Abu Musab al- Zarqawi, head of al-Qaida in Iraq, is alienating the insurgency. Dr. Gilles Kepel of the Institut d'Etudes Politiques in Paris and a well-known Middle East expert said that al-Qaida's hope that Zarqawi would be the one to mobilize the Arab masses in Iraq may be fading. Zarqawi's bloody attacks on Shia Muslims have alienated support for al-Qaida in Iraq. In a letter released by the U.S. military in 2005, the deputy to al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, criticized Zarqawi's attacks on the Shia and the beheadings he had broadcast. "Nowhere ... not in Zawahiri's text nor in bin Laden's text is there any reference made to the Shias," Kepel said Thursday at the United States Institute of Peace. "And they are not interested in them, they are not part of (al-Qaida's goals). Whereas Zarqawi's texts are obsessed with Shias, with the fact that Shias are traitors; they're stooges of the Americans, friends of Jews, and that they should be killed first and foremost."
Kepel said that Zarqawi's joining al-Qaida forces with the Sunni insurgency in Iraq represented the "first opportunity for al-Qaida to be grounded on a turf." Zarqawi's terrorist operation is seen as the biggest obstacle to success of the United States and their allies in Iraq.