Intelligence

Warlord behind the insurgency

TheStar.com - Warlord behind the insurgency

Zarqawi's reputation `overblown' by West
He's a fighter not a strategist, analysts say
Nov. 12, 2005. 01:00 AM
OLIVIA WARD
FEATURE WRITER

The suicide bombings that took the lives of at least 57 people in three Jordanian hotels was a special victory for Al Qaeda warlord Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, says a terrorism expert who has just published a book on the little-known militant.

The deadly bombings, said Loretta Napoleoni, were "a personal attack."

"He knew how damaging they would be to Jordan's economy. He hates the Jordanian royal family, and he made the transition from being a street fighter and a radical to becoming a terrorist after experiencing brutal treatment during years in jail."

After the bombing of the three Western-frequented hotels in Amman Wednesday, thousands of Jordanians took to the streets to denounce the Al Qaeda in Iraq leader.

But Napoleoni, author of Insurgent Iraq: Al Zarqawi and the New Generation, said there was a powerful revenge motive for the attack, the second he had planned against Jordan. A previous plot to blow up the U.S. embassy in Amman failed in 2004.

"He was imprisoned for years in terrible conditions and he was tortured," Napoleoni said in a telephone interview. "At that time he was in a radical Islamic group. But a very public trial for conspiracy publicized his cause, and attracted many people who wanted to follow him."

Zarqawi, 39, was born Ahmed Fadel al Khalaylah. He took his nom de guerre from the bleak industrial town of Zarqa, Jordan, where he grew up as the son of an impoverished former army officer. When his father died he joined a youth gang and was arrested on drug and sexual assault charges.

But he later found religion in the ultra-conservative Salafist sect of Islam. He trained in an Afghan guerrilla camp in 1992, returning to Jordan a year later to agitate against the government. Arrested in 1994, he was released in 1999 and fled to Pakistan, slipping across the Afghan border to join Osama bin Laden's jihad and eventually running a training camp in Herat.

Napoleoni said Zarqawi's reputation as a mastermind of international terrorism and partner in bin Laden's plans to destroy the Western world, is based on a "myth" invented by U.S. President George W. Bush's administration to link Al Qaeda with Saddam Hussein.

Zarqawi had infiltrated Iraq and formed an Islamic cell there, but had no ties with Saddam's regime, she said.

"Zarqawi has become very powerful as an icon. But he's not a charismatic leader or a great strategist. He's a rather simple man, a street kid who's basically a fighter.

"He didn't believe in a worldwide jihad, but wanted to fight in his own neighbourhood. He opposed bin Laden's idea, and his allies (in Al Qaeda) were Palestinians and Jordanians. His training camp prepared suicide bombers to return to Jordan and possibly neighbouring Arab countries."

Zarqawi's fame spread when he was denounced by former U.S. secretary of state Colin Powell as the head of a "deadly terrorist network" in Iraq. And, said Napoleoni, he became "the Arab Zorro" when he joined the insurgency in the Sunni stronghold of Falluja, battling U.S. troops in the spring of 2004.

Zaki Chehab, British-based author of Iraq Ablaze: Inside the Iraqi Insurgency, agrees Zarqawi's reputation is overblown, and the product of Western propaganda that has turned him into an unrealistically towering figure.

"If he disappeared tomorrow, the insurgency wouldn't be affected very much," Chehab said. "He doesn't have any particular skills that Iraqis don't already have."

November 12, 2005 at 11:36 AM in Al Qaeda | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home