Intelligence

The missing terror link or the latest bogeyman?

TheStar.com - The missing terror link or the latest bogeyman?

Al-Zarqawi busier than bin Laden, one analyst says
But Jordanian is a mysterious figure even to his hunters

MICHELLE SHEPHARD
STAFF REPORTER

He has been called everything from the next Osama bin Laden to a Washington-created bogeyman.

What is clear is that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's presence in Iraq continues to be the crucial link the United States government cites between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein at a time when the U.S. justification for invading the country is itself under attack.

"Zarqawi is the best evidence of a connection to Al Qaeda affiliates and Al Qaeda," U.S. President George W. Bush said last week, defending Vice-President Dick Cheney's assertion Monday that Saddam had longstanding ties with Al Qaeda.

"He's the person who's still believed to be responsible for killing hundreds in terrorist attacks in the last year."

But little is known about the Jordanian, dubbed by Jonathan Schanzer of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy as "Osama bin Laden 2.0."

"This is the most active terrorist in the world right now. Bin Laden has the most credits and most deaths to his name but he's in hiding. He's not coming out," Schanzer said in an interview last week.

"When you hear about the affiliate phenomenon of Al Qaeda, this man personifies it."

While he's often identified in the media as a bin Laden associate, most intelligence officials believe al-Zarqawi does not pledge allegiance to Al Qaeda or take orders from the terrorist leader. Some go so far as to suggest he is actually a rival, albeit with similar goals.

Born in Jordan as Ahmed Fadil al-Khalayleh, al-Zarqawi is believed to be 38 years old and running his own terrorist network centred in the Middle East and Western Europe.

In the past two years, according to intelligence officials, al-Zarqawi has been investigated or claimed responsibility for various terrorist acts, including:

The kidnapping and beheading of American Nicholas Berg in May. The Central Intelligence Agency believes the masked man who wielded the knife and performed the actual decapitation was al-Zarqawi himself.

The suicide boat attacks against Persian Gulf oil terminals that killed three Americans and disabled Iraq's biggest terminal for more than 24 hours in April. The bombing resembled the 2000 attack on the USS Cole off Yemen that killed 17 sailors.

The Oct. 28, 2002, murder of Laurence Foley, an Amman-based administrator for the U.S. Agency for International Development. Eight militants were sentenced to death this April for conspiring to murder Foley. Six of them, including al-Zarqawi, were convicted in absentia.

Al-Zarqawi is also being investigated in the Madrid bombings in March that killed 200 people, and a U.S. intelligence report obtained by the Boston Globe last month stated al-Zarqawi's reach is wide with reports he is responsible for the deaths of at least 700 people in Iraq during the last year.

"Zarqawi and his network have plotted terrorist actions against several countries, including France, Britain, Spain, Italy, Germany and Russia," the report said.

Yet despite these claims — and rumours the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation plans to increase the reward for his capture from $10 million to the $25 million also offered for bin Laden — al-Zarqawi still isn't listed on the FBI's top 10 lists for fugitives or terrorists.

In fact, while the CIA and FBI seem able to authenticate his voice on audio and videotapes purportedly made by him, they know very little else, including details of his physical appearance, such as height, weight or whether he has a prosthetic leg or simply an injured one.

Al-Zarqawi's mysterious existence leads some critics of the American administration to believe he is simply the current face of terrorism the U.S. needs in the run-up to the November presidential elections.

Schanzer, who has interviewed detainees from Al Qaeda and the Ansar al-Islam group in Iraq, disagrees. "It's not that the U.S. government just came up with this guy as we see ourselves getting increasingly bogged down in Iraq," he said.

"They were talking about Zarqawi well before the war and since then he has been letting it be known that he is one of the people who's pulling strings when it comes to terrorism in Iraq. This is not something that is fabricated."

Al-Zarqawi only became an internationally recognized name after U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell's February, 2003, speech to the United Nations.

Describing him as part of the "sinister nexus between Iraq and the Al Qaeda terrorist network," Powell said al-Zarqawi returned to Afghanistan in 2000 and oversaw a terrorist training camp specializing in biological weapons, including ricin. He had previously been among the throngs of Muslim men who travelled there in the 1980s to fight Soviet occupation.

Powell said al-Zarqawi left Afghanistan again because of an injury and travelled to Baghdad for medical treatment.

His exact whereabouts are unknown but he is believed to be moving between Iraq and Iran. Reports last week said U.S. troops had focused their search on Iraq's Falluja-Ramadi area.

June 20, 2004 at 04:29 PM in Al Qaeda | Permalink | TrackBack (14) | Top of page | Blog Home