Monday, March 08, 2004
The new big bad wolf
Since we found a dishelved Saddam that had been living in a hole for several months and probably hadn't conducted much in the way of armed insurgency and we can't seem to find that Osama guy (wait for October . . . wait for it . . .), the US needs a new Bad Guy to personify the War against Terra.
Iraqi and U.S. leaders call Zarqawi the mastermind of an eight-month wave of attacks in the country, most recently the multiple bombings at Shiite Muslim shrines that killed as many as 271 people last week.
Almost every day, U.S. officials here display a confiscated letter, allegedly written by Zarqawi, that claims responsibility for 25 suicide attacks and lays out a blueprint for plunging Iraq into sectarian chaos. There is a $10-million price on his head.
But the U.S. has provided little evidence implicating Zarqawi. In one case coalition officials say he plotted, the car bombing of the U.N. headquarters in Baghdad that killed 22 people last year, a U.S. counter-terrorism official said little progress had been made in identifying the culprits.
Although Zarqawi has been identified as a central figure in a multiethnic network whose tentacles reach across Europe and the Middle East, his anointment as an all-powerful kingpin troubles some investigators and experts, who say it distorts the nature of the insurgency in Iraq.
An Iraqi anti-terrorist police commander dismissed the claim in the purported Zarqawi letter that he has carried out 25 "martyrdom operations," which would encompass most major attacks here since the fall.
"They are always exaggerating about Al Qaeda," said Col. Dhia Hussein of the Baghdad anti-terrorism unit. "No witnesses have come and talked to me about Zarqawi. The only thing is that he is mentioned in the newspapers. And a $10-million reward. Who is this man? ? Maybe he exists ? such characters exist. But to complete these operations and we don't know, it's impossible."
Die-hard loyalists of the former Iraqi regime represent a bigger threat than Zarqawi, Hussein said. The suicide bombings in Baghdad are the work of different groups, he said, including the loyalists, recently arrived freelance Islamic extremists and foreign fighters who came to Iraq before the war.
The focus on Zarqawi is part of a political strategy to portray the terrorism threat as essentially foreign and rooted in the Al Qaeda network, thereby downplaying the significance of Iraqi insurgents, critics say. But outsiders could not operate in Iraq's "hostile tribal environment" without local allies, said Mustafa Alani, an Iraq-born expert on terrorism.
"The Americans want to say that the only people fighting them are supporters" of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, said Alani, who is based at the Royal United Services Institute, a London think tank affiliated with the British Defense Ministry. "Everybody blames Zarqawi, but I think it's a series of assumptions. It's of great publicity value to say he is trying to stir a civil war. With all the attacks they blame him for, he's either a superman or a myth."
Zarqawi has been in the spotlight before. His real name is Ahmed Fadhil Nazzar Khalailah, and U.S. officials identify him as a Palestinian Jordanian. His prewar presence in Iraq served as the basis for U.S. accusations tying Al Qaeda to Saddam Hussein ? allegations that remain unproven. The current depiction of Zarqawi as supreme chief of a terrorist army assaulting Iraq may reflect a U.S. perspective that differs from European and Arab views.
U.S. officials tend to personify the threat in a notorious individual, European investigators say, while Europeans and Arabs regard Islamic networks as loose and anarchic. American officials are also quick to group Zarqawi and other terrorists under the label of Al Qaeda, though the network is an increasingly dispersed constellation of groups, experts say.
"There's this image of a super-villain who's behind everything," said Claude Moniquet, a terrorism expert at a Brussels think tank, who believes that the claim of 25 attacks attributed to Zarqawi is exaggerated. "These people don't work like that. What you always have to remember about the Islamic movements is that they are little, very independent cells, not all connected. There's no hierarchy."
posted by chris at 2:03 PM
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