 Abu Musab al-Zarqawi had the phone numbers of senior Iraqi officials stored in his cell phone, according to an Iraqi legislator. | Interesting, but not surprising... |
Waiel Abdul-Latif, a member of former Prime Minister Ayad Allawi's party, said Monday that authorities found the numbers after al-Zarqawi, leader of al Qaeda in Iraq, was killed in a U.S. air strike on June 7. Abdul-Latif did not give names of the officials. But he said they included ministry employees and members of parliament. | Wonder what the call logs look like? |
He called for an investigation, saying Iraqis "cannot have one hand with the government and another with the terrorists."
| And here I thought the kidnappings and assassination attempts against MPs in the past few days were the bad guyz. Looks like it's the not-quite-so-bad guyz doing wet work... |
Meanwhile, al-Zarqawi's wife told an Italian newspaper that al Qaeda leaders sold him out to the United States in exchange for a promise to let up in the search for Osama bin Laden. The woman, identified by La Repubblica as al-Zarqawi's first wife,
| ... the one with the big ta-tas... |
said al Qaeda's top leadership reached a deal with U.S. intelligence because al Zarqawi had become too powerful. She claimed Sunni tribes and Jordanian secret services mediated the deal. | Wouldn't surprise me if al Qaeda dropped a dime on him. He was getting too big for his turban. We wouldn't make a deal with Binny, though. |
| Makes a better martyr than an asset, huh? He'd worn out his welcome in Iraq, but now he belongs to the ages... |
"My husband has been sold to the Americans," the woman said in an interview published Sunday. "He had become too powerful, too troublesome." She was identified only as "Um Mohammed," which means "mother of Mohammed" and would be a nickname, not her full name.
| I've noticed that lots of Muslim women don't have names. That's because Islam gives them dignity, unlike us decadent Westerners... |
The Rome-based newspaper said the interview was conducted in Geneva and described her as Jordanian and about 40 years old. In Jordan, Al-Zarqawi's eldest brother, Sayel al-Khalayleh, said the family had not been aware of the woman's whereabouts for about two years.
| "Last we heard, she'd run off with a Swiss shoe salesman..." |
Iraq's national security adviser said Sunday that al-Zarqawi had been buried in a "secret location" in Baghdad despite his family's demand that the body be returned to his native Jordan. Mouwafak al-Rubaie would not say when the Jordanian-born militant was buried, or give any specifics on the location of the grave. The U.S. military confirmed the burial but declined to give details. "The remains of Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi were turned over to the appropriate government of Iraq officials and buried in accordance with Muslim customs and traditions," the military said in an e-mailed statement. "Anything further than that would be addressed by the Iraqi government."
| "We dropped him into one of those recently excavated mass graves." |
Al-Zarqawi's brother demanded that his body be transferred to Jordan, and accused the United States of lying. "Bush took his body to the United States," al-Khalayleh told The Associated Press in a telephone interview from his home in the Jordanian city of Zarqa. | Just the head, it's mounted over the fireplace in Texas |
"Even if he is buried in Iraq, we will continue to ask for the body to be transferred and buried in Jordan," he said. "He should be buried in his own country." |
