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| Iraq-Jordan |
| Hunting Zarqawi |
| 2004-10-24 |
| What a loser. At 17, he dropped out of high school in the small industrial city of Zarqa in Jordan. One of 10 children of a Bedouin herbal healer, he quickly developed a reputation as a drunk and a rabble-rouser. By one account, he was jailed for sexual assault, and took up the ideology of jihad in prison. After his release, he drifted for a while and then went to Afghanistan to fight the Soviets. But by the time he got there, the war was over. So he got a job in Afghanistan with a small jihadist newspaper, even though he was nearly illiterate, writing in a child's scrawl. Back in his homeland, his first terrorist operation, in 1993, was an utter failure, and he and his confederates were jailed until 1999. He was freed in an amnesty. Then he returned to Afghanistan, but was apparently rejected by Al Qaeda, instead running his own training camp in Herat. "He had no learning," says a former Jordanian intelligence officer. "He was a thug." Yet today, at 37, Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi has managed to become the most wanted man in Iraq. What Zarqawi lacks in pedigree, he has made up for in brutality. He has personally beheaded at least two Americans, and his group, Tawhid and Jihad, has killed dozens of other hostages. Zarqawi's group has assassinated Iraqi officials, blown up hundreds of Iraqi pilgrims and claimed responsibility for the bombing that drove the United Nations out of Iraq. Using mostly foreign fighters, Zarqawi can be blamed for only a small percentage of the many daily attacks on Iraqi and American forces, but his operations have been far more spectacular than most. With an apparently inexhaustible supply of suicide bombers, Zarqawi has become far more effective than even Osama bin Laden. And the price on his head, $25 million, is the same. U.S. officials believe Zarqawi uses the rebellious city of Fallujah as a principal base, and Iraqi Prime Minister Ayad Allawi has issued an ultimatum to Fallujah to turn him in or face a full-scale invasion. In April, a halfhearted assault cost the lives of 60 U.S. Marines and up to 600 Fallujans, before the fighting ended in a compromise that left insurgents in control of the city. This time, American forces are threatening to go all the way, and the past two months have seen at least 18 airstrikes against what the U.S. military says are Zarqawi safe houses in the city (residents claim many of the victims have been women and children). It's a measure of how far Zarqawi has risen in the terrorist pantheon that during the same period, American forces didn't launch a single airstrike against Qaeda or Taliban forces in Afghanistan. |
| Posted by:Dan Darling |
| #1 moral of the story: It's all GW's fault that even such a loser extrodinaire such as this as this can become Iraq's most wanted man. BBC? NPR? Nope...Newsweak. Do they realize how juvenile their spin is? Do they realize how transparent and silly they sound. They are just like bitchy school girls saying the prom-queen is really just an ugly bitch. Yawn. This is the 21st Century. These guys are so stuck on reliving their Anti-American heyday. Grow up, geezers. |
| Posted by: 2b 2004-10-24 9:14:15 PM |