| Submit your comments on this article |
| Iraq |
| Al-Qaeda in Iraq chief lurked in the shadows |
| 2007-05-02 |
| Abu Ayyub al-Masri's claimed death is only the latest in a series of unconfirmed reports on the shadowy Egyptian leader of Al-Qaeda in Iraq whose true role in the insurgency has never been established. The Iraqi interior ministry announced on Tuesday that they had "strong" intelligence" that Masri had been killed in clashes between insurgent groups. But the Al-Qaeda kingpin, who has been given several different names, had already been erroneously reported dead in October and wounded in February. Masri, an Egyptian, succeeded Abu Musab al-Zarqawi as head of one of Iraq's deadliest insurgent groups after Zarqawi was killed in a US air strike in June 2006. The details about Masri's real identity -- even his name-- have been a source of debate among Iraqi and US security officials and analysts trying to monitor the group. Al-Qaeda, for its part, has said in Internet messages that its new leader is one Sheikh Abu Hamza al-Muhajer, rather than the more foreign-sounding Masri, whose name means "the Egyptian." US officials say the two are one and the same. "al-Muhajer" means "the immigrant." Presumably he "immigrated" from Egypt by way of Afghanistan, but they don't want to push the issue of his being an Egyptian. Analysts believe Masri was part of a generation of Islamist militants who carried out attacks in Egypt throughout the 1980s and 1990s before travelling to Afghanistan and joining Al-Qaeda. "His real name is Yussef al-Dardiri, he is around 38 years old and he comes from Upper Egypt," Montasser al-Zayat, an Egyptian lawyer and former member of the Islamist group Gamaa Islamiya, told AFP last year. According to Zayat, who says he does not know him personally, Masri lived in the Cairo slum of Zawiya Hamra before going to Afghanistan in the late 1980s and then on to Iraq via Iran. Egyptian security services, however, claim to have never heard of him. The US military believes he is an explosives expert specialising in the construction of car bombs, a key weapon of Iraq's Sunni insurgency, and that he made his way to Iraq from Afghanistan after the March 2003 invasion. Masri and Zarqawi met in Afghanistan in 1999, added US officials, when they were both at Al-Faruq training camp where he became an explosives expert, a skill he would use to great effect in Iraq. But Diaa Rashwan, a leading expert on political Islam at Cairo's Al-Ahram Center for Strategic Studies, said he had not come across the name. "There is no trace of such a name in the Egyptian radical Islamic files," he said. "The Americans have given details of his past, saying he joined Islamic Jihad in 1982 and make him out to be one of the founders of Al-Qaeda in Iraq without knowing his real name, which is difficult to believe," says Rashwan. "The Americans are eager to establish a non-Iraqi identity for Zarqawi's successor for political reasons. They need a symbol of international jihad (holy war) to justify their occupation of Iraq." In June 2006 a posting on an Al-Qaeda-linked website said Muhajer had ordered the killing of two kidnapped American soldiers. "We announce good news to the Islamic nation from the battlefield... The two crusaders taken hostage have been executed by having their throats cut," the message said. The two US soldiers were later found south of Baghdad, their bodies showing signs of brutal torture, according to the Iraqi defence ministry. In recent months, there have been indications that other more nationalist insurgent groups have grown disaffected with Al-Qaeda's tactics, including the large-scale attacks on Shiite civilians. There are unconfirmed reports of clashes between insurgent groups, and a coalition of powerful Sunni tribes from the western province of Anbar that was once sympathetic to the cause has thrown its lot in with the Americans. The US State Department posted a one million dollar reward for information leading to Masri's arrest. |
| Posted by:Fred |