Terror leader Zarqawi dead: Iraqi PM
Baghdad, AP:
Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Al-Qaeda-linked militant who led a bloody campaign of suicide bombings, kidnappings and hostage beheadings in Iraq, has been killed in a US air raid north of Baghdad, Iraq's prime minister said on Thursday. Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki said al-Zarqawi was killed about Wednesday evening along with seven aides.
The Jordanian-born militant, who is believed to have personally beheaded at least two American hostages, became Iraq's most wanted militant, as notorious as Osama bin Laden, to whom he swore allegiance in 2004.
The United States put a $25 million (about euro20 million) bounty on al-Zarqawi, the same as bin Laden. In the past year, he moved his campaign beyond Iraq's borders, claiming to have carried out a November 9, 2005 triple suicide bombing against hotels in Amman that killed 60 people.
US forces and their allies came close to capturing al-Zarqawi several times since his campaign began in mid-2003. His closest brush may have come in late 2004. Deputy Interior Ministry Maj Gen Hussein Kamal said Iraqi security forces caught al-Zarqawi near the insurgent stronghold of Fallujah.
But then released him because they didn't realise who he was.
In May 2005, Web statements by his group said al-Zarqawi had been wounded in fighting with Americans and was being treated in a hospital
abroad - raising speculation over a successor among his lieutenants.
But days later, a statement said al-Zarqawi was fine and had returned to Iraq. There was never any independent confirmation of the reports of his wounding. US forces believe they just missed capturing al-Zarqawi in a February 20, 2005 raid in which troops closed in on his vehicle west of Baghdad near the Euphrates River. His driver and another associate were captured and al-Zarqawi's computer was seized along with pistols and ammunition. US troops twice launched massive invasions of Fallujah, the stronghold used by Al-Qaeda in Iraq fighters and other insurgents west of Baghdad. An April 2004 offensive left the city still in insurgent hands, but the October 2004 assault wrested it from them. However, al-Zarqawi - if he was in the city, escaped.
http://www.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/meast/06/ ... index.html
Iraq's 'most wanted' Zarqawi, drove sectarian strife
BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- In a horrifying videotape seen around the world, a masked figure brutally beheaded American Nicholas Berg.
Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was the man who claimed credit.
Berg's murder in 2004 was just one in a string of killings, kidnappings and suicide bombings masterminded by the "prince of al Qaeda in Iraq," a protege of Osama bin Laden.
A Sunni militant, al-Zarqawi worked to drive a wedge between the two leading Muslim religious sects and stir up violence that would hurt Iraq's fledgling democracy.
The 39-year-old Jordanian-born terrorist had eluded U.S. and Iraqi authorities for years, often mocking them with recorded messages and videotapes.
Militant Islamic Web sites quickly posted his messages, bringing terrorism to cyberspace and reinforcing his support among Islamists.
In October 2004, al-Zarqawi pledged his allegiance to al Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden, and renamed his group al Qaeda in Iraq. (Watch how al-Zarqawi rose to power -- 2:50)
With the insurgency spreading, the United States grew more determined to catch or kill the Jordanian-born militant, and increased his bounty to $25 million -- equal to bin Laden's.
"This guy, Zarqawi, has sworn his allegiance to bin Laden. He's declared his intentions," President Bush once said. "This is an enemy with no conscience, and they cannot be appeased."
Bin Laden's seal of approval
Most of al Qaeda in Iraq's attacks were against Iraq's Shiite majority.
There was an upsurge in car bombings in Iraq in late April 2005 after the transitional national assembly chose a new Cabinet. It was the worst spike of attacks since the U.S.-led push against militants in Falluja the previous fall.
Al-Zarqawi sought Osama bin Laden's seal of approval, and got it. Bin Laden called him "the prince of al Qaeda in Iraq."
Al-Zarqawi's network was blamed for the 2003 suicide bombing of U.N. headquarters in Baghdad that killed Sergio Vieira de Mello, the U.N. envoy to Iraq, and 21 other people.
Counterterrorism and intelligence officials believe al-Zarqawi forged links with terrorist groups in many other countries, including his native Jordan, where he admitted to the November 11, 2005, triple hotel bombings in Amman that killed 60 people and injured scores, mostly Jordanians.
Jordanian courts have convicted and sentenced al-Zarqawi in absentia.
In December 2005, he was sentenced to death by hanging for a failed suicide bombing at the al-Karama border crossing between Jordan and Iraq. In March, he received 15 years in prison for a plot to attack the Jordanian Embassy in Iraq.
A court handed him a death sentence for the October 2002 assassination of Laurence Foley, with the U.S. Agency for International Development, and convicted him in a December 1999 "millennium" plot against Jordanian hotels.
