Reports: Al-Zarqawi had global ambitions
Posted on Sunday, June 11, 2006
BAGHDAD — At the time of his death, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was still trying to transform his organization from one focused on the Iraqi insurgency into a global operation capable of striking far beyond Iraq’s borders, intelligence experts in Amman, Jordan, and in the West agreed.
His recruiting efforts, according to high-ranking Jordanian security officials interviewed Saturday, were three-part: He sought volunteers to fight in Iraq and others to become suicide bombers there, but he also recruited about 300 people who went to Iraq for terrorist training and sent them back to their home countries, where they await orders to carry out strikes.
Insurgents in Iraq signaled Saturday that the fight was still on after al-Zarqawi’s death, posting an Internet video showing the beheading of three suspected Shiite death squad members in revenge for killing Sunnis.
The video appeared designed to quash hopes that the Sunnidominated insurgency might change tactics by ending attacks on Shiite civilians and institutions, especially the police.
Fellow Sunni insurgent groups sent condolences for al-Zarqawi in Internet messages Saturday and warned Sunnis not to cooperate with the Iraqi government, an apparent call for unity three days after U. S. forces killed the terror leader in a targeted airstrike.
The condolence statements came from the al-Qaida-linked Ansar al-Sunnah — the group that posted the beheading video on a militant Web site — and the head of the Mujahedeen Shura Council, an umbrella organization of five insurgent groups, including al-Qaida in Iraq, that al-Zarqawi helped found last year.
“Iraq is the front defense line for Islam and Muslims, so don’t fail to follow the path of the mujahedeen [holy warriors ], the caravan of martyrs and the faithful,” said Abdullah bin Rashid al-Baghdadi, the Shura Council’s head.
Across Iraq, at least 24 people were killed in violence Saturday — including a number of sectarian attacks. Gunmen stopped a minivan carrying Sunnis on a highway near Baghdad, ordered the passengers off and opened fire, killing four and wounding one. In Baghdad, gunmen in two cars shot dead a Shiite metal worker and wounded two others. Also in the capital, a roadside bomb exploded in the mainly Shiite Karadah area, targeting a police patrol; five people were killed and 14 wounded, including three officers. In the northern city of Mosul, gunmen killed three Shiite butchers.
INTELLIGENCE FOCUS Scattered reports had been offered before that Iraq had become a training ground for al-Zarqawi, but the Jordanian assessment was the first to offer firm numbers.
Of a number of intelligence experts in the United States, Europe and Jordan interviewed about al-Zarqawi’s reach, only the Jordanians offered such a number. But they agreed with the other authorities’ overall assessment that he had not yet created an international terrorist network capable of sustaining itself.
The Jordanians have had a particularly strong intelligence focus on al-Zarqawi. After al-Zarqawi took credit for sending suicide bombers into three Jordan hotels last December, killing dozens, King Abdullah II authorized creation of a new unit within his intelligence organization called “Knights of God,” hoping to challenge not only al-Zarqawi’s activities, but also his claim to be doing God’s work.
Members of the new intelligence unit were dispatched to Iraq and neighboring countries and ordered on the offensive against al-Zarqawi. Two months ago, Jordanian officials said that they first picked up al-Zarqawi’s whereabouts and then were eventually able to confirm the United States’ own intelligence, which located al-Zarqawi on the day he was killed.
Jordan’s security services had been following al-Zarqawi, a native of Jordan, for nearly two decades, and officials in the country agreed to speak about his work, his organization and the operation that eventually killed him on the condition they not be identified because of the covert nature of their work.
The officials described al-Zarqawi as a strong, smart organizational leader who changed routines any time any of his followers were arrested — and who managed to set up logistical operations in Syria, Iran and Libya, which funneled volunteers into Iraq.
Authorities across Europe have identified dozens of young militant Muslim men who have either left Europe to fight in Iraq or have been stopped while planning to do so. U. S. forces in Iraq have said at least three French nationals are among the dozens of foreign fighters they have captured there. German authorities, meanwhile, have arrested 18 suspected members of Ansar al Islam and the al-Zarqawi network since December 2004, including three Iraqis charged with plotting to assassinate interim Iraqi Prime Minister Ayad Allawi last year.
INTERNATIONAL REACH How al-Zarqawi’s death will affect global terrorism is still a matter of uncertainty even while Western officials say it will by itself do little in Iraq. Al-Zarqawi’s international reach depended on practical details, like organization and recruiting and finances, which experts say were limited outside of his Iraqi activities, but also more amorphous factors, such as the appeal of his ideas to young recruits, which his followers say was enhanced by his death. “Each mujahedeen is seeking to be killed, to have Allah’s satisfaction, and he is looking to have high-class status in paradise, in heaven” said Marwan Shehadeh, an Islamist activist and researcher in Jordan. “Americans protect their leader. The mujahedeen don’t. His members will say this is what they were looking for.” Despite goals to spread his reach globally, al-Zarqawi appears to have used his foreign contacts mainly to draw foreign fighters to the insurgency in Iraq, an American counterterrorism official said. The only attacks outside Iraq known to be directed by al-Zarqawi were in Jordan, he said, including the 2002 murder of Laurence Foley, a U. S. diplomat; a foiled plot in 2004 to attack the U. S. Embassy and Jordanian intelligence headquarters; and the bombings of three Amman hotels in November that killed 60 people.
“I think he really operated regionally in the Middle East,” a senior French counterterrorism official said. The official said he did not think al-Zarqawi’s death would have a noticeable effect on the threat in Europe.
Shehadeh, the Islamist activist and researcher, said that al-Zarqawi’s death would, in the short run, undermine his group’s ability to operate, but he said that he believed in the long run it would fuel terrorism. He cited slogans proffered by the followers of al-Zarqawi, including two crucial ones: “Our credibility comes by our leaders being killed,” and “Those of us who die go to heaven. Those of you who die go to hell.”
Shehadeh said he also disagreed with the intelligence assessment of al-Zarqawi’s reach outside Iraq, and that he believed it was much stronger and deeper in countries neighboring Iraq, including Jordan.
Still, it appears that at the moment al-Zarqawi was killed, he had not achieved his ultimate goal — transforming his base in Iraq into a worldwide global terrorist outfit. Jordanian officials said that Libya recently did a good job of shutting down the al-Zarqawi operation there, for example.
“My sense is that the next step might have been mobilizing his recruitment networks to attack Europeans,” said Steven Simon, a former National Security Council staff member now at the Council on Foreign Relations. “That’s one reason I think his death makes a difference.”
Lorenzo Vidino, author of al-Qaida in Europe, published last year, said he believed that al-Zarqawi’s death did not necessarily end the threat posed by the recruitment channels he helped set up.
In April, Italian authorities uncovered a group of North Africans who had traveled to Syria to join al-Zarqawi’s fighters in Iraq, said Vidino, who is an analyst at the Investigative Project, a Washington counterterrorism research group.
“ The gatekeepers in Damascus told them, ‘We don’t need you in Iraq. It’s better if you go to Italy and do something there, ”’ he said.
Information for this article was
contributed by Michael Slackman and Scott Shane of The New York Times and Hamza Hendawi, Patrick Quinn, Kim Gamel, Sinan Salaheddin and Qais al-Bashir of The Associated Press.
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