#8 OK, short history of Zarqawi leading up to time in question:
Upon his release from prison in 1999, Zarqawi was involved in an attempt to blow up the Radisson SAS Hotel in Amman, Jordan where many Israeli and American tourists lodged. He fled Jordan and travelled to Peshawar, Pakistan, near the Afghanistan border. In Afghanistan, Zarqawi established a militant training camp near Herat. According to the Bush administration, the training camp specialized in poisons and explosives. Jordanian and European intelligence agencies claim that Zarqawi formed the group Jund al-Sham in 1999 with $200,000 of startup money from Osama bin Laden. The group originally consisted of 150 members. It was infiltrated by members of Jordanian intelligence and scattered by Operation Enduring Freedom but in March 2005, a group of the same name claimed responsibility for a bombing in Doha, Qatar. [6] Sometime in 2001, Zarqawi was arrested in Jordan but was soon released. Later, he was convicted in absentia and sentenced to death for plotting the attack on the Radisson SAS Hotel.[7]
After the September 11 attacks, Zarqawi again travelled to Afghanistan and was allegedly wounded in a U.S. bombardment. He moved to Iran to organize al-Tawhid, his former militant organization. Zarqawi supposedly traveled to Iraq to have his wounded leg treated at a hospital run by Uday Hussein. In the summer of 2002, Zarqawi was reported to have settled in northern Iraq, where he joined the Islamist Ansar al-Islam group that fought against Kurdish-nationalist forces in the region. [8] He reportedly became a leader in the group, although his leadership role has not been established. In Colin Powell's notorious February 2003 speech to the United Nations urging war against Iraq, Zarqawi was cited as an example of Saddam Hussein's support for terrorism. In his speech, Powell mistakenly referred to Zarqawi as a Palestinian but Powell and the Bush administration continued to stand by statements that Zarqawi linked Saddam Hussein to al-Qaeda. At the time, Zarqawi's group was a rival of bin Laden's.
Now we've reached the time in question. Zarq is supposedly in one of the Ansar camps in northern Iraq. Some people were calling for airstrikes, some wanted us to hold off while diplomatic moves were continuing. The diplomats won. When the war started, if I remember correctly, SF working with the Kurds rolled Ansar pretty quick, with the head turbans running for the Iranian border. At the time, Zarq was not a household name, just a up-and-coming thug. |
A former top CIA spy says the United States deliberately turned down several opportunities to kill terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in the lead-up to the Iraq war. Mike Scheuer headed the CIA's bin Laden unit for six years before resigning in 2004. He has told the ABC's Four Corners program the Bush administration had Zarqawi in its sights almost every day for a year. He says a plan to destroy Zarqawi's training camp in Kurdistan was abandoned for diplomatic reasons.