U.S. and Iraqi forces came close to capturing al-Zarqawi several times. In December 2005, Hussain Kamal, Iraq's deputy minister of interior, admitted that Iraqi security forces had al-Zarqawi in custody in 2004, but released him because they didn't know who he was.
His luck ran out on Wednesday, when he was killed by a coalition airstrike on what was supposed to be a safe house in Baquba.
Finding Allah in prison
Al-Zarqawi's story began in neighboring Jordan, in the working-class city of Zarqa. The young militant, originally named Ahmad Fadil al-Khalailah, later turned the name of his hometown into an alias.
A troubled youth, al-Zarqawi drank -- a taboo in Islam. Then he found Allah, and made his way to Afghanistan in 1989 to do jihad against the Soviets. It's not clear if he ever saw combat, but when he returned to Jordan years later, his aim was clear: overthrowing the government of King Hussein in favor of an Islamic state.
Soon he was in a Jordanian prison, where he emerged as a leader among militants. Freed in an amnesty, he once again went to Afghanistan where he ran a training camp.
Al-Zarqawi fled to Iraq after the U.S.-led attack in Afghanistan and soon made a name for himself as one of the insurgent leaders.
It was after the U.S. invasion and the downfall of Saddam Hussein that al-Zarqawi emerged as a major terrorist figure in Iraq.
In February 2003, al-Zarqawi's name was mentioned on a worldwide stage for the first time, associated with Iraq, when then-Secretary of State Colin Powell appeared before the U.N. Security Council to make his case for the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
Iraq, Powell said, was harboring al-Zarqawi's terrorist network, a "collaborator of Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda lieutenants."
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,198737,00.html
Victim's Brother to Zarqawi: 'Rot in Hell'
Thursday, June 08, 2006
LONDON — Two men, worlds apart, illustrate the divide in global passions about the death of Al Qaeda leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
The brother of a Briton beheaded by the terrorist band hopes he "rots in hell." Zarqawi's brother said he was on his way to paradise.
News of the terror leader's death in an air strike in Iraq invoked relief in world capitals but sadness in other corners of the globe. His death was perhaps felt most deeply by those who knew him — and those on whom he inflicted pain.
Paul Bigley — the brother of Briton Kenneth Bigley, who was kidnapped Sept. 16, 2004, and beheaded before a camera — described Zarqawi as an "evil person."
"As far as I'm concerned, he can rot in hell because that's where he is," Bigley told The Associated Press. "He's not in paradise, that's for sure."
But Zarqawi's long struggle against U.S.-led forces in Iraq made him a superhero to many extremist Muslims. His older brother said the family had anticipated his death for some time.
"We expected that he would be martyred," Sayel al-Khalayleh told The AP in a telephone interview from Zarqa, the poor Jordanian industrial town that Zarqawi called home and from which he derived his name. "We hope that he will join other martyrs in heaven," he added.
In Zarqa, Zarqawi's three sisters, all dressed in black, arrived at the one-story family home looking grief stricken. But the husband of one of the women, who identified himself as Abu Qudama, said: "We're not sad that he's dead."
"To the contrary, we're happy," he said, "because he's a martyr and he's now in heaven."
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,198652,00.html
Zarqawi Was Mastermind Behind Iraq's Bloodiest Attacks
Thursday, June 08, 2006
Zarqawi: 'What Is Coming Is Even Worse'
BAGHDAD, Iraq — Abu Musab al-Zarqawi rose from the life of a street thug in Jordan to become the symbol of "holy war" in Iraq, masterminding the bloodiest suicide bombings of the insurgency, beheading hostages and helping push Iraq into a spiral of sectarian violence with vicious attacks against Shiites.
The 39-year-old Zarqawi, slain in a U.S. air strike Wednesday night, was instrumental in turning the swift U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 into a grueling counterinsurgency fight, helping draw Arab militants into what he depicted as a war for Islam against the American "crusaders" and Shiite "infidels."
Zarqawi was not the only insurgency leader. Homegrown Sunni Iraqi guerrillas — believed to have tense relations with Zarqawi — are thought to have had an equal or even greater role in deadly attacks on U.S. and Iraqi forces and Shiites.
Still, Zarqawi became the symbol of the jihadi — or "holy war" — movement, nicknamed the "slaughtering sheik" by his supporters across the Arab world. He is believed to have personally beheaded at least two American hostages, Nicholas Berg in April 2004 and Eugene Armstrong in September 2004. Grisly videos of the slayings were posted on the Internet, part of the revolutionary Web-based propaganda campaign that was key to Zarqawi's movement.
Zarqawi vowed fealty to Al Qaeda leader Usama bin Laden in October 2004 and had the same bounty on his head from the U.S. military — $25 million — as bin Laden.
But he played a dramatically different role: While bin Laden was the hidden leader, issuing statements from hiding in Pakistan's border region with Afghanistan, Zarqawi portrayed himself as the warrior on the front lines.
