqa, an industrial town east of Jordan's capital, Amman. "Zarqawi" merely denoted his birthplace; his true name was likely Ahmad Fadil Nazal al-Khalayleh. Rather than being Palestinian - as was once believed - he probably hailed from the Bani Hassan, a Jordanian desert tribe.
He grew up in poverty, dropped out of school and took to heavy drinking, tattoos and fighting. Allegedly jailed for sexual assault, he embraced militant Islam and travelled in Afghanistan in 1989. With the Soviets already defeated, he was left to edit a magazine for demobilised mujaheddin. In Afghanistan he met bin Laden, and his penchant for expertly synchronised suicide bombings recalled al-Qaida's methods. Yet colleagues said relations between the two men cooled. By 2000 Zarqawi was running training camps for his Jund al-Sham (Levantine Soldiers) in Herat, hundreds of miles from bin Laden's bases.
In 1992 Zarqawi joined Bayat al-Imam (Loyalty to the Imam), a radical Jordanian clique led by another former convict, Issam Barqawi.
Reportedly jailed for possessing arms in 1993, Zarqawi became a taciturn loner; fellow prisoners recalled him intimidating inmates with a mere glare. Released in an amnesty in 1999, he was soon to be sentenced in absentia for plotting to bomb tourists celebrating the new millennium at the Radisson SAS hotel in Amman.
In 2000, Zarqawi escaped with his ailing mother to Peshawar in Pakistan. Late the following year, he was apparently wounded during the US bombardment of al-Qaida's Afghan bases. Surgeons at Baghdad's Ibn Sina hospital operated on his leg in May 2002. American and Kurdish forces destroyed Ansar camps in April 2003, but Zarqawi slipped away.
Soon Zarqawi was back in Iraq, where he revived his group, Tawhid al-Jihad (Monotheism and Holy War, or Unity and Struggle). Its epicentre was Falluja, where four US private security agents were killed in April 2004.
In February 2004 Washington raised Zarqawi's bounty to $25m - the same as it had put on Saddam and bin Laden.
Some detected the outlaw's hand outside Iraq. Spanish officials investigated his possible role in the train bombings that killed 191 in Madrid on March 11 2004. He took credit for car bombs that killed 60 in Najaf and Karbala in December 2004; rocket attacks on Israel and US navy vessels in Jordan the following August, and a triple attack on three Amman hotels which killed another 60 on November 9 2005. Most significantly - and curiously, in the light of his growing unpopularity - bin Laden accepted his oath of allegiance as recently as December 2004, in effect making him an al-Qaida brand franchise. In May last year he justified the collateral killing of Muslims, where necessary. The following month his website launched a slick 46-minute video, All Religion Will be for Allah. The man whose remoteness earned him the nickname al-Gharib (the Stranger) - a moniker he used to sign letters - was videoed that December cradling a gun, swathed in a suicide bomber's vest, and, for the first time, unmasked. It was another stake at self-promotion.
June 09, 2006
