tinyurl.com/mnll7 -> www.theatlantic.com/doc/200607/zarqawi?ca=9hloQUJamUfhaPsPg%2B9E5USZvqSqBDKyXpAE9U9Gsng%3D
"The Gospel According to Osama Bin Laden" (January 2002) To Western ears, the author writes, the public utterances of Osama Bin Laden have always come across like the "tirades of a loony idealogue." But these skillful rhetorical constructions, rich in historical allusion, have enormous powers of penetration--and will survive their author.
This is a preview of an article appearing in the July/August 2006 Atlantic. The URL at which this preview is made available to the press is temporary and not for public distribution.
O n a cold and blustery evening in December 1989, Huthaifa Azzam, the teenage son of the legendary Jordanian-Palestinian mujahideen leader Sheikh Abdullah Azzam, went to the airport in Peshawar, Pakistan, to welcome a group of young men. All were new recruits, largely from Jordan, and they had come to fight in a fratricidal civil war in neighboring Afghanistan--an outgrowth of the CIA-financed jihad of the 1980s against the Soviet occupation there. The men were scruffy, Huthaifa mused as he greeted them, and seemed hardly in battle-ready form. None of them would prove worth remembering--except for a relatively short, squat man named Ahmad Fadhil Nazzal al-Khalaylah.
Once one of the most wanted men in the world, for whose arrest the United States offered a $25 million reward, al-Zarqawi was a notoriously enigmatic figure--a man who was everywhere yet nowhere. I went to Jordan earlier this year, three months before he was killed by a US airstrike in early June, to find out who he really was, and to try to understand the role he was playing in the anti-American insurgency in Iraq. I also hoped to get a sense of how his generation--the foreign fighters now waging jihad in Iraq--compare with the foreign fighters who twenty years ago waged jihad in Afghanistan. Huthaifa Azzam, whom I first met twenty years ago in Peshawar, bridges both worlds. He first went into battle at the age of fifteen, fighting against the Soviets in Afghanistan with his father and Osama bin Laden (to whom his father was a spiritual mentor); three years later, on that December night at the Peshawar airport, he met al-Zarqawi for the first time. The two Azzams and bin Laden had fought against the Soviets in the early days of the jihad; al-Zarqawi would fight in the war's second phase, after the Soviets had pulled out. Both Huthaifa Azzam and al-Zarqawi would eventually leave Afghanistan to pursue two very different lives, but their paths would once again cross on the battlefields of jihad in Iraq, after the US invasion of 2003. A self-described jihadist--one who believes in struggle, or, more loosely, holy war--Azzam now lives in the Jordanian capital, Amman, where he is at work on a doctorate in classical Arabic literature, but he moves routinely between Jordan and Iraq. Seeing him again for the first time since he was a teenager, I was struck, as we chatted in a friend's drawing room, by how little he resembled the conventional image of a jihadist. He wore jeans, a light denim jacket, and an open-necked shirt, and his light-brown beard was neatly trimmed. I asked Azzam if he knew who was funding al-Zarqawi's activities in Iraq. He thought for a moment, and then replied without answering, "At the time of jihad, you can get vast amounts of money with a simple telephone call. I myself once collected three million dollars, which my father had arranged with a single call." "I was in Syria when the war in Iraq began," he went on. I remember one guy who came and said he was too old to fight, but he gave the recruiters $200,000 in cash. He then told me about a young boy he had met in the early days of the war. I noticed him in the crowd at a recruiting center near the Syrian-Iraqi frontier. People would come and register in the morning, then cross the border in the afternoon by bus. The recruiters refused to take him because he was so young, and he started to cry. I went back later in the day, and this same small guy had sneaked aboard the bus. He had $12,000 in his pocket--expense money his family had given him before he set off. Then, on February 5, 2003, Secretary of State Colin Powell catapulted him onto the world stage. In his address to the United Nations making the case for war in Iraq, Powell identified al-Zarqawi--mistakenly, as it turned out--as the crucial link between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein's regime. Subsequently, al-Zarqawi became a leading figure in the insurgency in Iraq--and in November of last year, he also brought his jihadist revolution back home, as the architect of three lethal hotel bombings in Amman. His notoriety grew with every atrocity he perpetrated, yet Western and Middle Eastern intelligence officials remained bedeviled by a simple question: Who was he? Was he al-Qaeda's point man in Iraq, as the Bush administration argued repeatedly? Or was he, as a retired Israeli intelligence official told me not long ago, a staunch rival of bin Laden's, whose importance the United States exaggerated in order to validate a link between al-Qaeda and pre-war Iraq, and to put a non-Iraqi face on a complex insurgency? Early one morning, with a driver who would also serve as my interpreter, I set out from my hotel in Amman for the forty-five-minute drive to Zarqa--the industrial city where, in October 1966, al-Zarqawi was born into a large family, and from which he took his new name. As we sped along the highway, I tried to recall the often contradictory descriptions I had heard of the man. US officials, for example, had often reported that in 2002, al-Zarqawi had had one of his legs amputated in Baghdad, a claim presumably meant to substantiate a link between al-Zarqawi and Saddam Hussein's regime. But he was later seen walking in a videotape, clearly in possession of both his legs. Some Bush administration officials called him a Jordanian-Palestinian, but in fact he came from one of the Middle East's most influential Bedouin tribes. In recent years, some even suggested that he didn't exist at all. One thing that brought me to Jordan was a desire to find out as much as possible about al-Zarqawi's relationship with Osama bin Laden. The two men had little in common: bin Laden, like most of his inner circle, is a university graduate from an influential family; al-Zarqawi, like many who follow him, was from an anonymous family (even though they are members of a significant tribe) and an anonymous town--a man who was fired from a job as a video-store clerk and whose background included street gangs and, according to Jordanian intelligence officials, prison for sexual assault. He was a ruthless self-promoter who, US officials claim, killed or wounded thousands of people in the past three years--in suicide bombings, mass executions, and beheadings that have been videotaped. But he was not the terrorist mastermind that he was often claimed to be. Z arqa is a shambolic industrial city of some 850,000 people, a sprawl of factories, open fields, and dust. Twenty-five miles northeast of Amman, it is Jordan's third-largest city, and one of its most militant. Along with the cities of Irbid and Salt, it has sent the largest number of Jordanian volunteers to fight abroad, first in Afghanistan and now in Iraq. Al-Zarqawi was born and raised in the al-Masoum neighborhood of Zarqa's old city, which sprawls somewhat haphazardly into the al-Ruseifah Palestinian refugee camp. They were easily identifiable by the shalwar kameezes they wore--the long shirts and bloused trousers that are Afghanistan's national dress--and by their long, unkempt beards. Squatting outside a tiny neighborhood shop, they paid us little heed. Until his death, al-Zarqawi kept a home on a quiet lane in Zarqa. It was indistinguishable from its neighbors--a two-story white stucco building surrounded by a whitewashed wall. al-Zarqawi's sisters, who still live in Zarqa, would come by to look after it. At one point I glanced up at a window, which was slightly ajar. I learned that the first of al-Zarqawi's two wives had lived in the house until recently. She was his cousin, whom he had married when he was twenty-two. But not long before my visit, al-Zarqawi had sent an unknown man to drive them acro...
|
http://csua.com/feed/