In the past year, Zarqawi moved his campaign beyond Iraq's borders, carrying out a Nov. 9, 2005, triple suicide bombing against hotels in Amman that killed 60 people, as well as other attacks in Jordan and even a rocket attack from Lebanon into northern Israel.
He also sought to spread Sunni-Shiite strife across the Middle East. In an audiotape posted on the Web last week, he lectured his fellow Sunnis to stand up against Shiites and railed against Shiites for four hours, calling them enemies of Islam.
In April, he released a videotape showing his face for the first time in an apparent attempt to reinforce his image as the leader of Iraq's insurgents and a hero to Sunni extremists. The video emphasized dramatic, iconic images of Zarqawi, showing him in a desert landscape firing a machine gun.
The U.S. military tried to undermine that image, issuing what it said were "out takes" of that video captured in a raid, showing Zarqawi fumbling with the machine gun.
Born Ahmad Fadhil Nazzal al-Khalayleh on Oct. 20, 1966, in Jordan, Zarqawi grew up in the industrial town of Zarqa, from which he eventually took his nom de guerre. He was one of 10 siblings in a poor branch of the prominent Bani Hassan Bedouin tribe, which publicly renounced all ties to him after the hotel bombings in Amman.
As a teenager, he was known as a thug, drinking alcohol and getting in street fights. He was jailed for six months for raping a girl, according to Jordanian security officials.
He then embraced Islamic militancy, making his first trips to Afghanistan in the 1980s before returning to Jordan, where he was arrested in the mid-1990s.
It was in a Jordanian prison that he solidified his radical ideology. He shared a cell block with militant cleric Isam Mohammed al-Barqawi, known as Abu Muhammed al-Maqdisi, who became his spiritual mentor in "takfir" — an extremist strain of Islam that brands its enemies "kafirs" or "infidels" worthy of death.
After being released in an amnesty, Zarqawi went in 1999 to Afghanistan, where he formed links with bin Laden. He fled Afghanistan during the U.S.-led war that ousted the Taliban in late 2001, passing through Iran to Iraq, according to U.S. officials and militant biographies of Zarqawi posted on the Web.
His followers' first operations may have been in his homeland: Jordan has sentenced him to death in absentia for masterminding the October 2002 slaying of Laurence Foley, a diplomat and administrator of U.S. aid programs in Jordan.
Soon after, his movement carried out two major suicide blasts in August 2003 — four months after Saddam's fall — that many see as marking the start of the insurgency in Iraq.
The first hit the U.N. headquarters in Baghdad, killing 22 people, including the top U.N. envoy to Iraq, Sergio Vieira de Mello, and prompting the United Nations to pull its personnel out of the country.
The second targeted a Shiite shrine in Najaf that killed more than 85 people, including Shiite leader Ayatollah Mohammed Baqir al-Hakim.
For more than two years, Zarqawi wreaked mayhem across Iraq, his strikes targeted not only to inflict maximum casualties but also to weaken Iraq's fledgling security forces, cause political damage, or enflame sectarian violence.
His group claimed responsibility for the bloodiest single attack of the insurgency: the February 2005 suicide bombing against Iraqi security recruits in Hillah that killed 125 people.
His fighters are believed to be behind a string of suicide bombings against Shiites in the holy city of Karbala and a police station north of Baghdad on Jan. 5, 2006, that killed at least 130 people — only weeks after a landmark parliament election.
A May 18, 2004, a car bomb detonated by Zarqawi's fighters assassinated the president of the now disbanded Iraqi Governing Council, Izzadine Saleem.
The string of kidnappings of Westerners by his followers terrorized foreign workers in Iraq, forcing them to limit movements and take up costly security precautions.
Among the other hostage slayings claimed by Al Qaeda in Iraq were American Jack Hensley, British engineer Kenneth Bigley, Kim Sun-il of South Korea and Shosei Koda of Japan, whose decapitated body was found dumped and wrapped in an American flag.
Al Qaeda in Iraq also kidnapped and killed the top Egyptian diplomat in Iraq and two Algerian diplomats, part of a campaign aimed at scaring Arab nations from sending full ambassadors to Baghdad in support of the new, Shiite-led government.
But in the last months of his life, there were signs Zarqawi's attacks on civilians were eroding his support. The triple hotel bombing in Amman — which killed mostly Sunni Muslims — outraged many in Jordan and even brought criticism from other Islamic militants.
In January, Zarqawi announced that his group was joining an umbrella organization of Iraqi insurgents called the Shura Council of Mujahedeen. The move was seen as an attempt to give an Iraqi face to Zarqawi's movement, which was believed to be mainly made up of non-Iraqi, Arab fighters.
Confirming Zarqawi's death, his deputy, known as Abu Abdel-Rahman al-Iraqi, vowed to continue the fight.
"The death of our leaders is life for us," he said in a Web statement. "It will only increase our persistence in continuing holy war so that the word of God will be supreme."
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,197915,00.html
Zarqawi Urges Sunnis to Confront Shiites
Thursday, June 08, 2006
Zarqawi: 'What Is Coming Is Even Worse'
CAIRO, Egypt — The leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq railed against Shiites in a four-hour-long audiotape harangue posted on the Web Friday, saying that militias are raping women and killing Sunnis and that the community must ignore calls for reconciliation and fight.
The tape by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi appeared aimed at sabotaging the Iraqi government's efforts to finish off a unity government — but was also intended to go beyond Iraq's borders and enflame already rising Shiite-Sunni tensions across the Arab world.
"There's a civil war going on in Iraq, but it will not become truly fierce until it's exported outside Iraq. This tape is trying to do just that," said Dawood al-Shirian, a Saudi political commentator.
The deputy leader of Al Qaeda, Ayman Al-Zawahiri, chastised Zarqawi last September for launching attacks on Shiites, recalled Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism expert at the Rand research group in California.
"Obviously, he [Zarqawi] is thumbing his nose at the Al Qaeda central leadership," Hoffman said. "That's significant."
Zarqawi's Sunni insurgent followers have carried out some of the bloodiest suicide bombings in Iraq's conflict and have frequently targeted Shiite civilians and mosques in an attempt to spark civil war. In his statements, the Jordanian-born militant often vilifies Shiites as infidels.
But Friday's tape was an unprecedented screed that over four hours chronicled what Zarqawi said was the Shiites' campaign throughout history to destroy Islam and help foreign invaders of Muslim lands.
"Sunnis, wake up, pay attention and prepare to confront the poisons of the Shiite snakes," Zarqawi said. "Forget about those advocating the end of sectariansim and calling for national unity."
He pointed to two Shiite militias with links to parties in the current Shiite-dominated Iraqi government accused by Sunnis in Iraq of running death squads in a wave of sectarian violence the past months.
"They kill men and arrest women, put them in prison and rape them and steal everything from the houses of the Sunnis," he said.
A written statement said Friday's audiotape was made two months ago.
The CIA said late Friday that technical analysis of the tape had confirmed it was the voice of Zarqawi.
Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki said Zarqawi expressed "a futile brutality, depraved mentally and morally."
"I believe the Iraqi people won't listenn to such miserable words," he told a press conference in Baghdad. "Reconciliation is the hope for all Iraqis, and all Iraqis welcome it".
Al-Maliki has put together a government of Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds that U.S. and Iraqi officials hope will be able to ease spiralling sectarian violence in the country. But al-Maliki has struggled to get the parties to agreee on key security posts that would lead any effort to bring stability — the interior and defense ministries.
He said Thursday he intends to announce names for the posts even without an agreement between his government partners in an attempt to force a resolution to the continuing differences.
Zarqawi appeared to be aiming at a wider audience, seeking to rally Sunni radicals by tapping into mistrust of Shiites and non-Arab Shiite Iran.
He denounced Shiites across the Mideast, saying they were "the same as Jews, with secret meetings" loyal to a "mother country" — Israel for the Jews, Iran for the Shiites.
He called the Lebanese Shiite group Hezbollah the "enemy of Sunnis" and accused it of working to protect Israel from Lebanon-based Palestinian guerrillas.
Hezbollah gained widespread popularity among both Sunnis and Shiites for its fight against Israel. But its support at home has waned amid resentment by anti-Syrian Lebanese for its alliance with Damascus and Tehran.
The head of south Lebanon's Shiite religious scholars, Sheik Afif al-Naboulsi, said the militant leader was seeking to "incite sectarian sentiments" and "name himself the leader of the Sunnis."
The conflict in Iraq has reopened the long dormant fault lines between the two communities across the Arab world, where Sunnis form the vast majority.
Sunni-led governments have shown increasing fear of restiveness among their Shiite populations. Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak enraged Shiites earlier this year when he said they were more loyal to Iran than their own countries, and Jordan's King Abdullah has warned of a "Shiite crescent" of power.
It was Zarqawi's first message since an April 29 videotape that seemed directly aimed at creating a hero's image of himself in the eyes of extremists after a wave of criticism over Muslim civilian deaths in some of his attacks — particularly a triple hotel bombing in Amman in November that killed 63 people.
The video was the first to show his face and had dramatic images of him firing a machine gun in the desert and consulting with mujahedeen leaders, apparently to emphasize his control
Anybody stomach for Zarqawi beheadings video? It is gory and brutal. Strong parental guidance advised. Go to Know your enemy on the left hand side and click on Nick Berg's beheading. Here is the link: http://www.homestead.com/prosites-prs/index.html
